By Michael McColly
[Soft Skull Press, Transition Books, 2006. 360 pages.
$15.95 paperback]
Reviewed by Lott Hill

In The After-Death Room, Michael McColly takes us on a journey around the world as he attempts to understand the global struggle to combat HIV and AIDS while confronting the virus inside his own body. The book is a combination of journalism, memoir, travel journal, confessional, and personal discovery for McColly as he contemplates the role of yoga in his own health and teaches others how such practice may help them live healthier lives. From South Africa, to Thailand, to India, to Vietnam, to Senegal, we follow the writer to communities that are on the frontlines in the battle against HIV and meet individuals who have dedicated their lives to stopping the spread of the virus.

McColly finds his way through determination and luck, as he travels around the world and meets the people who are treating, preventing, educating about, and/or living with HIV and AIDS. These remarkable activists and their stories represent so many others in similar circumstances around the world, yet McColly’s interaction with each one underscores the immense and unique challenges they face. He writes: “Like the virus, the work of activists and their organizations replicates [itself], latching on to new sources of strength in order to distribute its message ever more broadly. This organic social movement spreads resistance not only to the indifferent biological machinery of HIV, but also to the more deadly indifference of human beings to the suffering that surrounds them.”

But the people McColly encounters are anything but indifferent, and whether they run the community-based organizations and clinics in Chennai, India, or treat the incarcerated patients at the Cermack Health Center of Cook County Jail, they become the source of hope in this story.

By Dawoud Bey
[Aperture, 2007. 164 pages. $45.00, hardcover]
Reviewed by Audrey Michelle Mast

“For all this rhetoric about ‘leave no child behind,’ I don’t think this society, quite frankly, gives a shit about young people other than as a kind of periodic political football,” says photographer Dawoud Bey in an interview with his former student Carrie Mae Weems in Class Pictures. “I’m trying to construct a kind of representation of the teenage subject that functions in opposition to those representations of teenagers as socially problematic or as engines for a certain consumerism.”

Bey’s prolific body of work is a fascinating progression of ever-new paradigms in portraiture, beginning with his early-’80s series of 35-mm photographs of young African Americans in Brooklyn and Harlem. These elegant, engaging pictures, as Yale University art gallery director Jock Reynolds notes in this book, stand “in stark contrast to the sullen mug shots of black youth being promulgated throughout the mainstream media.” In later work Bey used a 20-by-24 Polaroid camera and richly toned backdrops to create sophisticated diptychs that made his young subjects appear as dramatic and noble as portraits by Dutch master painters.

But Bey himself observes that he does not merely attempt to subvert stereotypical representations of blackness or teenager-hood in general: he does not impose ideas upon his subjects, but rather responds genuinely to the young people themselves during their time together. This is what is so extraordinary about Bey’s Class Pictures: his ability to connect so intimately with such enigmatic subjects. Each of them gazes directly at the camera, some melancholy, others inquisitive, aggressive, or world-weary, but all are utterly engaged with the artist.

The book is the culmination of work produced between 2002 and 2005, as Bey photographed teenagers during a series of artist residencies in urban public high schools around the country, including Chicago, New York, and Detroit, as well as the prestigious, private Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. One can rarely discern whether these students are pictured at Andover or an urban magnet school, as they curl up in a chair or lean against a backdrop of hazy, generic lockers and blackboards. Each plate is accompanied by text written by the students during their shoots, in response to Bey’s prompt: “Tell me something about yourself that you think no one knows.” The answers are alternately funny, poignant, and heartbreaking, and allow not just Bey’s images, but these teenagers, to truly speak for themselves.

By Alexis J. Pride
[Utour Publishing Co., August 2007. 375 pages. $20.99 paperback]
Reviewed by Micki Leventhal

This debut novel about one woman’s battle with personal demons and societal ills was inspired by the story of controversial Chicago educator, Corla Jean “Momma Hawk” Wilson-Hawkins.

Within the fictional frame, Hawkins’s story is told through the persona of Emma Rivers, a deeply flawed heroine. Growing up, Rivers’s traditional, 1950s working-class African-American family provides well enough for her basic survival needs, but very little in terms of love and nurturing. In this environment, Rivers reaches adolescence with a severely damaged self-image and an inability to control her emotions and anger.

