Local Book Notes: Drawing Disaster

Plus: Downstate Reverend Inherits Images From 1723

“From the inaugural issue of the Illustrated London News in 1842 to the first chapter of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning serial Maus in 1980, comics have had a long affiliation with documentary and reporting,” Dominic Umile writes for the Reader.
“So why isn’t the illustrated medium associated with nonfiction as reflexively as news articles and photographs? In Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, University of Chicago professor Hillary Chute argues for recognizing comics as a substantial documentarian form that ‘endeavors to express history.'”

Posted on January 27, 2016

Local Book Notes: Memoir Wars – Drummer vs. Kristin Cavallari

Plus: An American History of Bookmaking And Sports Betting

“Chicago Review Press has set a May 1 release date for Stick It!: My Life Of Sex, Drums, And Rock ‘N’ Roll, the new autobiography from legendary rock drummer Carmine Appice,” Blabbermouth reports.
“The book was co-written by Ian Gittins, who wrote The Heroin Diaries with Motley Cure bassist Nikki Sixx.
“Official book description: ‘Carmine Appice has enjoyed a jaw-dropping rock-and-roll life – and now he is telling his scarcely believable story. Appice ran with teenage gangs in Brooklyn before becoming a global rock star in the Summer of Love, managed by the Mob.
“He hung with Hendrix, unwittingly paid for an unknown Led Zeppelin to support him on tour, taught John Bonham to play drums (and helped Fred Astaire too), and took part in Zeppelin’s infamous deflowering of a groupie with a mud shark.
“After enrolling in Rod Stewart’s infamous Sex Police, he hung out with Kojak, accidentally shared a house with Prince, was blood brothers with Ozzy Osbourne and was fired by Sharon.
“He formed an all-blond hair-metal band, jammed with John McEnroe and Steven Seagal, got married five times, slept with 4,500 groupies – and, along the way, became a rock legend by single-handedly reinventing hard rock and heavy metal drumming.
“His memoir, Stick It!, is one of the most extraordinary and outrageous rock-and-roll books of the early twenty-first century.”

Posted on January 21, 2016

Local Book Notes: The Road From Slave Patrols To New Trier High School

Prohibition, The Police & The Daily Caller

1. “My great-grandfather Vincenzo negotiated Prohibition by fermenting two barrels of wine a year,” James Marone writes for the New York Times.

“It was perfectly legal, he insisted. Vincenzo was lucky to be a New Yorker. In her fine history of Prohibition, The War on Alcohol, Lisa McGirr, a professor of history at Harvard, shows us that a poor Italian in Illinois or a black man in Virginia might very well have been jailed, shot or sentenced to a chain gang.

Indeed.

Posted on January 14, 2016

Local Book Notes: Church Ladies, January 1973 & Liberty Power

By Steve Rhodes

“The women of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church were influential leaders in the congregations of Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Senior and Junior,” Oretha Winston writes for the Defender.
“Church Ladies: Untold Stories of Harlem Women in the Powell Era, written by Martia G. Goodson, explores these women’s lives at the church and their roles in a Northern civil rights movement that took them and their pastor, the fiery Powell Junior, from protests for jobs on Harlem’s 125th Street in the 1930s to demonstrations for justice in the halls of the United States Congress in the 1960s.
“The book animates testimony from over a dozen little-recognized women paints a vivid picture of that historic church and the struggles against Jim Crow in New York City and beyond.”

Posted on January 5, 2016