By The Beachwood Society of Midland Authors Affairs Desk
The Society of Midland Authors has announced the winners of its annual awards for books by Midwest authors published in 2008. We’ve got ’em here, plus a critic’s award goes to a Beachwood favorite.
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Category: Adult Fiction
Winner: Aleksander Hemon, The Lazarus Project
Publisher: Riverhead
Author Lives In: Chicago
Finalists: Tony Romano, If You Eat, You Never Die; Jeffery Renard Allen, Holding Pattern.
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Category: Adult Non-Fiction
Winner: Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Author Lives In: Chicago
Finalists: Eric Dregni, In Cod We Trust: Living the Norwegian Dream; Daniel L. Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.
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Category: Biography
Winner: John E. Hallwas, Dime Novel Desperadoes: The Notorious Maxwell Brothers
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Author Lives In: Macomb, Illinois
Finalists: Thrity Umrigar, First Darling of the Morning; Curtiss Anderson, Blueberry Summer: Growing Up at the Lake.
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Category: Children’s Fiction
Winner: Louise Erdrich, The Porcupine Year
Publisher: HarperCollins
Author Lives In: Minnesota
Finalist: Gary D. Schmidt, Trouble.
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Category: Children’s Non-Fiction
Winner: Candace Fleming, The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary
Publisher: Random House.
Author Lives In: Oak Park, Illinois
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Category: Poetry
Winner: Ronald Wallace, For a Limited Time Only
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Author Lives In: Madison, Wisconsin
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Category: James C. Friend Memorial Award for Criticism
Winner: Teresa Budasi, Sun-Times
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Budasi has long been a Beachwood favorite. Here are her previous Beachwood mentions:
1. “The best part of License to Wed comes fairly late in the movie, after you haven’t laughed nearly enough, after you’ve looked at your watch a half-dozen times, and long after you’ve decided you don’t care about the characters, not one bit,” writes Teresa Budasi in the Sun-Times.
“It’s when John Krasinski punches Robin Williams in the face.”
– July 3, 2007
2. “How possibly does a girl forget her first high school boyfriend, not to mention her best friend in the world and her parents’ divorce?
“In Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, my back-to-school choice for young adult readers, Naomi Porter trips and falls down a flight of concrete stairs and cracks her head,” writes books editor Teresa Budasi. “And that’s how she forgets the entirety of her still-in-progress teenage years.”
– September 11, 2007
3. “Books editor Teresa Budasi writes that she wasn’t looking forward to reading If I Did It, but once she started she was hooked by the whole of O.J. Simpson’s sick ‘love’ story.”
– September 27, 2007
4. “Books editor Teresa Budasi also takes on Gill’s Starbucks book, noting that the author still works for the coffee company with no plans to quit despite the movie deal. Maybe so, but he’ll be taking a really, really, really, really, really, really long leave.”
– October 3, 2007
5. “Books editor Teresa Budasi comes up with another interesting column, this time about Rosie O’Donnell’s Celebrity Detox. While chiding Rosie for her questionable childhood ‘memories,’ Budasi also writes that ‘Rosie says she never set out to steal the show when she agreed to a one-year stint [on The View]. But she did steal it, and thank goodness.’ Amen, sister!”
– October 16, 2007
6. “While I was busy getting to know Dr. Seuss via the Cat in the Hat, the Lorax, Sam I Am and Bartholomew Cubbins – a provocative name for a preschool set if I ever heard one – a generation of stay-at-home moms was cuddling up to Harold Robbins, whose dirty, sexy page-turners revolutionized the once-puritanical world of publishing,” Books editor Teresa Budasi writes in her weekly column.
“It is mentioned in Andrew Wilson’s Harold Robbins; The Man Who Invented Sex that one could expect dirty parts in a Robbins novel about every 17 pages. I suppose the same could be said for Wilson’s meticulously researched biography . . . ”
– October 22, 2007
7. “Books Editor Teresa Budasi takes on Valerie Plame’s Fair Game: My Life As A Spy, My Betrayal By The White House (Verdict: Not as good as you’d think).”
– November 5, 2007
8. “Books editor Teresa Budasi took an online quiz and – much to her surprise – found that the presidential candidate whose views most aligned with hers was Dennis Kucinich. So she picked up his memoir, The Courage of Survive, which she described as ‘not an outline of his career in politics or his platform – not directly anyway; it’s Kucinich, in his own words, going back to his poor, working-class roots. He has a remarkable memory of people and places; his family moved 21 times before he moved out at 17, and he remembers every address and neighborhood.’
“Also catching up: Two weeks ago, Budasi wrote about David Levy’s Love + Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. Don’t laugh. ‘[H]e comes up with so many rational, scientific and sociologically sound arguments that the deeper you get into the book, the more difficult it becomes to dismiss his thesis,’ Budasi writes.