Despite her high intellectual capacity, her pride and unmanageable temper get her thrown out of school, then out of the military. In a page-turning spiral of misadventures and bad choices, Rivers winds up living the low life in New York’s Spanish Harlem.

Ultimately, however, her natural intelligence and survival instincts lead her back toward stability and education. She earns a college degree and lands a job in the Chicago Public Schools, where she finds her path and mission in life as an unconventional education reformer, instituting a controversial program of tough love and high expectations for the “left-behind” children in one of Chicago’s inner-city public schools.

As a June 19, 1997 article in the Chicago Tribune noted, “An imposing woman with a domineering aura, a boisterous laugh and a raucous voice that is intimidating one minute and comforting the next, Momma Hawk, 48, has been described—sometimes in the same breath—as a tyrant, a chameleon and a saint. To her 45 students, she is a lifesaver.”

Pride’s strong and vivid writing creates both a compelling narrative and a central character who is alternately inspiring and infuriating. The depiction of a childhood lived without love is harrowing. Rivers’s clarity of purpose and obsessive dedication to her students contrasts painfully with her blindness to the needs of her own children and the complete muddle she makes of her other personal relationships. One can understand why Rivers is the way she is, while still wanting to slap her upside the head. In Pride’s capable hands, Rivers is a character who is deeply and completely human.

But Where the River Ends is not only a book about one exceptional woman. It is also about racism, classism, gender relationships, bureaucracy, and power politics.

Momma Hawk was fired from the Chicago Public Schools in 2003 under a cloud of accusations of payroll fraud, misconduct, and employee harassment. Poetic license —or “truthiness,” in the parlance of creative nonfiction—or perhaps the deeper truth of Pride’s fictionalized narrative, leads the reader to conclude that all of this was a set up because Rivers/Momma Hawk went too far in challenging the system.

At some level, this detail does not matter. Where the River Ends confronts many of our society’s ills and the ways in which one person can make a difference. It’s also a darn good read.

By Kathleen Flinn (’92)
[Viking Adult, 2007. 304 pages. $24.95 hardcover]
Reviewed by Elizabeth Burke-Dain

Most of us end up in jobs at the periphery of our dreams. The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry allows us to witness the struggle and rewards of pursuing the impossible.

Flinn begins her tale with being fired from her tony job at a major software company in London. Against her mother’s wishes, the 36-year-old Flinn decides to sell everything and enter the Cordon Bleu Cooking School in Paris, where she will learn the art of classic French cuisine. She parades before us a brace of snooty French chefs, competitive culinary students, and some pretty disgusting degustations. In the center of this crunchy outer story structure is the creamy romance between herself and Mike, whom she eventually marries at a monastery in the French countryside.

The best bits in the story are the visceral descriptions of uncooked animals and how they are hacked, disemboweled, and deboned. Did you know that in France they leave the heads of hares on their skinned bodies so that the consumer can differentiate them from cats? Or that no matter what kind of animal is being cooked, every part of it is eaten?

The ability to objectify something such as a lamb must be as vital to a chef as it is to a surgeon. That’s especially true here in France, where the eating public consumes every part of a cow or pig with delight—often in a cream sauce.

Tensions arise when Mike, Flinn’s new husband, has an accident while parasailing on a trip back home in Seattle. His sternum breaks, necessitating a recovery time of several weeks. Flinn, in her quest to finish her program, has to decide whether to stay in Seattle to nurse Mike back to health, or fly back to Paris. Mike urges her to go, and she reluctantly returns to Paris to spend the next few worried weeks wandering around the city, looking for a new apartment, and crying.

Back at school, in her distraction Flinn makes the terrible mistake of serving a dish on a cold plate—a felony at Le Cordon Bleu. Then she develops a serious kidney infection right at exam time. Mon dieu! She has to do her written exam at home, and the practicum must be delayed until she can get back on her feet. Luckily, she is well-liked and the rules are bent in her favor. Either of these incidents could easily have knocked out even the most hard-core contenders, but Flinn is not deterred. She finishes her exams with great fanfare.

