Read Beat (...and repeat)

If time travel ever becomes a thing, the Chicago World’s Fair held in 1893 might be one of the leading attractions for time travelers. Here was an exposition, spread across almost 700 acres in Jackson Park, some seven miles from Chicago’s Loop, that sold 27 million tickets in its six-month run. Some 200 buildings were erected that included displays from nations across the world, public comfort sta...

The Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II brought hardship to many, especially if they were Jewish. As German rule tightened, Jewish families were at risk of being rounded up and sent to concentration camps like Auschwitz. The Courtyard is an account of one Jewish family that survived the war thanks to the assistance of brave neighbors and a miracle or two along the way, said Morris, whose...

The horrors of the Holocaust were preceded in Nazi Germany by the conversion of five asylums and an abandoned jail, which were transformed into gas chambers, killing tens of thousands of patients.  That’s a story that Susanne Paola Antonetta tells in The Devil’s Castle , a book that started with the Nazi massacre of the disabled, she said. “The subtitle, Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiat...

So where did we get all these letters that children learn as their ABC’s? Danny Bate has the answer in his book, “Why Q Needs U.” Born and raised in England and now living in Prague, Bate is a linguist, writer, broadcaster, and podcaster ( A Language I Love is… ), Bate admits to being obsessed by language and its history. “Nowadays, the alphabet has become so successful that we rarely recognize it...

At a time when U.S.-Cuban relations have probably never been worse, there’s Barbara Caver’s “A Little Piece of Cuba,” a book that explores her own journey “to become Cubana-Americana.” Caver’s mother was born in Cuba before leaving for the United States with her family at the age of seven in 1959. While the author, who lives in New York, doesn’t speak Spanish and only visited Cuba for five days in...

The saga of basketball star Larry Bird invariably culminates in the Bird-Magic Johnson story, two players who met in the most-watched basketball game of all time, the 1979 NCAA championship game between Indiana State and Michigan State, and then went on to "save" the NBA, each winning titles for their respective teams, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers. But Keith O'Brien...

A true story, The Navigator’s Letter is a tale of uncanny coincidences: two friends from the same small town in Illinois join the Army Air Corps in World War II.  Both become navigators. Both were assigned to B-24 Liberators. Both flew missions over Europe. Both of their planes were forced down over Ploesti in Romania, a target for Allied bombers that wanted to knock out Nazi Germany’s primary fue...

It’s a familiar story: the animals we’ve all known since we were children, the lions, tigers, and elephants, all disappearing from the wilds due to loss of habitat, hunters, or a changing environment. So how gratifying is it to learn that in one part of the world, a wintry forest area between Russia and China, that the Siberian tiger is actually making a comeback? That’s what Jonathan Slaght write...

Abraham Lincoln has been characterized in many ways: as a father, statesman, lawyer, writer, speechmaker, and military leader. He served as U.S. President during this country’s Civil War, grappling under the intense pressure that could have split the nation in two permanently. There are probably more books written about Lincoln than about any other individual in U.S. history. Add one more. Matthew...

Jesse Sutanto has found a unique writing formula. The author of over a dozen books including the Aunties and Vera Wong (the previous interview with Sutanto came after the publication of Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) treats her writing like it’s a day job.  After writing an outline, she walks about her Indonesian home, which she shares with a husband, two children, and a nanny “talk...

The first thing that makes a reader read a book is the characters. That was John Gardner. If the characters come alive, the novel comes alive. That’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Given the importance of characters, James Plath, an English professor at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Gail Sinclair, the executive director of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla.,...

The date of June 18, 1940 proved to be the most important day in the lives of two of the best-known world leaders of the 20th century: Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. World War II had taken an ugly turn in Europe with the fall of France, and both men took to BBC radio on that day to rally their respective sides, England and France, said Richard Vinen, author of The Last Titans: How Church...