“For example, this little tidbit: ‘There are obvious social benefits in robot sex – the likely reduction in teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and pedophilia.’ At least two-thirds of that thought is completely reasonable – and encouraging.”
– December 11, 2007
9. “Well, here’s the thing. The Sun-Times doesn’t really have a book section anymore, though it does still carry reviews.
“‘We’ve been fortunate over the past few years to have had an expanded number of pages to run many full-length book reviews, local author features and interviews when many newspapers cut back to abbreviated reviews or eliminated their book review sections altogether,’ books editor Teresa Budasi wrote on December 23rd in “How The Grinch Stole The Books Section.’
“No longer. Now book reviews appear in the Sunday Showcase section.
“What’s so funny about it is that it was only last May when former books editor and now editorial page editor Cheryl Reed bragged about her paper’s commitment to its books section and attacked the Tribune for moving its section from Sunday to Saturday.
“‘Many, including myself, suspect the move by the Tribune is merely the first step before that corporation kills off its shrinking books section,” Reed wrote. “Perhaps they are banking that with fewer Saturday readers there will be less uproar about its ultimate elimination.
“‘The irony of course is that the Tribune is a broadsheet with the Ivy-League mentality that shrunk its books section down to a tabloid, and the Sun-Times is a tabloid with a scrappy reputation that blew its books section up into a broadsheet. In the past year, the Sun-Times has made an even further commitment to local authors, with one- and two-page profiles of local authors Jane Hamilton, Sara Paretsky and Sara Gruen, among others. Each week we offer free local listings of author readings and feature an interview with a local author. We’ve continued to offer our own takes on the big books like The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Rant by Chuck Palahniuk, and we’ve alerted you to the best-selling authors coming our way, like Salman Rushdie and A. M. Homes. We’ve done all this even though we rarely ever receive advertising.
“‘Concerned about the security of the book pages here, I asked Sun- Times Publisher John Cruickshank, a bibliophile and frequent reviewer in these pages, whether there were plans to cut books coverage here. His response: ‘The Opinion and Books sections of the paper have never attracted much advertising, but they are at the core of any paper’s identity and the engagement a paper has with its community. We are committed to these sections because they are integral to the basic character of the Chicago Sun-Times.’
“Cruickshank is gone, of course (as is the Controversy section, which was the best thing the paper had to offer outside of its investigations of City Hall). But that’s no excuse for the ongoing push-pull at the paper that has done anything but allow it to gain steady footing long enough for its selling points to sink in.”
– January 9, 2008
10. “‘If you read Andrew Morton’s unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise with a fan’s curiosity in one hand and a thinking person’s skepticism in the other you’ll likely end up in the same place you were before you read it: not all that interested,’ Teresa Budasi writes in her Sun-Times books column.
“‘Because as fascinating as the book can be – mostly when Morton gets into the inner workings of Scientology and its effect on Cruise – there’s always a nagging question as to what’s true and what isn’t.’
“Sort of like Scientology itself.
“Budasi may be lukewarm on a book that certainly has an almost irresistible voyeuristic appeal, but that doesn’t mean the book didn’t make at least a little bit of an impression on her.
“For example, she observes that ‘We all know people who are never single – never without a boyfriend or girlfriend on their arm. Cruise is one of those people, and when you lay out his relationship history, as Morton does here, there doesn’t seem to be any gaps.
“‘What’s more interesting is that for a guy whom Scientology is a reported deal-breaker – if you’re not on board, don’t expect long-term – Cruise has only seriously pursued Catholic women since his 1990 divorce from Mimi Rogers, the woman who introduced Cruise to Scientology in the first place’.”
– January 21, 2008
11. “Teresa Budasi. The new books editor whose section has been shrunk but whose column has been a breath of smart and witty fresh air.”
– January 30, 2008
12. “Have any political figures in American history been as thoroughly – and often ridiculously – examined as the Clintons? From Bill’s sex life to Hillary’s laugh, the obsession is beyond absurd.
“Now comes Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers, which is not a wholly uninteresting premise, but also shows just how far behind we are as a nation compared to the rest of the globe’s matter-of-fact history of women leaders.
“Thankfully, the Sun-Times’s Teresa Budasi, as she states in her Sunday column, has read Thirty Ways so we don’t have to. (Wouldn’t 10 or 15 ways have been enough?)
“Budasi found a sizable number of the book’s essays to be silly and predictable – and far too many coming from editor Susan Morrison’s New Yorker pals. But the book is not totally without value.
“‘Thankfully, for every five essays about Hillary’s fashion sense, icy coldness, stand-by-your-man-ness and even weird stuff like what her food preferences say about her or whether she’s a dog or cat person (Susan Orlean, you phoned in this assignment), there is one that stands out.’
“In the end, Budasi finds essays by six authors worthy of your time.
“‘And while you’re reading,’ she writes, ‘remember that no book like this would ever be written about a male candidate’.”
– February 5, 2008
Posted on May 5, 2009