By The Society of Midland Authors

PRESS RELEASE
SOCIETY OF MIDLAND AUTHORS ANNOUNCES AWARDS
The Society of Midland Authors announces the winners of its annual awards. The society will hold its annual banquet and awards presentation May 13 at the Hotel InterContinental in Chicago, emceed by Victoria Lautman.
CHICAGO-AREA AUTHORS HONORED: The winners include one Chicago-area resident, Judith Testa of St. Charles, who wrote the top biography, Sal Maglie: Baseball’s Demon Barber. Finalists include Tony Romano of Glen Ellyn, who teaches at Fremd High School in Palatine; Marlene Targ Brill of Wilmette; and Ann Hagedorn, who began writing Savage Peace while she was living in Chicago. In addition, Myrna Petlicki of Skokie will receive the James Friend Memorial Award for Criticism at the banquet.
The following are the winners and finalists for books by Midwest authors published in 2007.
ADULT FICTION
WINNER
Matthew Eck, “The Farther Shore, Milkweed Editions
(Author’s hometown: Kansas City, Mo.)
FINALISTS
Tony Romano, When the World Was Young, HarperCollins
(Author’s hometown: Glen Ellyn, Ill.)
Benjamin Percy, Refresh, Refresh: Stories, Graywolf Press
(Author’s hometown: Stevens Point, Wis.; formerly of Milwaukee)
Brock Clarke, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, Algonquin Books (Author’s hometown: Cincinnati, Ohio)
ADULT NONFICTION
WINNER
Patricia Hampl, The Florist’s Daughter, Harcourt
(Author’s hometown: Minneapolis, Minn.)
FINALISTS
Barbara Oakley, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend
(Author’s hometown: Rochester, Mich.; formerly Port Townsend and Seattle, Wash.)
Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919, Simon & Schuster
(Author’s hometown: Ripley, Ohio; formerly of Chicago and Dayton, Ohio)

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Posted on April 30, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“How you feel about Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon – and the Journey of a Generation may depend on how you respond to Weller’s dedication, which reads: ‘To the women of the 1960s generation. (Were we not the best?)’ If that’s the sort of thing that gets you all hepped up to pour a glass of chardonnay and order some gauzy embroidered tunics and Clarks sandals from the Soft Surroundings catalog, then you go, girl! If, on the other hand, the nakedly self-congratulatory quality of that dedication makes you want to play a record by the Slits or Hole or Sleater-Kinney, really loud, you may be in a different category, or just a different age group – not the ‘best’ one,” Stephanie Zacharek writes in the New York Times
I’ll take loud. Really loud. And I’m a fan of the 60s.
Still, Zacharek finds much of value in this book, though to my eyes it looks like the value has everything to do with emerging songwriting talent and nothing to do with anything generational. In fact, Zacharek argues that of the three, only Carole King really changed the world.

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Posted on April 28, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Former Chicagoan Liz Phair penned a review in the New York Times on Sunday of Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance, by indie rock hero Dean Wareham.
It’s a mess – Phair’s review, that is. We’ll look elsewhere to get a sense of Wareham’s book.
Phair’s opening paragraph starts with a highly questionable interpretation of a Freddie Mercury quote and ends by telling us that (while reading the book, apparently) “Dominick Dunne would make sure his seat was saved before excusing himself to use the restroom.”
Or, Dunne could take the book with him.
Let’s take a quick run through the rest of Phair’s effort.

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Posted on April 10, 2008

By Daniel Strauss and Steve Rhodes

Meet Janie Fredell. From the ultra-conservative and ultra-religious community of Colorado Springs, she arrived at Harvard University wide-eyed. “From the start,” the New York Times Sunday Magazine reports, “she was awed by the diversity of the place, by the intensity, by the constant buzz of ideas.” Except for one: sex.
Like all Harvard freshmen, she was educated in safe-sex practices, including familiarizing herself with a pamphlet called “Empowering You” that taught newbies to”put the condom on before the penis touches the vagina, mouth, or anus . . . Use a new condom if you want to have sex again or if you want to have a different type of sex.”
Janie was having none of it. She founded an abstinence group called True Love Revolution and landed on the cover of the Times magazine – because the media loves abstinence stories and celibacy pledges and extrapolating large themes from the actions of small number of sheltered 18-year-olds, and this one filled this year’s quota nicely.

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Posted on April 8, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“Steve Coll’s riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of Osama bin Laden’s extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics,” Michiko Kakutani writes in “The Bricklayer’s Sons: The Family That Spawned 9/11.”
“It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.”

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Posted on April 3, 2008