Read Beat (...and repeat)

The ancient Maya civilization is known for many things: pyramids, stone sculptures, complex astronomical calculations, a writing system, a rubber-ball game and the subject of anthropologist Dean Arnold's latest book, Maya Blue (University Press of Colorado). Arnold, an adjunct curator of anthropology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and professor emeritus of anthropology at W...

W.E. B. DuBois went on record in 1896 saying that white supremacy significantly warps whites' perceptions and behaviors. Even earlier--in 1890--as a 22-year-old Harvard College student--he called out Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy during the Civil War. He outlined the Davis career in a 10-minute speech as one who "advanced civilization by murdering Indians" and parti...

Ida Lupino's "problem" was that she constantly found herself the smartest person in the room, noted biographer Alexandra Seros, a Hollywood screenwriter and the author of Ida Lupino: Forgotten Auteur (University of Texas Press). Lupino was more than a great actress but also a successful director. The Hitch-Hiker , a film made in 1953, is now considered a film noir classic. The fact...

Maia Lee-Chin, whose book, Et Cetera: An Illustrated Guide to Latin Phrases (Andrews McMeel), was published last year, got more out of Latin class than I did. But she admits it didn't just happen. "I was forced to enroll in Latin. I considered dropping the course several times, especially while translating Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico . I couldn't understand his long-winded...

The Washington Post calls Mark Greaney the Tom Cruise of thriller writers. Like the Mission Impossible star, Greaney is on a roll, following in the footsteps of Tom Clancy, the thriller writer whose books have sold over 100 million copies. Greaney, who said he became obsessed with Clancy’s work as a teenager, co-wrote several books with Clancy before the author died in 2013. While carrying on the...

Kimberly Kay Hoang, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, traveled over 300,000 miles, conducting hundreds of interviews to trace the flow of capital from offshore funds in the Cayman Islands, Samoa or Panama to holding companies in Singapore and Hong Kong. Her book, Spiderweb Capitalism , reveals how some of this money finds its way into risky markets in Vietnam and Myanmar. &quo...

“It’s a new world when it comes to journalism. That prompted Patrick Ferrucci, the head of the journalism department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, to go out and see how that world has changed. The Organization of Journalism offers a profile of six different business models that now bring folks the news or sports, as the case may be. There’s the St. Louis Beacon , a digital nonprofit, ...

You already know about the local news crisis. The proof is probably not in your hands with the demise of so many newspapers. The terms “ghost paper” (a publication with an old masthead and little else) and “news deserts” (areas without local news coverage of any kind) are part of the vernacular these days. Communities have had to be inventive to replace the local news they once took for granted, s...

It’s been 80 years since the bloodiest battle of World War II, the Battle of the Bulge, a five-week struggle that started during the Christmas season of 1944 that took 19,000 American lives in fighting in the densely wooded Ardennes region of Germany. It was Germany’s last stand, said O’Connor, who drew on considerable research of that battle in Jeep Show , a novel that focuses on the U.S. Army’s...

Dr. Jordan Grumet is a hospice doctor as well as a podcaster at The Earn & Invest Podcast . He’s also an author whose new book is The Purpose Code , a follow-up Taking Stock: A Hospice Doctor’s Advice on Financial Independence, Building Wealth, and Living a Regret-Free Life , published in 2022. Grumet describes his own battle to find purpose in life, relinquishing a job as a full-time medical...

Books that seek to help you understand the world of finance probably aren’t viewed as the most engaging of literary categories. Consumers, after all, hold that book in their hands for a specific reason: to understand policy rates better or inflation-linked bonds not for a ripsnorting reading adventure. Paul Podolsky, a former equity partner at Bridgewater Associates and the founder and CIO of Kate...

You’re a Japanese American living in Nebraska in 1941. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, sending the United States into war. What do you do? At 24 when war broke out, Nebraskan Ben Kuroki enlisted to fight for his country. Ben joined the Army Air Force along with his brother.  In Most Honorable Son by Gregg Jones, Kuroki’s unique wartime experience is related. Ben Kuroki not only flew a staggering...

