Read Beat (...and repeat)

Bill Hammack follows in the illustrious footsteps of Don Herbert ("Mr. Wizard"), Carl Sagan and Bill Nye the Science Guy (and, to some extent, Alton Brown of the Food Network) as one of the explainers of the universe. While the aforementioned individuals developed a following on television, Hammack, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois, has reached millions via public r...

The Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain remains with us today but when Piggly Wiggly first appeared on the scene in 1916 it was part of a whole new concept in retailing: the self-service store. Lisa Tolbert, a professor at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, explores the Piggly Wiggly phenomenon through 1940 at which time the self-service approach had become commonly accepted, she noted. T...

As co-founder of the Rails to Trails Confederacy, Peter Harnik has visited 207 rail trails across the United States as part of his work on a fascinating chronology of  rail corridors that have become trails for bikers, joggers as well as folks just out for a walk. But Harnik also supplies the background on how these trails came to be, a rail history that salutes the train era. "The rail-trail...

There are a lot of baseball books out there but few delve into the kind of detail that Steve Gietschier (rhymes with "itchier") delivers in "Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years." His book covers the sport from the depths of the Great Depression to the uncertainties of World War II right through the 1950s. Gietschier draws his title from the quote, "I prefer turbulent...

America was a nation of farmers in the 19th century. As R. Douglas Hurt notes in his book, "Agriculture in the Midwest 1815-1900," someone in 1900 born after the War of 1812 would have seen dramatic changes in farming practices. "They would be able to recount harvesting wheat with a sickle. They could discuss threshing a crop with a machine. They would have observed the power of a s...

Come with us now to a stretch of lonely desert in New Mexico during the latter days of World War II. Under extreme secrecy, there’s activity here that involves the country’s top military officials and some of the best minds in the world, scientists steeped in cutting-edge physics at work harnessing a nuclear chain reaction that will result in the first atomic bomb. That’s the story that Janet Farr...

As the co-founder of American Prairie, Curtis Freese is an ecologist working to help restore the wildlife in the grasslands of the Great Plains. His book, "Back From the Collapse," is a study in what's happened over the years in the Great Plains and what's being done to establish a large refuge that will let bison, wolves, beaver, prairie dogs and grassland birds thrive once ag...

“It attacks old and young alike,” declared the Pike County Democrat in 1866. The Illinois newspaper wasn’t talking about a cholera epidemic but baseball fever. Robert Sampson details the game’s early popularity in Illinois in his new book, “Ballists, Dead Beats and Muffins: Inside Early Baseball in Illinois.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, papers up and down the state were singing the praises...

The battle for civil rights in the United States has always involved people willing to stand up and be passionate about what they believe. Two of those people were Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt. The alliance between the two women forms the basis for “The First Ladies” by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, a work of historical fiction that allows the reader to better unders...

Public broadcasting wasn’t some grand plan that just happened. Josh Shepperd traces the setbacks, minor victories and hard work that had to take place before the experiment that is public broadcasting took shape. His book, “Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting,” identifies the universities that built the first educational program networks in the 1930s. You learn, for example,...

Mark Dawidziak has a new book out, this one on Edgar Allan Poe. It takes its place on the bookshelf alongside other volumes Dawidziak has written. It’s a varied lot with subjects such as Mark Twain (who he has portrayed on stage for 44 years), Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Matheson and classic TV shows like “Twilight Zone,” “Columbo,” and “Kolchak: the Night Stalker.” In the new book, Dawidziak make...

Doug Howard and David Bianculli produced an entire book about endings, specifically television finales. The book, “Television Finales—from ‘Howdy Doody’ to ‘Girls’” (2018), is a collection of essays edited by Howard and Bianculli that catalog the last show in  a series where an effort is made to provide closure, answer lingering questions or send characters off to different spin-offs. The most fam...

In writing "The Influencer Industry," Emily Hund, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, had a challenge: to explore the "increasingly-commercialized, social media-focused and sprawling internet environment" to find the influencers, the people that we go to to find truth or at least what we believe to be the truth. "Amid the immense noise of social media content, who sho...