An upcoming story on the CrimeReads website (https://crimereads.com/) will look at the performances of movie/TV good guys who later took on bad-guy roles and vice versa. It can only be another story by Keith Roysdon, whose previous stories on CrimeReads include looks at writers Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch, a historic scan of Universal monsters, and a review of 1970s disaster movies. Having s...

 "Making Democracy Count" by Ismar Volic Ismar Volic  is one math professor who wants to use mathematics to improve our democratic process. His book, Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation , examines the mathematics that govern how our election systems work or, surprise, don’t work. Volic may be director of the Institute for Mathematic...

The first woman to serve in the U.S. congress didn’t come from New York or Boston but from Montana. Jeannette Rankin served two terms in Congress—not in succession but terms separated by more than 20 years. Among her many distinctions is that she was the only legislator to cast votes against two world wars, once in 1917 and again in 1941. Lorissa Rinehart brings Rankin to life in her book, Winning...

Groundhog Day, Ed Wood, The Big Lebowski, Dark City , and 12 Monkeys . What do these movies have in common? They were all made in the 1990s and represented a middle-level film—neither franchise nor family fare. “That’s what we’re missing at the theater nowadays,” said Thomas Doherty, the Brandeis University professor and author whose work frequently appears in the Hollywood Reporter . “The middle-...

In the mid-1950s, Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctors’ offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern. That highway was never built, but it didn’t matter—even the failure to build it destroyed Rosemont economically, if not physically. In Ro...

We think nothing of ordering dinner, shopping for clothes, or banking on our phones anymore. So why not vote? That’s what Bradley Tusk has been working on. In his book, Vote with Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy , the New York venture capitalist spells out the details and the benefits of making it easier for people to vote. Along with the general public, Tusk wan...

An exploration into the perilous world of American sports gambling, journalist Danny Funt interviews the power players of the betting boom at FanDuel, DraftKings, and beyond.  He relates the story of ESPN Bet, a failed attempt by the sports giant to compete with the major sports gambling operation.  As the first major investigation into America’s sports gambling industry, Everybody Loses describes...

Where are you with maps? Still digging in the glove compartment for that dog-eared map of Iowa? Gazing contentedly at a map of the world with Greenland as the dominant feature? Maybe you’ve got a pocket map of attractions in Downtown Chicago? Wherever you are when it comes to maps, you need to know what Yale history professor Bill Rankin is preaching: all maps lie. Maybe he wouldn’t actually say t...

When Kristin Hoganson came from the East to the Midwest 25 years ago to teach at the University of Illinois, she realized she had entered the heartland, that safe sanctuary that lies between the American coasts. But was it? Her book, The Heartland: An American History , delves into heartland characteristics that have portrayed the rural communities of the Midwest as local, insular, isolationist –...

If you’re weary of being bombarded by claims and concerns over AI, you need to hear David Eliot talk about the subject. The author of Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI is “the story of how artificial intelligence was born from human longing, grief, and ambition. It’s the story of the humans at the forefront of this field, from Hinton to Lovelace, Turing to Altman,” he said. As a...

When you review the life of Jessica Mitford, the activist muckraking journalist who died in 1996, you’re following someone who not only lived through world events but put her body on the line and wrote about them. That list includes the Spanish Civil War (she went to Spain as a 17-year-old adamantly opposed to fascism), World War II, the Red Scare of the early 1950s, the fight for civil rights in...

Science fiction has long contemplated the possibility that machines could rise up against their human creators. Movies such as 2001, Terminator , Matrix , and I, Robot are part of our cultural history. But James Barrat, author of The Intelligence Explosion , suggests that it’s not out of line to worry about just where technology is leading us--for real.  Barrat, a documentary filmmaker, has been o...

The 15th in the Gray Man series is out this February. That means it’s time to talk with author Mark Greaney about the latest Court Gentry entry. Entitled The Hard Line, action takes place in Bulgaria, Nicaragua, Boston, and Washington, D.C., to list just a few of the action-packed locations involved. If you’re not familiar with the series, it’s a spy thriller. We’re talking espionage and internati...