Classic French cuisine is not meant to be improvised. This is driven home on several occasions recounting Flinn’s often-hilarious faux pas in the kitchen. However, Flinn is a good student and a compassionate teacher, and at the end of each chapter she provides a recipe version that can be made by the amateur. In France, for example, coq au vin is made with the blood of a rooster. Flinn provides a delicious and less sanguine recipe that can be made in your own kitchen—even if you’re fresh out of rooster blood.

I recommend this book to anybody who wants to or intends to make a major life change. However, the joy of the book for me lay in the kitchen scenes, where Flinn learns the basic recipes from the masters of the trade. I’m planning to make the cassoulet. While my beans have been soaking for days, I’m still searching for the duck confit legs. Bon Appetit!

By Samuel Park
[Alyson Books, 2006. 238 pages. $24.95 hardcover]
Reviewed by James Kinser

With a hint of E.M. Forster and a splash of Armistead Maupin, Samuel Park captures the raw, delicate, and passionate nature of a taboo relationship in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Set in 1948 on the Harvard campus, this novel features the union of two unlikely partners.

Adam, an aspiring literary scholar from a wealthy family, has a robust, athletic physique, effortless intelligence, and an engagement to the perfect girl. He moves through life with ease until he is caught in a sexual act in a library bathroom. Risking expulsion, he refocuses his attention on his studies.

Jean, an independent spirit, wily and mischievous, convenes weekly with a group of followers who smoke and drink freely, listen to Cole Porter on the Victrola, and collectively venture to guess who in Hollywood might be “Uranian” (a euphemism for being gay). Comparatively, Jean’s habits and sense of entertainment fall decidedly more toward the fringe than Adam’s.

However, their paths intersect and increasingly intertwine as they become better acquainted in their literature class. One argues that the Sonnets were written by Shakespeare for a mysterious woman in black, while the other posits that they were composed for a secret male lover.

As the evidence for each argument amasses, so does the inevitable attraction and intimacy between the two. A palpable love story unfolds, in which each person must make choices that follow prescribed and predictable coda or those that follow the passions, desires, and will of the heart.

Akin to epic stories like Brokeback Mountain, Sonnets not only reveals the intricacies of navigating a same-sex relationship in a less-accepting era, it does so in a manner that is humorous, ironic, and applicable to the modern reader, straight or gay. For a read that slides like a knife through warm butter, pick up Shakespeare’s Sonnets and be prepared to read past your bedtime and risk missing train stops in the process (at least that was my experience).

By Laurence Minsky
[The Copy Workshop, 2007. 480 pages, $47.50 paperback]
Reviewed by Matthew Green

The second edition of Laurence Minsky's How to Succeed in Advertising When All You Have is Talent is both an update and amplification of the original. A book for all those enraptured by the immense cultural space occupied by advertising, the book will prove not only relevant, but inspiring.

Minsky connects with many of the people who helped evolve advertising into an industry that takes seriously its role as author of genuinely creative and cultural products. To those outside the field, the names of Minsky's subjects—Alex Bogusky, Tom McElligott, Rich Silverstein, Nancy Rice, Lee Clow, etc.—aren't necessarily household, even if their words and images are. These are truly the giants of creative American advertising, and despite Minsky's own accomplishments in the field, this is their book. It tells their stories, offers their pieces of advice, and provides a look into their craft.

Contemporary advertising, at its best, is a practice that rejects formula. In turn, there is no formula for breaking into the field. The 18 people profiled here tell 18 authentically unique stories. This is not to suggest there are not common pieces of advice readers will find practical; there are. Foster your talent. Be inspired. Trust your intuition. Seek out any chance to practice your craft. It is, however, each person's unique take on how this advice can be manifested that makes this book stand apart from the standard “how to break in” fare it will be shelved next to.

Although it is not uncommon in his field, you can tell Minsky is not someone who “ended up in advertising.” He is not a copywriter who tried to become a screenwriter and failed. He is a creative who wanted to become a copywriter and succeeded. He loves advertising. He is an enthusiast. This book will serve as an inspiration to those who feel the same.