So many images represent Walt Disney. There’s that mouse, of course, and all those movies. There’s so much music, countless cartoons, and aisles of toys Once there were even comic books. Characters like Donald Duck operated across many different media. We know about the cartoons starring an exasperated duck with a funny voice. But there was also an adventure series with Donald, his nephews, and a...

Pickleball has become the fastest-growing sport in America. Ilana Long, author of Pickleballers , a debut romantic comedy set in Seattle, noted that as many as 50 million individuals are expected to play the sport in 2024. The game, which Long calls multigenerational, serves as the backdrop for a story about a young woman who, on the rebound of a breakup, finds solace and redemption on the pickleb...

Whenever the Jurassic Park/World franchise launches another movie entry, the national media runs to quote “a dinosaur guy” for a professional analysis. One of the guys they call is David Hone, a zoologist at Queen Mary University in London and the author of How Fast Did T.rex Run? and the Tyrannosaur Chronicles. Hone’s latest book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior (Princeton University Press), seeks t...

A plaque standing in downtown Bloomington, Ill. pays tribute to that city’s circus heritage: “In the era before movies, television, and the internet, it was the circus that entertained us…For more than 80 years, spanning the 1870s until the 1950s, countless numbers of brave Bloomington men and women risked their lives to entertain massive crowds by performing aerial tricks high up on the flying tr...

Decades before the Civil War, Illinois meant freedom for those seeking to escape slavery.  Larry McClellan’s Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois is his third book exploring the phenomenon known as the Underground Railroad. McClellan, a resident of Crete, Illinois, some 35 miles south of Chicago, served as a professor of sociology at Governors St...

The comics page has long been a place for cars and energy. Comic strips like Otto Auto, Toonerville Folks , and Gasoline Alley related a nation that happily motored about in a car-centric world. Daniel Worden, an art professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, relates that history in Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics . “This book analyzes how comics represented...

Doug Villhard knew that Red Grange might have been the greatest running back in the history of college football. He was also singularly responsible for helping make the National Football League an established professional league. But Villhard said what drew him to write the historical novel, The Golden Age of Red , was Grange’s alliance with C.C. Pyle, the man who became America’s first sports age...

It’s a story of World War II but it’s also a story of politics, power, seduction, and intrigue. Did I leave anything out? Pamela Churchill Harriman didn’t as Sonia Purnell’s book, Kingmaker, makes clear. The British biographer and journalist spent five years gathering information on Harriman’s life, including gaining access to a wealth of fresh research, interviews, and newly discovered sources. ...

The 20th century American department store: a palace of consumption where shopping meant something more than simply getting what one needed. Every major city had at least one department store with a name that lives on even in this age of discounters and online buying. New York, of course, was the nation’s business capital, main market and fashion center.  Julie Satow tells the story of how women h...

The overriding message you get after reading the essays collected by Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University history professor, and Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School, is that all the voting issues of today (charges of voting fraud, voter suppression, and foreign interference with the vote) have been with us a long time. Our Nation at Risk:...

By now most of us have heard of some of the daring deeds executed by the special operations teams that worked undercover during WWII. Shannon Monaghan has added to that body of work through her latest release, A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men. Monaghan follows the exploits of four Britishers, David Smiley, Peter Kemp, Billy McLean, and Julian Amery. These four show remarkable courage and resilienc...

When Ellie Laks found herself communicating with animals early on, she said she didn't think anything of it. But as Laks, continuing with her communications, got older, "people looked at me as though I was crazy," she said. But Laks also rescued and rehabilitated animals. As co-founder of The Gentle Barn, a rescue mission for animals with no other place to go, she celebrated the org...

Anyone around youngsters knows that among the many benefits is reading children’s books—to your child or to yourself. Children’s literature offers stories and pictures that we all need to enjoy—not just kids. One of the best examples of that is some of the work done by Chris Sickles of the Red Nose Studio in Greenfield, Ind., just a stone’s throw from where Wilbur Wright was born. Sickles, 50, is...