Imagine this scenario: Your bills are all paid, with unexpected dollars showing up everywhere you turn. Your career is flying high, with accolades and promotions coming fast and furious. You're madly in love; your kids are wonderfully behaved and earning top grades.
Your body's in great shape and now that you think of it, you've never felt better. This biography is like Edie Sedgwick herself. Consider its size.
It's an unwieldy 9?206-140? by 11?
206-140? inches, an inch thick at 191 pages, and impossible to handle in a normal way. It's filled with a bewildering number of photos, none of which have captions to identify who or what the subject is or when the photo was made.
Few of the pages are numbered, and the minimal narrative refers to unidentified individuals except for the occasional celebrity, such as Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol or George Plimpton. Most of the words in the book are direct quotes generally from inarticulate people drawn to Sedgwick's gaudy flame.
The shoeboxes used to be chin-high in my closet -- every one of them packed with scuffed cassette boxes and a few loose, unwound tapes.
Mixes, made by me and given to me: "This That," the heavy magnetic tape from Sondra with all the U2; "Savage Indictment of Bourgeois Society," the not-so-savage tape from Chris; Liz made "Tom's Diner," of course, with that awful song by some screechy act called Shelleyan Orphan that, truth be told, was the beginning of our end.
As fantastic a tool as is the Hubble space telescope, few Americans remember where they were when its photos were first beamed back. Though valuable data still streams from the two Voyager spacecrafts, nobody ever made a movie about them.
EATONVILLE, Fla. -- It's late January, and residents and some 50,000 visitors are showing love to 20th century writer, folklorist, anthropologist and Eatonville hometown girl Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God.
There are good and bad things about writing an autobiography when the lights are flickering. Les Brownlee was 80 when he first sat down at his typewriter.
You know how it ends from the title. Barbara Brown Taylor leaves the church but keeps her faith. More importantly, leaving the church enables her to keep her faith.
First, a few things you should know about Danny Newman before hearing more about his zestful, photograph-filled new memoir, Tales of a Theatrical Guru: Say the words "queer girl writing" and an unfamiliar listener will either conjure up a fleet of saucy, sexy minxes engaged in a pillow fight, or a troop of stubble-haired, tattooed girls marching, grim and dour, in combat boots and thick glasses.
It never hurts to be good looking. Ann Coulter, the sharp-tongued conservative columnist whose latest book,
This nation of immigrants has increasingly turned its back on its own kind. The huddled masses yearning to break free get no quarter from anti-immigrant movements like the Minuteman Project, or neo-nativists like Rep.
Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), sponsor of the controversial "reform" legislation H.R.
4377, and CNN's Lou Dobbs, a professional rabble-rouser who's revitalized his TV career by fanning the fires of jingoism. The History of Havana is a busy, inviting book about a resilient city wracked by all kinds of strife since its founding in 1519. Written by Dick Cluster, a novelist and lecturer at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and Rafael Hernandez, editor of Temas, a Cuban magazine known for its coverage of social science and the humanities, this colorful work explains the singular allure of Havana, forbidden to the U.
S. tourist since Fidel Castro took over the island of Cuba, 90 miles south of Florida. At the end of Janet Evanovich's Plum Lovin', Stephanie Plum receives three bouquets -- one of which comes with a card that says "Valentine's Day sucks, usually.
" A post-Sept. 11 superpatriot with an unlikely macaronic bent might call Howard Zinn a
Chicago author Laura Mazzuca Toops' Jazz Age historical novel, Hudson Lake, at the Green Mill. There are a lot of emotional and intellectual benefits to working as a journalist and activist: See the world, bring the news, have a hand in improving people's lives.
The only real mobster I ever met was a funny little guy named Fred. He was short, stooped and rumpled, with basset-hound eyes and pallid skin. A wise-cracking, kewpie-doll of a guy with a cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth.
It was 1974, and the high school speech class assignment called for an address on a hero. My topic: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. I rightly figured everybody else would do Butkus, Banks or Bobby (Hull).
