Local Book Notes: RAT BIT SLEEPING CHILD!

Plus: Smell Chicago Later! & Paging Doc Hollywood

“Born to bourgeois Jewish parents in Chicago in 1899, [Vera Caspary] went out to work almost as soon as she turned eighteen and rarely stopped churning out copy from that day until she died,” Michelle Dean writes for The New Yorker. “There was no college and no finishing school, no slow courtship of traditional critical respect. She had to make a living, so she wrote.
“Her first jobs had her writing the materials for scam correspondence courses on everything from ballet to salesmanship to screenplay writing. She did a little journalism, of the ‘RAT BITES SLEEPING CHILD!’ sort, but credited a job at the Trianon ballroom in Chicago with opening her mind to experiences not her own. ‘I became both editor and staff of Trianon Topics,’ she explained, ‘an eight-page tabloid-sized weekly devoted to clean dancing.’ She worked the way most journalists once did: she hung around, talking to every sort of person who came through the place. And though she could not print scandals, she found that “through the gathering of inane and trivial news I was educated and profoundly changed . . .

Posted on September 24, 2015

Black Lives’ Burdens

Growing Up Poor – And Rich – In Chicago

“For as long as I can remember, certain relatives of mine were always dismayed and often enraged by the daily headlines and nightly news stories of crime,” Khalil Gibran Muhammad writes in his New York Times’ review of Black Silent Majority.
“As a kid I heard countless tales of the terrible outrages visited on black people by other black people: burglarizing homes, pulling guns and shooting at one another, too often claiming innocent bystanders in the crossfire. Some of these stories were personal testimonies of victimization. In my ’70s childhood on Chicago’s South Side, I was taught that some black people behaved despicably.”
You’ll have to click through to see where he’s going with that.

Posted on September 22, 2015

Variety Comics Ending 41-Year Run

Huge Clearance Sale At Chicago’s Oldest Comic Book Store

“The oldest comic book store in Chicago, Variety Comics, is closing after 41 years; their last day open will be on October 31st,” Bleeding Cool reports.
“It opened in the summer of 1974, in Chicago’s rundown Lincoln Square neighborhood. In 1975, it was bought by Rich Vitone, who ran it until illness stopped him in 2009. After he died in 2011, the store was taken over by Vin Nguyen and Victor Olivarez.
“And forty years worth of stock is on sale from now, throughout October, comics, statues, toys, supplies, books and magazines.”

Posted on September 21, 2015

Committee Insider: Obama Nobel Prize Fell Short Of Hopes

By Alister Doyle and Stine Jacobsen/Reuters

The effect of giving the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to U.S. President Barack Obama fell short of the nominating committee’s hopes, and several awards in the past 25 years were even more questionable, the committee’s former secretary says in a new book.
Geir Lundestad, lifting a veil on the secretive five-member panel, also reveals that former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, late Czech president Vaclav Havel and several rock stars were among those who were considered for the award but never won.
Lundestad writes in Secretary of Peace that the prize to Obama was the most controversial during his time as director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute from 1990-2015. He attended committee meetings but had no vote.

Posted on September 18, 2015

First Library To Support Anonymous Internet Browsing Effort Stops After DHS E-Mail

By Julia Angwin/ProPublica

Since Edward Snowden exposed the extent of online surveillance by the U.S. government, there has been a surge of initiatives to protect users’ privacy.
But it hasn’t taken long for one of these efforts – a project to equip local libraries with technology supporting anonymous internet surfing – to run up against opposition from law enforcement.
In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.
Soon after, state authorities received an e-mail about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.

Posted on September 10, 2015

The Newark School District’s Booby Prize | Lessons For Chicago

By Arianna Skibell/The Hechinger Report

What happened with the $100 million that Newark schools got from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg? Not much. A new book delves into how the project went wrong.
For the last 50 years, a combination of poverty and commonplace corruption has plagued Newark’s public school system. In 2010 fewer than 40 percent of students in third- through eighth-grade were performing at grade level. And most students did not graduate from high school.
That year, when journalist Dale Russakoff learned that Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire Facebook founder, wanted to give $100 million to turn around the failing school system in Newark, she was amazed, “almost electrified,” she said. Hearing then-Mayor Cory Booker, Governor Chris Christie and Zuckerberg talk about it on The Oprah Winfrey Show, she thought they sounded like they knew exactly what they were doing. She soon learned they did not.

Posted on September 9, 2015

Hey Ya: Young Poets Break It Down

By The Poetry Foundation w/The Beachwood Value Added Affairs Desk

The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine are pleased to announce the five recipients of the 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships: Nate Marshall, Erika L. Sanchez, Danniel Schoonebeek, Safiya Sinclair, and Jamila Woods.
Among the largest awards offered to young poets in the United States, the $25,800 prize is intended to encourage the further study and writing of poetry and is open to all US poets between 21 and 31 years of age.

Posted on September 3, 2015

The Real Curse Of Downers Grove . . .

. . . Is The Curse Of Hollywood

“I saw more people die in high school than in the rest of my life,” Downers Grove South graduate Michael Hornburg tells the Daily Herald.

“One kid died in a car crash,” he said. “One kid drowned in a quarry. The girl who sat next to me in typing class, she was kidnapped outside of an arcade and was found murdered inside a garbage bag in Lisle. So there was a lot of murder and mayhem and people getting killed on a scale I never experienced again.”

A movie based on his book The Curse of Downers Grove is out Tuesday on Blu-ray, DVD and video on demand.

Posted on September 1, 2015