Illinois Books

My name is Ray McCormack, and I am a boxing historian. I have been following boxing for almost 50 years. This book is one of the most informative and objective books I have ever read about a boxer.

The book gives you a very accurate and exciting glimpse of the life of Billy Conn, and of the 1930's and 1940's in boxing and the USA.

I rarely recommend books about boxing. The reason being the books are usually full of mistakes and unsubstantiated rumors which soemhow become accepted as facts as the years go on. This book is 100% legitmate. I strongly recommend giving it a read

Well written and easy reading...enjoying the local references...brings the fight scene during the 30's and 40's alive and vivid...lots of facts..anyone living in the Western PA area will appreciate the narrative

This is a wonderful reference. It is quite readable and presents good useful material in succint fashion. A great graduate-level textbook.

This is a book that does exactly what it sets out to do: it is a comprehensive look at how to teach the knotty subject of music theory, particularly the beginning stages, which the author rightly regards as most crucial. Rogers, who obviously brings a great deal of experience to bear on his topic, is not shy about expressing his opinions; though he does allow for different paths to reach the same goal, he is uncompromising about what he thinks must happen in the mind of a music theory student. Beginning with an overview of different philosophical and pedagogical approaches to the subject, Rogers then addresses teaching in more specific areas, fundamentals, counterpoint, analysis and ear training, concluding by returning to more general advice on teaching strategies and curriculum construction. The book is at times dry and, rather like in an actual music theory class, one may bridle at times at being crammed with so much information in so little space. But there is certainly a wealth of useful and thought-provoking information to be gleaned here.

I had Dr. Kroll for this class at IU, and some of my journal entries are used in his book. This class had a tremendous effect on me, having grown up without any understanding of the Vietnam War. It was one of those classes that has had a lifetime effect on its students. For anyone interested in teaching about Vietnam, Dr. Kroll's approach is a great model

In this book, Dr. Kroll takes us inside his class on Vietnam War literature in order to show how a teacher can use the richness of the material to engage students and to help them develop crucial critical thinking skills. Dr. Kroll gives a useful overview to the structure of his class, whereby the literature and assignments form a meaningful progression that continually challenges students to respond, analyze, rethink, and write. The book includes a detailed list of readings and, most helpfully, models for assignments. What comes through most in this book, however, is Dr. Kroll's commitment to both the material and his students. He pays careful attention to their writing and their responses to material that can be very disturbing on a number of levels. When I was a graduate student at Indiana University, I was fortunate enough to work with Dr. Kroll when he taught this course there. This experience was easily the most significant one I have had in my teaching career; I have never witnessed a higher level of commitment on the part of a teacher nor a more favorable and affectionate response to a teacher from his students. If you are at all interested in using Vietnam War writing in your classroom, you must read this book.

Most readers would find it incomprehensible that this literary masterpiece is only ranked #4,137,804 on the Amazon sales rating. Once the movie hits the silver screen (see previous review), this book will definitely rest among the top four million bestsellers. It deserves to be in the midst of the greatest-To Kill a Mockingbird, In Cold Blood, Helter Skelter, Murder on the Orient Express. Miller weaves a tome that is captivating, heartwarming, spellbinding and outrageously funny, as he tries to continually overcome the fate bestowed on him by "The Man " of Fulton County, Illinois. The description of each time he manages to escape yet another date with the executioner is wackier and funnier than the last! This is a must read for anyone compelled to commit a heinous crime in small town Illinois-and aspires to get away with it. His hand drawn illustrations are breathtaking. This five star masterpiece cries for a staring movie role for Tom Cruise as Lloyd in the 1950's, repeatedly eating last suppers, and trying to escape a final sit-down in Stateville's "Old Sparky".

a shocking true story of a innocent man fight against corruption in illinois..a coming movie

a true shocking story by a innocent man fight against corruption in illinois..a coming movie ... a MUST to read and see the coming movie...

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This is a very readable book. With Irons's use of primary sources, Southern workers come to life at a time when they were at their most heroic. It describes the strike of cotton textile workers in four southern states in September 1934, which was part of a general strike of textile workers stretching from New England to Georgia. I've heard this strike called the largest in American history. It describes how hundreds of thousands of poor whites across the south launched a mass movement for economic justice. The author states that this strike has been a very painful episode over the years in the communities in which it affected. The workers were intimidated into submission in the years after the strike. The Wagner Act, according to Irons, did not help them much. Their story seems all too typically American.

Throughout the 1920's, what we today call "downsizing" hit the textile industry full force. The decade saw the emergence of theories on efficiency and "scientific management." Mill owners began pushing aside their pre-capitalist paternalism and started firing workers and increased the workloads of the remaining workers at levels extremely hazardous to physical and mental well-being. In textile mills, the increased workload was called the "stretch-out." These measures increased once the great depression hit and there were many strikes at individual plants which responded by firing strikers, evicting them from their homes in company towns, sending masked men to kidnap union organizers and drive them out of town, etc.etc. Now with Roosevelt in power, there was a major law passed in June 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act, (NIRA), section 7a of which stated that workers had the right to organize unions and not suffer employee intimidation for doing so. Southern workers were very optimistic, Irons shows quoting their letters to Roosevelt.

