As for the gaps in our local history: “Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative” (Nov. 26) begs a pressing question: Do we need another one of these? Yes - when it’s this cleanly told, alternating familiar anecdotes with a smart focus on the uneasy class and moral questions that later defined a smoldering city. “The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul” (Sept. Just when you thought there was nothing new to say about the Chicago fire, the writing life or growing up on the South Side, there is “Burning of the World,” Dwight Garner’s “Upstairs Delicatessen” and Taylor Byas’ “Wiz”-inspired poem collection, “I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times.” (E. (Hint: It’s tasty.) The crime book of the season, though, is Library of America’s “Crime Novels of the 1960s,” a definitive nine-novel box set that argues for the decade as the moment when crime writers embraced the mind (Chester Himes, Patricia Highsmith) even as they got lean and mean (Ed McBain, Richard Stark). “Holly,” another great occasional reminder that Stephen King is a master of dime-store procedurals, is about octogenarians with a secret too ugly to hint at. 28), a history of the murderer whose nihilism inspired generations of responses, from Springsteen’s “Nebraska” to the media’s embrace of crime itself. Exhibit A: Harry MacLean’s absorbing taxonomy “Starkweather” (Nov. Surprise: We live in a golden age of crime writing. For the armchair criminalĬrime writing is in a renaissance this fall, and one of the reasons we know this is Stephen King, rarely thought of as a crime writer, has a fantastic new novel, “Holly,” about a very disturbing, non-paranormal crime. The good news, for now, isn’t so terrible: Yet fall, I fear, will soon become more of a state of mind than roughly eight weeks on a calendar. Fall, the most overstuffed of reading seasons, the time of the year when it is said that we become serious readers again, already felt like some melancholy art installation of a season, designed to remind you that life is short and art is long. To make matters worse, Chicago keeps opening new bookstores. You know the saying: So many books, so little time? What follows are way too many books to read before Groundhog Day, never mind Thanksgiving. But this is the fall book preview, and though I should be excited to tell you of weeks of incredible titles coming - Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk, Zadie Smith on historical fiction, Sly Stone (!) on himself - climatologists warn that summer may linger until Groundhog Day. Christopher Borrelli | Chicago Tribune (TNS)Īm I the only one who thinks it’s weird that we keep treating the seasons as clearly delineated stretches of time? I love fall, and particularly that lineal moment right before fall gets chilly, that promise of fall.
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