Chicago -
By Steve Rhodes
Amazon recommendations based on items I own and more.
1. West/Lucinda Williams
2. When the Mob Ran Vegas: Stories of Murder, Mayhem and Money/Steve Fischer
3. The Battle for Las Vegas: The Law Vs. the Mob/Dennis Griffin
4. The Tangled Web: The Life and Death of Richard Cain – Chicago Cop and Mafia Hitman/Michael J. Cain
5. Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama/Steve Dougherty
Posted on June 23, 2008
By Max Eddy
Gentle reader, let me bare all to you. Let me tell you about how Warren Ellis hurt me. In 2005, I discovered Desolation Jones, an offbeat little number written by Warren Ellis. I read the first two issues while sitting on my cousin’s chair and stroking his cat. It blew me away, and I went right back home and bought the first issue for my very own, and started my first pull-list. At the time, I hadn’t bought a single-issue comic since the mid-1990’s and displayed Desolation Jones #1, and many of the subsequent issues on my shelf.
But this summer romance was not to be. After the June 2006 issue, there was a long, long silence. Readers know that when a monthly regular is late, the future of the title is in question. When Jones miraculously returned around December, I was overjoyed! As the birth of Jesus brought hope in the dead of winter, so did the arrival of Desolation Jones #7 bring hope to me. But it was a false hope. A new story arc, a new artist, and what felt like a new mindset for Ellis made #7 a weak offering. The arrival of #8 was met not with enthusiasm, but trepidation. And since then, no one has seen not hide nor tail of good ol’ Jones.
When newuniversal first showed up in my local shop in 2007, I was still reeling from the whole Jones debacle, and wasn’t sure if I was willing to trust Ellis again. But the covers looked neat and the word on the street was that newuniversal was a good read, so I picked it up. It was weird, it was wonderful, and completely surprising – I loved it. And then again, after a good six-issue run, it vanished. There was no anger, not this time. I should have known better.
Posted on June 17, 2008
By Steve Rhodes
Catching up.
Baggage Fee
“Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles’s fine first novel, takes the form of a letter to the titular air carrier, which has stranded Benjamin R. Ford, the book’s middle-aged protagonist, in O’Hare Airport on the way to his estranged daughter’s wedding,” Richard Russo writes in the New York Times. “One doesn’t take this premise literally, of course. As Bennie waits to be put on another flight, he has a lot of time on his hands, enough to miss first the rehearsal dinner and then the ‘wedding’ itself (quotation marks courtesy of Benjamin, who’s just found out that his daughter is marrying a woman), but not enough to write a novel. The premise works though, because, as anyone who’s ever been stalled in an airport knows, time crawls.”
“Indeed, airport time goes so slowly in the ‘purgatory’ of O’Hare that there’s plenty left over for Benjamin, a former poet who now works as a translator, to read and translate large sections of a Polish novel, as well as to digress into an impressive array of cultural issues, large and small. Bennie’s digressions don’t all advance the story, but they’re great fun and serve an important purpose by lightening the narrative load.”
Posted on June 13, 2008
By The Beachwood Book Club
Heraldo Muñoz, the ambassador-permanent representative of Chile to the United Nations, is in town today to discuss his new book, A Solitary War: A Diplomat’s Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons, at an event with the Board of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Muñoz is the former president of the UN Security Council and chairman of the al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee. Here is the introduction to Solitary War.
*
On Sunday, January 30, 2005, an upbeat President George W. Bush spoke from the Cross Hall of the White House to congratulate the Iraqi people on their successful election of delegates to a National Assembly. The election had signified the launch of an unprecedented democratic process in the country. The Iraqis, defying terrorist threats that had created an atmosphere of insecurity, had gone to the polls in massive numbers to exercise their sovereign right to vote.
During his speech, President Bush specifically thanked the United Nations, an organization that he described as having provided “important assistance in the election process.” Months later, in September 2005, at a packed UN General Assembly meeting attended by more than 150 world leaders, President Bush thanked the UN once more for having “played a vital role in the success of the January elections” in Iraq, and for supporting the drafting of a new constitution. He then requested that the United Nations “continue to stand by the Iraqi people as they complete the journey to a fully constitutional government.”
By contrast, about three years before, in October 2002, Bush had warned the UN that failure to act against the Saddam Hussein regime would lead the organization “to betray its founding and prove irrelevant to the problems of our time.” And in the run-up to the invasion, on March 17, 2003, Bush had severely criticized the UN Security Council for not “living up to its responsibilities.”
These disparities in the American stance toward the UN were due to the late recognition that the UN was the only legitimate institution able to broker a viable alternative to permanent military occupation so that the United States could begin disengaging, at least politically, from Iraq. The Bush administration’s plans for a transition to an interim Iraqi government had been soundly rejected by the Iraqis in 2003. A key player in the process, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, had even refused to meet with any American official! So, at the request of the United States, the United Nations stepped in to consult with all concerned parties and develop a solution to hand sovereignty back to an interim government, one that was chosen largely by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. This set in motion an unprecedented democratic transition process, which completed its first key stage in the January 30, 2005 elections, followed by the approval of the new constitution in October 2005.
Posted on June 12, 2008
By Steve Rhodes
“On June 7, S.E. Hinton will make a rare appearance and accept the Tribune’s Young Adult Book Prize at the “Chicago Tribune Printers Row Book Fair,” the Tribune notes. “The Outsiders, Hinton’s first and most famous book, was first published 41 years ago, when Hinton was only 17. The book has sold more than 13 million copies and become a standard on middle-school reading lists.”
In connection with that appearance, the Tribune published “The Brotherhood of S.E. Hinton” on Saturday, a fine essay by Lizzie Skurnick.
Here are some other Outsiders resources and tidbits.
Let’s do it for Johnny, man. We’ll do it for Johnny!
Posted on June 3, 2008