By Sean Chercover
William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2007. 288 pages, $23.95 paperback
Reviewed by Ann Wiens

“The Spilotros had run afoul of mob bosses for bringing too much heat on the Outfit’s lucrative Las Vegas arm, headed by Anthony ‘The Ant’ Spilotro … Days later, the brothers’ bodies, one on top of the other, were discovered buried in an Indiana cornfield.” So unfolds the lurid tale of some of the most provocative mob—I mean Outfit—murders in Chicago history. It’s a story involving Joey “The Clown” Lombardo, John “Bananas” DiFronzo, Sam “Wings” Carlisi, Louis “The Mooch” Eboli … but wait. That’s the story of the sensational “Family Secrets” trial, and it’s being told as it happens this week on the front page of the Chicago Tribune.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but if we can take the courtroom testimony being hear against some of the Chicago Outfit’s most notorious figures as truth, then Sean Chercover’s debut novel, Big City, Bad Blood, is spot-on in its depiction of the shrouded world of organized crime in this city. The suspenseful tale is told from the perspective of disillusioned newspaper reporter turned small-time private investigator Ray Dudgeon, whose P.I. gigs tend toward surveillance, fraud investigation, and the like. He has a office full of second-hand furniture overlooking the “L” on Wabash (discounted because it’s on the thirteenth floor), and a dingy bachelor’s apartment with a good record collection. He has a girlfriend named Jill, a nurse (convenient later on, when Outfit thugs get the best of him), and a new client named Bob Loniski, a unremarkable Hollywood locations manager who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Loniski hires Dudgeon to protect him from the aforementioned Outfit thugs, who want him dead, and we’re off on a story full of twisting plot lines, colorful good guys and bad guys, and vivid scenes set in the gritty streets of underground Chicago.

Chercover stays true to the detective-novel genre, keeping the reader in suspense, springing surprises here and there, and leading, ultimately, to a not-entirely expected resolution. His language teeters on the brink of cliché, but rarely slips over the edge, and his characters and settings are so richly visualized and well-defined that one easily becomes immersed in this engaging, satisfying novel. And the story’s setting, much of it in Chicago’s South Loop, is an entertaining bonus for Columbia readers. Dudgeon gets take-out spinach pizza at Edwardo’s, drinks at the South Loop Club and Trader Vic’s, and hides his beleaguered client, Bob Loniski, at the Travelodge on the corner of Harrison and Wabash—smack in the middle of Columbia’s campus.

By Karyn Bosnak (B.A. ’96)
[Harper, 2006. 368 pages, $13.95 paperback]
Reviewed by Elizabeth Burke-Dain

Have you ever wanted to go back and visit all the people you’ve slept with to find out if you might want to marry one of them? I haven’t, but Delilah Darling, the narrator of 20 Times a Lady, has.

After reading the results of a sex survey in The New York Post that says, “The average person has 10.5 sexual partners in their lifetime,” Delilah decides that she must take control of her life. She knows that she’s easy. However, having slept with 20 men (twice the average!), she is dangerously close to making the transition from easy to sleazy.

To avoid sleeping with another 20 men to find Mr. Right, Delilah decides to revisit this unseemly trough to reassess if any of the old cache will pass muster. The reader wonders if it will be Rod the Con; Wade the Muppeteer for Christ; Roger the Boss, who wears braided belts and the not-so-fresh trousers; Ian, who has a penchant for older ladies; or any of the other dysfunctional duds she encounters on her Homeric cross-country odyssey through past romances.

A chance encounter with a new tenant in her building, Colin, gets the ball rolling. Colin is young, has “great abs,” is fresh off the boat from Ireland (so he has a cute accent), and just happens to be the nephew of a successful private detective in New York. Colin has come to the Big Apple to follow in his uncle’s footsteps. While trying to keep her eyes off of Colin’s abs, Delilah enlists his services to help her track down “a few people from her past.” She doesn’t want him to know that he’s investigating a list of men she has boffed over the years. Plus, flirting with Colin could only lead to yet another man on her list, and the road to Slutsville is paved with guys like Colin.

Re-experiencing these men with Delilah Darling is like watching somebody who decides that the expiration date on the milk carton is wrong and gulps it down anyway. You want to run after her in slow-mo screaming, “Noooooo!” It’s funny.

