Former Catholic priest Richard Morrisroe reflects on his friend and fellow civil rights activist Jonathan Daniels who was gunned down by a segregationist in Alabama 50 years ago.
Author Archives: S.L. Wisenberg
Posted inNews & Politics
Paris
Long lost love: “I remember thinking that he looked like a north African Elvis Presley, but in a good way”
Posted inArts & Culture
Freedom Rider Thomas Armstrong on segregation, progress, and the trauma of war
Born in Silver Creek, Mississippi, Thomas Armstrong was 14 in 1955—the same year another African-American 14-year-old, Emmett Till, was kidnapped, tortured, and killed in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. Three years later, as a student at Tougaloo College, Armstrong got involved in civil rights work. He organized black Mississippians to register to vote, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Local Lit
From authors with a Chicago connection: a backpacker thriller, taking license with Louisa May Alcott, and more
Posted inArts & Culture
What’s So Funny About Cancer?
Breast cancer memoirists all seem to agree that laughter is pretty good medicine.
Posted inArts & Culture
Rajaa Alsanea
The path to love is especially rocky in conservative Saudi Arabia, with its segregation of the sexes, arranged marriages, double standard, and religious police at the ready to arrest unrelated young couples out in public together. In The Girls of Riyadh, which some have compared to Sex and the City, Rajaa Alsanea details the hopes […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bich Minh Nguyen
A bright red can of Pringles becomes magical in Bich Minh Nguyen’s graceful new memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (Viking/Penguin), about growing up in a refugee family in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Like everything else American, the chips are exotic to young Nguyen and her sister. “The Pringles glowed by window light, their fine curvatures nearly translucent,” […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Eduardo Galeano
“Every suitcase contained the world,” Eduardo Galeano writes in “Immigrants a Century Ago,” one of 333 vignettes in his new collection, Voices of Time: A Life in Stories (Metropolitan). He lists some of the contents: “A lock of hair / a key that’s lost its door / a pipe that’s lost its mouth.” The acclaimed […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Doing the Barter System One Better
I’ll teach you to throat sing if she teaches me to crochet.
Posted inArts & Culture
Kathie Klarreich
Early on in her stay in Port-au-Prince, writes Kathie Klarreich in her new memoir, Madame Dread: A Tale of Love, Vodou, and Civil Strife in Haiti (Nation Books), she saw a crowd and followed it. It led to the temporarily unoccupied home of a retired general, where people were engaged in dechoukaj, or “uprooting”–systematically and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozol is one of this country’s few true prophets, delivering unpleasant truths about race and class that are often ignored until, say, a natural disaster hits. For 40 years he has doggedly shed light on our disparities in housing, wealth, and, most of all, public education. In Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991) […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Clueless
Melanie Rehak’s history of the women who wrote the Nancy Drew books is a heap of facts in search of a thesis.
Posted inArts & Culture
Mitchell Zuckoff
So this guy says to give him ten bucks to invest, and he’ll give you back $15 in 45 days. Guaranteed. Or give him $100, or $1,000. Don’t worry, he says. It’s legit, has something to do with buying and selling coupons for postage stamps, and besides, you’ve seen the line of lawyers and tailors, […]