For two years, from June 1933 to May 1935 after the NIRA passed, an attempt was made to organize the country's economy through a bureaucracy called the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The NRA was supposed to work with businesses in each industry and draw up a code for each regulating prices, wages, output levels and so on. The aim was to stabilize these industries and eliminate the cutthroat competition which had contributed to causing the Great Depression. Implementation of the textile code was handed over to a committee dominated by textile mill owners. A special NRA committee to analyze the feasibility of reducing or expanding the stretch-out was formed but it was chaired by an industry-friendly industrial engineer. The other members of this committee were an anti-union mill owner and the leader of the printing-pressman's union, George L. Berry. Irons describes how Berry left the running of the board to the other two though occasionally he wrote letters to the leaders of the United Textile Workers (UTW) demanding they do more to reign in the militancy of southern textile mill workers. When the NRA textile mill code went into effect in the summer of 1933 it called for reduced production which gave many mills the impetus to lay off workers and intensify the workload on the remaining members. Minimum wages set by the code were often the maximum wages paid. Firings of union members increased, as did evictions from company housing and physical and sexual abuse by overseers. Many workers started joining locals of the UTW. Complaints were sent to Washington by workers such as relating to the refusal of overseers to open windows in horrendously humid mill work rooms and sexual abuse of female employees. These complaints were almost always rerouted to the special NRA subcommittee on the stretch-out which rarely did anything more than send an investigator who would listen to employer denials and then leave.
The way Irons describes it, the UTW was a big problem for southern textile mill workers. The UTW leadership, as was the leadership of most unions, was anxious to increase its own power by gaining places of influence in the NRA bureaucracy. They wanted to prove their lack of militancy and their devotion to efficiency in business...They were dragged reluctantly into the strike.

Irons shows how southern workers managed to spread the strike wave dramatically with little help from the cash strapped UTW. The strike saw terrible violence. 15 strikers were killed, including the seven by gunfire at Honea Path South Carolina. Irons reconstruct the Honea Path massacre in a way that shows its barbarity, in contrast to previous efforts to minimize it.

The strike ended after a few weeks in September 1934. Mill owners were able to create a climate of fear and insecurity amongst workers. In Georgia, Irons notes, the Democratic governor Eugene Talmadge did not send out the national guard for a while. But after he won the Democratic primary that mid-September and he was thus electorally safe, he declared martial law and imprisoned many striking workers. Some mill owners apparently met with him and gave him a generous campaign contribution just before the election. However the biggest factor ending the strike was FDR using his prestige amongst the poor workers to get them to go back to work. In return for calling off the strike, workers were promised they would not be fired once they returned and a new NRA board was created to hear complaints from textile workers about employer treatment.

Despite Roosevelt's assurances, union members were fired en masse once they returned to work and the climate of fear was maintained in southern textiles. This new NRA textile labor board, Irons shows, made its pro-industry bias clear by its method in conducting its own investigation of the stretch-out. It had received complaints about the use of the stretch-out from 249 of 1200 mills in the south. It decided to investigate 36 of those mills and found 11 of them to have valid worker complaints about the stretch out. Thus with this method it decided that only 6.5 percent of the mills were engaged in excessive workloads.

Janet Irons provides a comprehensive look at a shockingly neglected piece of US labor history: the 1934 general strike of southern textile workers. Irons convincingly shows that the impetus for the strike came from the workers, and that the leadership of the United Textile Workers of America was out of touch and committed to an outdated style of leadership from the top. One of the most fascinating areas Irons explores is the effects of mass communication, new hard-surfaced roads, and inexpensive autos in enabling Southern workers to innovate a new organizing technique: the flying squadron. Teams of strikers in cars and trucks went from mill to mill throughout the Piedmont to spread the walk-out. A minor drawback to the book is its failure to put the textile strike in a broader context. The fall of 1934 saw a general strike in San Francisco and labor unrest in Seattle, Minneapolis and other cities. Arguably, FDR's New Dealers had a lot more than the textile situation on their minds in this period. There is not doubt that Irons's book is an important contribution to an emerging, more nuanced view of southern workers and their alleged passivity.

Hutcheon's definition of parody is much broader than most, and I believe it is both fitting and useful. Parodic works, to Hutcheon, are not those which imitate at the expense of the parodied text (that's satire). Rather, they confront the past, and explore the difference between the parodied text and the present. As she writes, the pleasure comes from the degree of engagement of the viewer/listener in "intertextual bouncing" between the familiar and the new.