Meanwhile, Colin the detective takes pleasure in watching these events unfold. The reader soon realizes what Delilah doesn’t: Colin will be the one she’ll get in the end. Colin is the pot of gold, but he’s also number 21, and her entrée into self-described slutdom. But in high romantic style, it turns out that the one who loves us is the one who will take us despite our impure ways. Think Mary Magdelen, Eliza Doolittle, Hester Prynne, and all the strumpets of old. Now all we can do is sit back and wait for Drew Barrymore and Colin Farrell to play them in the movie.

By Todd Dills
[Featherproof, 2006. 183 pages, $12.95 paperback]
Reviewed by Kristin Scott

Todd Dills’s first novel, Sons of the Rapture, defies any attempt at concrete categorization or plot summary, which is refreshing. Successfully straddling the line (or bridging the gap) between traditional and experimental fiction, the novel is ripe with subversive political pundits in the guise of apathetic drunkards who are on a sort of Dionysian adventure.

Upholding all the Southern stereotypes and clichés and invoking anecdotes of religious revelations, the novel is an allegory for living life with great élan, without remorse or nostalgia. Center stage is Billy Jones, a roaming Southern vagabond-like character who drifts about the streets of Chicago in his ripped, stitched, and stained gray confederate topcoat, damning the world, swimming in shots of whiskey, and telling stories with dramatic flair.

The remaining cast of feral characters includes Billy’s father, Johnny Jones, a wealthy Marlboro-man-meets-Jack Nicholson type who comes barreling into Chicago with a herd of cattle, a flask of whiskey, and the news of an old enemy’s death. There’s also brother Bobby, who, shortly after being released from prison for murdering his mother, ends up dying of pneumonia; U.S. Senator Thorpe Storm, the kind of racist son of a bitch who conjures up the likes of Strom Thurmond; and Artichoke Heart, a tiara-wearing hit man/bartender/performer and pseudo-prophesier.

While none of the characters are entirely believable, they are all authentically real. And though some have compared Dills’s prose to that of William Faulkner, Sons of the Rapture is also reminiscent of Dorothy Allison, who often inscribes her fiction with an abrasive yet unabashed deliverance of gut-wrenching truisms.

By Jean Iversen
[BYOB Chicago, Inc., 2006. 176 pages, $9.95 paperback]
Reviewed by Ann Wiens

American liquor laws are intricate, confounding, and disparate, varying widely from state to state, county to county and even block to block. As Jean Iverson notes in this update to her 2005 guide to bring-your-own-bottle restaurants, the southeast corner of State and Division was voted dry in the 1980s, and no new restaurant within 100 feet of a school, church, or library stands a chance of snagging a liquor license. Chicago’s own colorful history regarding the sale and consumption of alcohol continues on, with the granting of liquor licenses inextricably intertwined with ward politics, zoning, and other delights of life in the Windy City.

Chicago is also a city of world-class restaurants, of course, and many of them are surprisingly affordable—all the more so if you can buy your booze at the neighborhood liquor store. Iverson’s book—slim enough to slip in a purse or a jacket pocket—is an indispensable resource for budget-conscious diners, as well as for those who want, say, a J & G Baumann vin de pays des Côtes de Gascogne 2006 as they peruse the menu, and nothing else will do.

Iverson has researched scores of restaurants, from family-run storefront cafes to upscale hot spots, and compiled her findings in this easy-to-use guide. A comprehensive list of BYOB restaurants from A to Z is complemented by tidbits of history, etiquette tips, help with choosing the right wine for the evening’s cuisine, a guide to wine shops and liquor stores, and listings organized by type of fare and neighborhood. Found yourself in Albany Park with a taste for Scandinavian food and a bottle of Grenache in your bag? Iversen has the dining destination for you!

This second edition updates information from the original, and has been expanded to include BYOBs in the ’burbs, nontraditional BYOB dining spots such as local theaters, and restaurants with liquor licenses that still allow you to bring your own.