As any baby boomer will tell you, there was a long period of time during which the term "bourgeois pig" was considered one of the more scathing insults to be hurled in anyone's direction. Never mind the fact that in many cases the very people hurling that insult were the widely indulged and privileged children of the bourgeoisie itself -- an ever-expanding group whose overall financial security, physical health and higher education were all assured to a degree unparalleled in human history. For those of us who attempt to make a living from free-lance writing, the thing hardest to believe about Jonathan Raban's novel set in the immediate future may be that one of its characters makes a living from free-lance writing.
Still, it's a chancy and ill-remunerated living, so that puts the novel squarely in the realm of reality. NEW YORK -- It's months away from being on bookshelves, but fans can't get enough of the seventh -- and final -- Harry Potter book, no matter the cost. A clandestine sect with evil plans to end the world.
An ancient code. Secret saints. And the Kabbalah.
These are the key elements of The Book of Names, a new spiritual thriller that has been flying off the shelves since its release last month. The murderous hysteria that engulfed New York City in 1741, leading to the execution of 31 African Americans, was not so different from the witchcraft hysteria that had overtaken Salem, Massachusetts a half century earlier, when about two dozen "witches" were killed. One of the worst-kept secrets in publishing so far this year is the real identity of Joe Hill, the much-hyped author of Heart-Shaped Box.
Joe Hill is the pseudonym for Joseph Hillstrom King. That's right, King. As in, Stephen King, who just happens to be Joe's father.
Family history is sometimes best left buried with the deceased. In Natalie Danford's Inheritance, when Olivia's father Luigi Bonocchio passes away, his daughter discovers a deed and a key to a house in the Italian town of Urbino. When Olivia travels to Urbino, she discovers a close-knit, gossipy town, where, to borrow a line from "Cheers," "everyone knows your name.
" This might very well be the best of times for Philip Roth. After all, here he is at 73 -- the long-established, often incendiary, Jewish-American "literary son" of Newark, N.J.
-- well on his way to seeing his complete works handsomely bound up in the authoritative, perpetually-in-print editions of the Library of America. Before starting Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It, readers should go outside for a good look at the moon. After reading this book, they'll never look at it the same way again.
Norman Mailer signs "The Castle in the Forest," 7 p.m. Thursday, Borders, 830 N.
Michigan. "What if" speculation is often futile and wasted, but as we celebrate Black History Month, it's intriguing to wonder what African-American giants of old would think about our country today. Harvard recently announced it would abandon its early admissions policy because it was deemed discriminatory against minority applicants.
Only three days later, Princeton said it would do the same. As the congressional elections approached, you may have been thinking about changing congressmen, but as Lou Dobbs, the crusading CNN anchorman, will be the first to tell you, that was probably not enough. It's time to fundamentally change Congress.
I met up with Rick Kogan for lunch at the Billy Goat Tavern, the old newspaper hangout beneath Michigan Avenue he memorializes in his book A Chicago Tavern: A Goat, a Curse, and the American Dream. There will always be crimes that challenge the convictions of even the most ardent anti-death sentence advocates and the most steadfast reformers of the human condition. Think Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy Jr.
, or any of the long line of serial murderers and twisted low-lifers this country seems to spawn with alarming regularity, and you get the idea. If the field of "art comics" is in its early middle age, as Chicagoan Ivan Brunetti posits with a certain wariness in the introduction to his terrific new collection, what comes next? A messy midlife crisis?
A sentimentally nostalgic (or perhaps crotchety and embittered) old age? By now everyone knows graphic novels aren't your granddad's comic books, but something entirely different -- and something that's growing like kudzu in the marketplace of books for children ages 6-12. Mukhtar Mai compares herself to the crops that sprout through her tiny Pakistani farming village of Meerwala, unprotected yet resilient to the volatile environment that often dares to wound and annihilate.
Amy Stewart signs "Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers" A month into the New Year and your plans for the "new you" have gone out with the dead Christmas trees. You didn't get to the gym every day as promised, you didn't pass on dessert and you're still sneaking outside for a secret smoke. Have you taken our new auto site for a spin?
Search local inventories, read about tips, tops and tools, and place ads with the click of a mouse. The Chicago Sun-Times will resume publishing TV Prevue on Feb. 25.
There's a new way to get information on your favorite shows, movies and sports. Search for your name - if it's listed, you have at least $100 waiting for you. View and buy historic photos from the files of Sun-Times photographers.
Chicago's sports stars, sports characters and sports moments in the camera eye.
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