Plus: J. Ivy And The Cycle Of Pain

1. Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality.
From the Society of Midland Authors:

Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson will discuss their new book, Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality, in a Society of Midland Authors program Tuesday, Feb. 10, at Cliff Dwellers Club, 200 S. Michigan Ave., 22nd floor. They will speak at 7 p.m. A social hour, with complimentary snacks and a cash bar, begins at 6 p.m. The program is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.
Coming in February from the University of Illinois Press, the book examines Illinois’ notorious culture of corruption, its historical roots and explains the reasons its political corruption continues to thrive well into the second decade of the 21st century.
Gradel and Simpson describe the history of political corruption in the Prairie State from vote rigging in 1833, when Chicago was first incorporated, and trace the dishonorable tradition through the criminal convictions of four of the last nine Illinois governors, a $53 million embezzlement by a downstate official, and the blizzard of bribery, extortion, tax fraud and other crimes that have led to the conviction of 33 Chicago aldermen.

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Posted on January 29, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

“Robert H. Chambers III, whose tenure as the seventh president of Western Maryland College was marked by a renovated campus, increased enrollment and expansion abroad, died Jan 15 at John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Indio, Calif., of complications from an intestinal ulcer. He was 75,” the Baltimore Sun reports.
As the Sun notes, Bob wrote book reviews for us in his later years; he was an energetic and elegant writer whose passion for ideas and baseball made him a good fit for us.
I knew Bob had been a college president, which I found intimidating at first as an editor, but I gleaned several fascinating aspects of Bob from the Sun that I did not know – chiefly his association with Garry Trudeau.

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Posted on January 24, 2015

Plus: Open Source Textbooks & Jessica Hopper Lives

“Recognizing the financial difficulties students have, Jonathan Tomkin, associate director of earth, society and environment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, created a solution to high-priced textbooks,” USA Today reports.

With the help of professors at two other University of Illinois-affiliated schools – the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Illinois at Springfield – Tomkin created a stand alone “open-source” textbook called, Sustainability: A Comprehensive Edition, which is available online to students free of charge.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and the Department of Education awarded the University of Illinois a $150,000 one-year grant in 2012 to develop open-source textbooks in students’ curriculum. The grant aided the funding for Tomkin’s book, which provided a stipend to the contributing authors.
The online textbook is used for “ESE 200: Earth System” and “ENSU 310: Renewable & Alternative Energy,” both of which are taught by Tomkin. The 560-page book, which took more than a year to fully develop, features content on varying topics such as climate and global change and environmental and resource economics.

Click through for a video of students’ reactions.

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Posted on January 23, 2015

First Stop On 2015 Tour

“Sugar Gamer Valencia aka ‘Glitch’ interviews Selene Gill of Alleycat Comics on the first stop of the Chicago Comic Book Tour 2015.”

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Posted on January 21, 2015

Plus: Read It And Eat; Booksploitation

“The underground Chicago literary community knew him as J.J. Jameson; the Massachusetts penal system knew him as Norman A. Porter Jr., a murderer who escaped in 1985,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“In 2005, Porter/Jameson was arrested in Chicago. ‘It’s been a good 20-year run,’ he told the police at the time. Now in his mid-70s, Porter is up for parole in Boston.”

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Posted on January 13, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

Emptying the notebook.
1. Becoming Richard Pryor.
“Becoming Richard Pryor is a book that breaks new ground, even if it has a tendency to take its insights very seriously and its audience’s knowledge of the Pryor oeuvre for granted. It spends a long time on this tormented funnyman’s childhood years in Peoria, Ill.,” Janet Maslin wrote for the New York Times last month.
“Pryor got a lot of mileage out of the fact that he grew up in his grandmother’s brothel. [Author Scott] Saul gets a lot of mileage out of explaining what kind of matriarch that pistol-packing grandma, Marie Pryor, was, and what a huge influence she was in Richard’s life.

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Posted on January 1, 2015