The book's premise is that parody is a genre fundamental to 20th century art forms. The works cited come from a wide range of disciplines, and are both modern and postmodern. The language is rather straight-forward and clear, a welcome diverson from many contemporary theorists. In fact, I found the book perhaps too repetitive, too focused on making a single point. Still, Hutcheon provides a thoughtful viewpoint from which to enjoy - and to make - art.

kalinin@terra.com.br
Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Parody is one of the most important theoretical books of the decade not only on parody but also on postmodernism. The dispute over the worth of postmodern art revolves around one of its most striking features, i.e. the outburst of intertextuality in the form of parody and pastiche. This proliferation of parody has been described as an exhaustion of creativity, appropriation of the property of others, borrowing, pirating, and cannibalisation; all of which descriptions are quite derogative. Parodists have, therefore, been considered minor artists, who take out their spite on acclaimed authors by ridiculing them. Linda Hutcheon's views on parody are far more positive and allows us to analyse contemporary writers and give them their due worth. She claims that postmodern parody has changed in its essentials when it became an imitation with critical distance. It is a highly sophisticated genre and has come to be almost an autonomous literary form. It is, in fact, a form of literary criticism. According to her, parody is "repetition with critical distance;" it is "stylistic confrontation," a modern re-coding which establishes "difference at the heart of similarity." In short, in order for one to criticise any modern work of art, I believe that her theory becomes an essential tool, since it enables us to establish the relations between the work of art and all the included references, allusions and quotations, and moreover, to discover the evaluative judgement the author expresses on both the parodied texts and on his/her own text. Hutcheon's theory on parody helps us understand better what happens to the quotation from a canonical text when it is transported into a postmodern text which uses fragmentation and irony to subvert the original meaning. Conversely, Parodies offer a dialogue and a re-evaluation of the past in the light of the present, and a critical view of present from the perspective of the past.

This is the first of the series I've read, and I'm rather pleased. There's wit and priestly advice and murder too. The collection of characters is the kind you'd expect in a story about a small parish priest, and there is a character you won't expect like Marcus the pamphleteer. I don't deal in spoilers, but Marcus is a one of the more interesting characters in the story, a story which begins with a series of odd thefts, missing pork chops and homemade jam, that lead to serious crime. The information about the people and the crime are divvied out at a comfortable pace, allowing time for Dowling and the cohort to reveal their thoughts about the crime and the world around them.

in the dreary, cold pre-Easter lull, Murkin develops a case of persnicketiness. Someone has stolen from the church's offering box. great story! of mysterious disappearances.

This book is a story which could be true for thousands of Germans expelled from their homeland, Silesia. The account of the Russian invasion and Polish take-over moved me very much and gave me a more clear picture of what my parents went through. As the author goes back to her homeland to visit I felt a new compassion for the Polish population, who inherited this land, due to the author's insight and integrity. This both is well worth reading even if your personal history is not intertwined with Silesia.

"To Lose A War" by Regina Maria Shelton. Subtitled: "Memories Of a German Girl". Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.

This is a very personal memoir of a young German girl, growing up during the Second World War. Born in 1927, Regina Maria was just reaching womanhood when the Soviet tanks were entering eastern Germany: Silesia, Pomerania, Prussia, etc. She begins the book with a brief story concerning visiting modern Communistic German in the 1980s, and, with one anecdote, she makes the point that the Communistic German border guards were as repressive, if not more so, than the old Nazi party members. Then, in the next chapter, she jumps to a nostalgic but wonderfully vivid description of Christmas Past, before the War: "Christmas began on the day that Mama melted the butter and honey in an enormous tin pan..." (p. 19). I have to tell my own children that Christmas Eve was once a fast day, with no eating until Midnight Mass, and I sense a kinship of the Past gone by with this writer, even though my Christmases were in NYC and hers in Germany.

Her last chapter deals with what the Poles have done to her hometown, her childhood town.
"My sentimental quest for my hometown is over. I have been walking in the streets of Klodzko, Poland. Glatz has ceased to exist save in my memories." (P. 218). She has written an interesting and complete personal history of living in a few decades in a town in Silesia, decades which saw the rise and fall of many.

I know about the singing and praying band and it really makes my heart glad to see that someone took time to record it's history.

Through first person interviews, Jon David provides a ground-level view of an amazing slice of American life: the music of the Singing and Praying Bands of the Chesapeak Bay area. The included CD is only five songs, but it alone is worth the price of admission. Commentary by the author adds greatly to the value of the project.

What a moving and inspiring poet! Ms. Khanna's literary power is her ability to majestically carry you right with her on her literal and revelatory journey. She successfully captures the reader in her struggle for understanding of her Indian and American backgrounds. I felt priveleged to have privy to her thoughts, and hope for a time again to enjoy her savory prose.
What do we have to look forward to, Van?!
Thanks.
Barbara R. Akin
Falls Church, VA.

What a incredible poet! You could feel the heat, smell the street and see the sights of India through Ms. Khanna's potent descriptions.