By ML Van Valkenburgh

A gift guide of (almost-all) 2006 releases as determined by the Beachwood Book Laboratory, in various categories to fit your needs.
History
Conspiracy in the Streets: The Extraordinary Trial of the Chicago Eight
Editor, Jon Weiner, Afterword by Tom Hayden, Ill. by Jules Feiffer
New Press
$16.95
If you’re not familiar with the Chicago Seven/Eight – one defendant, Black Panther Bobby Seale, had charges dropped when he was indicted on other charges, though not before the judge had him bound to his seat and gagged because he insisted on continuing to ask for his own lawyer or the right to represent himself – you should be. The United States of America put on trial a veritable Who’s Who of Sixties activists, including those from the Yippie movement (Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin) and the politically radical group the MOBE (Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden), and two young Ph. D students (John Froines and Lee Weiner), on charges of planning and inciting to riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The defendants lampooned the judge, the judge made a mockery of the justice system, and the entire spectacle was like a circus sideshow. This book, which mainly contains highlights from the 20,000-page trial testimony, is at once sobering and absurd, and you can’t help but compare the antics and action of the defendants to the tame activists of today, who have more than enough reason to be outraged.
Hip Novel
Wolf Boy
Evan Kuhlman
Shaye Arehart Books
$23.00
Kuhlman’s debut novel is beautifully transcendant. A comi-tragedy played out both within a family that’s falling apart and a friendship that’s cementing itself into a creative duo ready to take on everything from the emergence of adolescence to death itself, Kuhlman’s novel includes perfectly scripted and cleanly drawn comics to help the story open its wings and fly. Points to Kuhlman for (a) setting it in Downstate Illinois with all the depressing expertise that entails and (b) setting it in 1993, and actually getting his pop culture right.

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Posted on November 28, 2006

By ML Van Valkenburgh

1. Ballad of the Confessor/William Zink.
Of course you’ve never heard of it. But that doesn’t make it any less of a masterpiece. The weight of the world is on the shoulders of the working man. Being a working man doesn’t mean you’re not also a thinking man. The weight of the world is crushing the soul of our thinking, working, protaganist. We can relate.

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Posted on November 27, 2006

By The Beachwood Cultural Affairs Desk

“Most customers at the Anthropologie store in SoHo come for the delicately woven knits and the ultra-feminine floral dresses. But these days at least some are coming for the books.
“Last Sunday the merchandise and books were coordinated with near-perfect precision. Resting beside a black sweater ($68) and a jet-black skirt with orange embellishments ($118) were copies of Annie Leibovitz’s A Photographer’s Life: 1990 – 2005, big and black and gleaming, for $75. A pop-up book called One Red Dot echoed a display of polka-dotted canvas sneakers, while another title, The Persistence of Yellow, perfectly matched a strategically positioned yellow knit sweater.
“Books are turning up in the oddest places these days.”
– “Selling a Little Literature to Go With Your Lifestyle,” New York Times front page, November 2
A partial list of books found on a first-floor table at the Urban Outfitters on Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park, until our correspondent suddenly suffered shortness of breath and ran out of the store screaming.
1. Illustrations Now!/Julius Wiedmann
2. An Inconvenient Truth/Al Gore
3. Body Type/Ina Saltz
4. Icons of Fashion: The 20th Century (Prestel’s Icons)/Gerda Buxbaum
5. 350 Best Sex Positions (or Sex Tips, we’re not sure, possibly by the editors of Cosmo, who apparently couldn’t come up with 365)

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Posted on November 8, 2006

By ML Van Valkenburgh

There is a new literary trend upon the land and I would like to register my disgust. Call it the emergence of the Nonre – the Genre formerly known as “Novels” or “Literature” or “Fiction” (or, in some cases, as we shall see, “Pets.”)

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Posted on November 2, 2006