By Marcus Sakey (’06)
[St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2007. 320 pages, $22.95 hardcover]
Reviewed by Rebecca Mielcarski (B.A. ’05)

Any story can be set in Chicago, but Marcus Sakey’s nail-biter novel really puts us there. He doesn’t waste time describing every city-centric detail (i.e. “El train” is not used; instead, he references the Orange Line, or simply the El). It’s refreshing to read a Chicago-based story that doesn’t feel the need to define all the details for out-of-towners.

The Blade Itself is set in the South Side, Irish-Catholic heart of the Bridgeport neighborhood. The unassuming hero, Danny Carter, and his childhood pal, Evan McGann, get busted during an attempted robbery—the first heist in their lifelong career to ever go wrong. Evan is caught and does seven years, while Danny goes free and makes a new, blue-collar life for himself—he moves to Lincoln Park, holds a legitimate job, and pairs up with a long-term, live-in girlfriend. When Evan is released, there’s hell to pay. Justice was not served, as far as Evan’s concerned, and he’s bound to tie the loose ends and make it count by dragging Danny back into “the life” to settle the score.

With the page count past 300, it’s a surprisingly fast read—chapters are small and include witty headings that tie in or are referenced later in the story. The realistic, three-dimensional characters are enhanced with very visual descriptions that make them all feel very familiar. It’s hard not to get invested in this suspenseful page-turner.

By Douglas Reichert Powell
[The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 280 pages, $59.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback]
Reviewed by Con Buckley

“Critical regionalism requires thinking about texts geographically, discerning the connections they draw among often disparate and far-flung places.”

Douglas Reichert Powell analyzes film, literature, academia, and even real life to encourage (well, demand) the implementation of “critical regionalism” as the lens through which people are taught “how to reconceive their own local spaces in terms that comprehend their social construction, understand the rhetorical force of social inventions of place, and recognize the possibilities for social action to change them.”

Powell contends that “articulating our ‘sense’ of what is unique about a particular spot on the landscape” must be done within the context of a “critical awareness of how that spot is part of broader configurations of history, politics, and culture.” His work is most useful in the discussion of real-life situations that show the debilitating effects of not making those connections between physical place and social constructs. In nonfiction venues, the possibility of confronting and rejecting stereotypes, recognizing the viewpoint of the locals, acknowledging agency, and admitting connections between region and the broader, global community is real.

Powell has particular qualms with the treatment of “ex-urban” spaces, particularly the treatment of his own Appalachian region. He criticizes the films Deliverance, Cape Fear, and Apocalypse Now within the framework of illiteracy, which he describes as “one particular synecdoche of American popular film’s ‘landscape narrative’ of regional life.” He concludes that these films “are not really concerned with the problems of Appalachian people, of women, blacks, Latinos, queers, or working people at all. Instead they are addressed almost entirely to the anxieties, neuroses, and hysteria of a relatively small section of their audience: prosperous, straight, cosmopolitan white men.”

In the chapter “Toward a Critical Regionalist Literature,” both John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. fail to meet the standards of critical regionalism because, although they “sought to develop new representational tactics that challenged readers’ perceptions of the spatial, political, historical, and cultural relationships among local sites on broader landscapes,” as Powell explains, “they seemed unable to conceive of local spaces as valid or useful sites of cultural politics and production and, instead, created ‘landscape narratives’ on a national scale, in which local cultures function as obstacles to change.”

It is unrealistic to expect existing fiction—particularly works created when the national landscape narrative mentioned was a new and exciting method of strategizing and presentation—to conform to current academic sensibilities. And, in the case of popular movies, the profit potential of targeting “the anxieties, neuroses, and hysteria of . . . cosmopolitan white men” is particularly obvious compared to the thoughtful creation of “local spaces as valid or useful sites of cultural politics.” Current and future writers of fictional text and movies will have the tools of critical regionalism available and could implement those strategies in their work.

Non-fiction—both writing and real-life experiences—lends itself much more successfully to the notion of critical regionalism, which “must search for the kinds of texts that can facilitate the most expansive possible thinking … in which circumstances challenge people’s ability to make sense of the places’ interconnections, even (especially) when those connection run counter to the assumptions underlying ‘commonsense’ versions of local and regional landscapes.”