By Steve Rhodes

The New Yorker seemed to slump over the summer but it’s come back this fall with a vengeance, especially in a series of outstanding profiles. In the current issue alone, you will find compelling portraits Bob Barr, Robert Mugabe, and (the late) Marlon Brando.
Let’s start with Brando.
I have a high appreciation of the art, power, and technique of film, but I am by no means a buff, so I can’t say whether what Claudia Roth Pierpont writes will be new to students of the cinema, but I found it pretty interesting.
This isn’t a full-blown profile, but it may as well be. Pierpont uses Brando’s Method acting style to plumb his psyche and what she finds is disturbing.

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Posted on October 24, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Who knew – among us mere civilians – that Robert Todd Lincoln, Abe’s son, had such a strange life.
“He knew that he would never have been made Secretary of War or Ambassador to Great Britain without the Lincoln name, and his weird accidental presence at the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley, in 1881 and 1901, must have seemed a fateful punishment for refusing his father’s invitation to Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865,” Thomas Mallon writes in the New Yorker.
Paging conspiracy theorists and spiritualists! I mean, my God!

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Posted on October 20, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ that has really gotten away from me so let’s just try to get updated from newest to oldest also considering that due to financial constraints I barely get any magazines at all anymore.
Beaten
“He was a star in the Republican Party,” the New York Times Sunday Magazine says. “Now, like dozens of his GOP colleagues, he’s quitting Congress, fed up with his party, his president and the process. Tom Davis gives up.”
This is a fascinating profile that really gives you an idea of what it’s like to be a United States congressman – and particularly a United States congressman with good intentions who wants to work across the aisle and get things done. It also illustrates how corrosive – and corrupting – zealous partisanship is.

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Posted on October 9, 2008

By Lauren Hammond

As Open Books, Chicago s first non-profit literacy bookstore, works on our new location, we remain busy collecting used books, raising awareness about illiteracy and improving reading skills throughout the city. To help us do that, and in partnership with Better World Books, we are holding The Great American Book Drive later this month.
You can donate books without even getting out of your car. Our volunteers will unload your books and process your donation while you wait. All of the proceeds will go towards funding literacy programs for children and adults in the Chicago area. We ll be saving your old books from ending up in landfills and sending them to people who will enjoy reading them as much as you have.

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Posted on October 2, 2008