“You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood. Somehow, the Vignes twins believed themselves capable of both.” The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett The 16 year-old Vignes twins disappeared from their small Louisiana town in the night after the Founders Day Dance in 1954, and Brit Bennet’s brilliant new book The Vanishing Half…
Phil Christman is the author of the new book Midwest Futures – a collection of interconnected essays about the Midwest. The book expands on Christman’s 2017 essay for The Hedgehog Review On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality. Both the essay and book start with a dissection of writing cliches about the Midwest as a…
Last week in this space, I considered the difficulty that many of us have been having concentrating on anything these days, including reading. There have been many articles in the book-related emails that come into my box every day. For many of us, reading is just something that we do—eat, sleep, play, work and read.…
During times of national crisis, we often look to our leaders for guidance and reassurance. Perhaps that is why, during these uncertain times, I was compelled to read two recently-published books about wartime leaders who, though very different in personality and upbringing, were both cognizant of their responsibility to the people they represented, and extremely…
Part our job as Bookies at Cook Library is to read books—even while we’re quarantined and working from home. Early on in the quarantine, we Bookies (professional readers all!) found it difficult to concentrate on much of anything, and apparently we weren’t alone. In fact, I’ve read several articles about why some of us are…
