Illinois Books

This book is full of extraordinary poems. I haven't put it down since I purchased it last week. Oliver De La Paz is destined to be one of the great poets of our time.

There's no author listed, since writing was paid for by the WPA Writers Project. As I read the book - less than 100 small-sized pages - I find myself surprised by how little I had known about Galena's history, and by how much I had missed.

I spent much of my childhood in Jo Daviess County (of which Galena is the seat) and had heard little snippets of history; I assumed every town had a similar past. Not so - Galena's lead deposits were first worked in 1721 - eighty years before Lewis and Clark. The town's boom ended before the Civil War, and it slid into genteel decay long before its rivals were even settled.

The book is a gem.

This study of gambling and everyday life in Chania, Crete, is an outstanding example of how anthropological ethnography can contribute to larger debates in the social sciences while remaining accessible and engaging to the casual reader. The author's intellectual objective is to shed light on reigning theories of risk and indeterminacy by exploring in finely grained detail how risk is operative and is experienced, interpreted and strategized against/upon by social actors in real life. The setting of the study is ideal for this purpose, as social life in this town is organized for many around the playing, practice and performance of gambling. A range of useful and non-jargony conceptual tools for capturing the experience of uncertainty are introduced (performative indeterminacy, instrumental nonchalance, e.g.), which heighten the feeling that true insight is occurring here. In fact, it is one of the impressive achievements of this book, that it manages to engage the serious scholar in ongoing disciplinary debates (about risk theory, social poetics, modernity and the state) while remaining a perfectly charming read for the nonspecialist.

I got this for my Dad on Christmas and all my brothers kept passing it around all day reading different entries. All the player's stories are only a few pages long so this makes for a great short story book that can be read for 10 or 15 minutes then put down, and revisited. All the Bears fans in my life loved it! I guess some of the people in it are pretty rare interviews and my Dad and brothers were so interested to see which games the different players would choose to discuss in this book. They all would guess which game they were going to talk about before they checked that section.

Felix Padilla's masterpiece of a Chicago Street gang who he refers to as the "Diamonds" is an interesting and educational read. What makes this book a cut above the average "gang information" book is the absence of preachy anti-gang material. Professor Padilla presents gang members as real people who are trying to obtain the "American Dream". His conclusion is that the gang oppresses the individual as much as conventional society does. Padilla's writing style is unpretentious, and enlightening.

What a wonderful "field guide" to the Illinois garden! This sturdy book has everything you need to know to make your gardening experience more enjoyable. Not only does this book offer hints and schedules for better gardening, it allows ample room for dated notes. Follow this book for one year, fill in the extra notes as directed, and you will have a workbook that you will never want to part with. Everyone in Illinois who enjoys gardening will enjoy this book.

If you like this book, and you will, you might want to look over other books in this series. They include helpful books on Ilinois perennials, annuals, trees & shrubs. The other books are not as inclusive as this volume, but they are equally well written and just as sturdy.

This book is a lovely review of formal gardens and restored prairies. All of the flowers are clearly identified so that you are not wondering what the plants are and they clearly show how flowers work together in the gardens.

More male writers could learn about courage from Jean Thompson. She should be read by every aspiring writer who's serious about being honest. We already know about the predictable thoughts and behaviors of humanity; what we need to see are the inconsistencies that make up the human experience. People of Color, like the other short stories in Gasoline Wars, places our feet at the edge of a cliff and lets our minds do the rest.

I think it's a great book, Both for old and young gays.

Laura Edwards adds another dimension to Reconstruction history with her community study of Granville County, North Carolina. Edwards uses gender and political analysis to show how reconstruction politics penetrated into private life. According to Edwards, elite white men viewed black men, and white and black women as dependents in the antebellum South. The Confederacy's defeat and the subsequent reconstruction of the former Confederate states endangered this existing system. Edwards uses post-war Granville County as a case study of white elite attempts at maintaining the antebellum political system. What sets Edwards' scholarship apart, however, is her examination of family and gender relations, as opposed to strictly political evidence. The accounts Edwards uses are both compelling and effective. This makes this book an important addition to reconstruction history, as well as an enjoyable and captivating read. The book is full of new evidence, as well as interesting revisions of previously used sources. Her deft analysis of post-war women's literature provides examples of prevalent gender roles. Moreover, Edwards argues that the Knights of Labor was created in order to reinforce these same roles. This books is intriguing, but one must resist the temptation to see Granville County as the entire South. Edwards provides an effective framework, but her study only speaks for one county in North Carolina. This does not, however, diminish the importance of this book, or the influence it will no doubt have on future scholarship. Although small in scope, Edward's monograph serves as a refreshing analysis of one section of the Reconstruction South. This book is a must read for students of Reconstruction history or women's history, or those interested in a refreshing new perspective on postbellum North Carolina.