If you believe western civilization is the result of a single cultural inheritance extending from ancient Greece to modern times, historian Naoise (pronounced Knee-sha) Mac Sweeney suggests you think again. That concept is a powerful figment of our collective imagination, she says, delivering some of her evidence in the form of a new book, "The West: A New History in 14 lives." How did s...

The bicycle has had anything but a smooth ride in the United States. As Robert Turpin tells it in “The First Taste of Freedom,” a history of how the bicycle has been marketed over the years in this country, the bicycle reached its height of popularity in the 1890s. Bicycling was a phenomenon with adults riding both individually and in clubs. Women found cycling brought new freedom. Production boom...

"A funny thing happened on the way to the digital utopia. We've begun to fall back in love with the very analog goods and ideas the tech gurus insisted that we no longer needed." That's the way David Sax's "The Revenge of Analog" starts off but that was 2016--light years ago since the intervening pandemic seemed to stretch time, itself. Sax's most recent eff...

Samir Husni has the distinction of being known as "Mr. Magazine," a title bestowed on him by a grateful student in 1986. Having made magazines his focus as a professor at the University of Mississippi for 37 years before retiring last year, Husni is now the founder and director of the Magazine Media Center. Husni told Steve Tarter that he picked up his love for magazines in his native Le...

When Bonnie Siegler found the movie film that her grandfather Jules Schulback, a successful Manhattan furrier and amateur filmmaker, had taken of Marilyn Monroe while in New York doing the famous blown skirt scene from "The Seven Year Itch," she knew she had something. It turned out to be more than just a fascinating piece of cinema history (the only surviving footage of that legendary n...

Sometimes it's hard knowing just how wild the Wild West was in this country. Cutting through the mythology that surround western heroes like Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill Cody is something that Steve Wiegand endeavors to do with "1876: Year of the Gun." A longtime journalist for three California papers, Wiegand has devoted himself to writing books since 2010. With "1876," he...

Journalist Gloria Dickie, based in London where she serves as an environmental correspondent for Reuters, offers a superb study of the eight surviving species of bears with "Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future."  Recounting her travels in search of spectacled bears in Ecuador and Peru, sloth bears in rural India, pandas in China, sun and moon bears in South Vietnam, black and g...

Alexis McCrossen is a professor of history at Sothern Methodist University who cannot only tell you what time it is but tell you something about time, itself. Her book, "Marking Modern Time" is a history of clocks, watches and other timekeepers in American life. She notes that the public clock era flourished in the United States between the 1870s and the 1930s. That was a period, she tol...

Edith Wilson may have wielded more power than any first lady in U.S. history for a period during the second term of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency but, if she did, she never admitted it. That’s part of the story that Rebecca Roberts tells in her new book called “Untold Power.” Edith Wilson first met the president during Wilson’s first term. “She inherited a jewelry store when her first husband died i...

It’s easy to take the phenomenon of the Sunday paper for granted. Until just recently, the idea of a metro Sunday newspaper complete with color comics, special supplements and inserts landing on your porch with a resounding thud was the way of the world. While the devastating decline in the nation’s newspaper industry has suddenly made us conscious that the world may not always have newspapers to...

When you talk about great Chicago cuisine, you're talking about Italian beef sandwiches, deep dish pizza and the Chicago hot dog. Those are just some of what's covered in "Made in Chicago," a guide book to 30 different Windy City delicacies gathered by two Chicago journalists, Monica Eng and David Hammond. While Eng is a reporter for Axios Chicago and cohost of the podcast Chew...

When you talk about the state of rural America, the story usually involves boarded-up storefronts and shrinking downtowns. Declines in jobs and population in small towns in Illinois and across America stretch back decades.  But Norm Walzer and Chris Merrett have just produced “Rural Areas in Transition,” a book that sees new hope for rural America, hope spurred on by technology.  The book shows th...