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August
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August
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 Monday
8.02 7:30 pm UIC
Imagine
if the Rolling Stones were just now releasing their
first greatest hits
album, and you might have some idea of how overdue
and anticipated Politics: Observations and Arguments
1966-2003 is. Here are Hendrik Hertzberg’s
most significant, hilarious,
devastating, infuriating dispatches from the American
scene he has been chronicling
for four decades.
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 Tuesday
8.03 7:30pm Oak Park
Voyeur
and dreamer Nina Shepard, The Dog Walker, yearns to find
something she can be passionate about. She may not have
a boyfriend or a purpose in life, but she does have a job
that offers one great perk: the keys to her clients’ apartments.
With these keys, Nina has the freedom to cross several
foyers — and a moral boundary
or two — and gain access to their lives...where she might find the things
that are
missing in her own. |
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 Thursday
8.05 7:30pm UIC
In
his unpredictable first novel, Coswell’s
Guide to Tambralinga, Scott Landers exposes our
most cherished illusions about
journeys of self-discovery. In an effort to save their
marriage, the Shermers embark on a trip to fashionably
exotic - and volatile - Tambralinga. They soon separate,
Lucy (guidebook in hand) in quest of authentic cultural
experience, while Conrad searches for an infamous brothel. |
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 Thursday
8.05 7:30pm Oak Park
Vanity
Fair contributor Bryan Burrough’s grandfather once
set up roadblocks in Arkansas to capture Bonnie and Clyde.
He didn’t catch them. Burrough was raised on stories
of the legendary crime waves of the 1930s and now, after
years of work, he succeeds where his grandfather failed,
capturing the stories of the FBI’s most famed nemeses,
weaving them into an enthralling account, Public Enemies. |
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Barry
Eisler/JA Konrath/David Ellis
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 Monday
8.09 7:30pm UIC
Barry
Eisler, JA Konrath and David Ellis are all men of mystery.
Or men of mysteries. There is something for every type
of murder maven on this evening. Barry Eisler’s Rain
Storm is the newest installment in his brilliant,
hardboiled
Rain series. JA Konrath adds a tough new woman
to the mean streets of Chicago in Whiskey Sour.
And David Ellis explores
corruption in the high places of our city in his latest
legal thriller, Life Sentence. |
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 Tuesday
8.10 7:30pm UIC
“On
the night Harriet was born, her mother screamed lines from
Shakespeare to dull the pain. The midwife was puzzled by
the words of love and death” And thus, Harriet Smithson,
a celebrated Shakespearean actress and the inspiration
for Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, made her
fitting first entrance to the world. And thus begins this
beautiful novel by the acclaimed Australian writer Christine
(The Salt Letters)
Balint, Ophelia's Fan. This project has been assisted by the Australian
Government through the Australia
Council, its arts funding and
advisory board. |
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 Wednesday
8.11 Noon 111 N. State
Marshall Field's Lower Level
J.A
Jance, author of the New York Times bestselling Joanna
Brady and
J. P. Beaumont
serieses, comes to Barbara’s at Marshall Fields on State, to sign copies
of her latest, Day of the Dead. The possibility of solving a very cold case gives
a former Arizona sheriff a chance to right a wrong from his past. This is a signing
only
event. |
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 Thursday
8.12 7:30pm Oak Park
The
Final Frontiersman is an intimate portrait of how one family
thrives in our
most remote landscape: Alaska’s wilderness. Hundreds have tried to live
in the Alaskan bush, but few have succeeded like Heimo Korth. Across the years,
he has carved out a life like no other- bounded by migrating caribou, swollen
rivers, and the exigencies of survival. James Campbell spent two years documenting
the lives of Heimo, his wife and teenage daughters, and paints their portraits
in vivid detail. |
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 Wednesday
8.18 7:30pm UIC
Peter
Hyman wants a model/Fulbright Scholar girlfriend, a job
with generous stock options and a well-appointed 2BR w/vu.
Instead he routinely finds himself single, underemployed
with a closet-free walk-up. The last woman he liked got
back together with her girlfriend; the one before that
threw up on the first date. Welcome to the almost hip life
of The Reluctant Metrosexual–a straight man whose
tastes are
just gay enough. |
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 Thursday
8.19 7:30pm Oak Park
Howard
Frank Mosher writes about the hard yet graceful lives of
working class New England in Waiting for Teddy Williams.
Homeschooled, fatherless Ethan Allen is an outcast in Kingdom
Common, Vermont. Haunted by a family mystery, he has only
one friend to talk to, a statue of his namesake on the
village green. Into this world comes a drifter, who is
determined to do one decent thing in his life by teaching
E.A. everything he knows about baseball. |
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 Wednesday
8.25 7:30pm UIC
In
Cris (Dog People) Mazza’s latest work, Homeland,
a woman takes her stroke-victim father out of a geriatric
hospital
to look
for the site of a family tragedy that happened three decades
before. By the end of their journey, they not only experience
but are influential factors in a brushfire inferno and
a Columbine-like attack on migrant
workers — both part of an apocalypse of hate, but which stand in sharp contrast
to the woman’s visceral yet strangely pastoral memories of love and death
in a secluded,
devoted family. |
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 Thursday
8.26 7:30pm UIC
Experienced
from the engaging street-level vantage point of a contemporary
Chicago family, the moment of transition between epochs
is central to The Orchards of Ithaca, the tenth novel from
celebrated Greek American storyteller, and longtime Chicagoan,
Harry Mark Petrakis. Returning to the comic tones of his
earlier work, Petrakis mixes naturalism with wit and revelation
in a tale of secrets, salvation, mythos,
and the millennium. |
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August
2004 Book Recommendations & Events Calendar