The Collector’s Guide to Heavy Metal By Martin Popoff (Collector’s Guide Publishing) How many times has this happened to you? You’re sitting in your cubicle, slogging away as usual, when suddenly the woman across the aisle leans over and says something like: “Hey, you know what? I just picked up that last Carcass LP, Wake […]
Tag: books
Posted inMusic
Dissecting Dylan
Greil Marcus Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (Henry Holt) The little bag of honey-roasted peanuts I got on a recent flight to California bore the slogan A Symbol of Freedom. I was especially spooked by this because I was reading Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, a book nominally about a Bob […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Marx on the Skids
A totured psyche, a bankrupt ideology, the fatal flaws of a man and his revolution.
Posted inNews & Politics
Trial by Goudie, Part 2/Staples and Bellow, an Odd Couple/News Speak/The Bosnia Question
Trial by Goudie, Part 2 A suspect arrested for a sensational crime is innocent in the eyes of the law, guilty in the eyes of the state, and copy in the eyes of the media. You might expect this copy to be written with measured care. What we often get instead is the reporter in […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Blunting the Cutting Edge/PR War
Blunting the Cutting Edge Scholars foresee an epochal disaster–one of the world’s great civilizations spiraling toward the black hole of Generation X (aka the twentysomethings or twentynothings), not just an inferior generation but the most ignorant and useless in history. One such scholar was the late Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago, whose The […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Cityscape: How the Lakefront Was Won
Every sizable city has a symphony and an art museum, but no one has lakefront parks like ours. How we got them is the subject of a classic book recently reissued.
Posted inNews & Politics
In the Realm of the Censors
Judith Krug works for the American Library Association, defending books like Huckleberry Finn and Slaughterhouse Five from bigots, fanatics, and intolerant fools. Lately she’s been very busy.
Posted inNews & Politics
Reading: Back of the Yards
Bloody, boozy, and blatantly political, it was in many ways the quintessential Chicago neighborhood.
Posted inNews & Politics
Leanita McClain
Remembering journalist and essayist Leanita McClain, who shed light on race and class issues in 80s Chicago, through her collection, A Foot in Each World