Bruce Pollock has been around. He’s covered a lot of ground. Best known as a rock critic, he's the author of 17 books on popular music, the founding editor of Guitar (for the Practicing Musician), a former record producer, and he’s been published in Playboy, Saturday Review, TV Guide, New York Times, Crawdaddy, and many others. You can find him online at brucepollockthewriter.com. His latest book, They’re Playing My Song, is a collection of articles based on interviews he’s done over the year...
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Bruce Pollock has been around. He’s covered a lot of ground. Best known as a rock critic, he's the author of 17 books on popular music, the founding editor of Guitar (for the Practicing Musician), a former record producer, and he’s been published in Playboy, Saturday Review, TV Guide, New York Times, Crawdaddy, and many others. You can find him online at brucepollockthewriter.com. His latest book, They’re Playing My Song, is a collection of articles based on interviews he’s done over the year...
Bruce Pollock has been around. He’s covered a lot of ground. Best known as a rock critic, he's the author of 17 books on popular music, the founding editor of Guitar (for the Practicing Musician), a former record producer, and he’s been published in Playboy, Saturday Review, TV Guide, New York Times, Crawdaddy, and many others. You can find him online at brucepollockthewriter.com. His latest book, They’re Playing My Song, is a collection of articles based on interviews he’s done over the year...
The Kokoro Clinic for the Soul is back in business. That's the mental health clinic that appears for those who need it. We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat is a follow-up to We'll Prescribe You a Cat, a bestselling Japanese novel. Both books have been translated into English by E. Madison Shimoda. The clinic--with its unconventional doctor and forceful nurse--uses a prescribed cat to heal the emotional wounds of its patients. The sequel introduces a new cast of healing cats, from Kotetsu, a fou...
Mars is held in high esteem on Earth. It’s a neighboring planet but, unlike Venus, our neighbor closest to the Sun, the planet stands as the closest thing to Earth in our solar system. It’s not inhabited, but robots now roving the planet continue to search for evidence that there might have been life there once. But when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds in 1897, a tale about an attack from beyond, it came at a time when Mars had become a hot topic. You had songs, dances, and advertisements ...
Moses Jacob Ezekiel may be a 19th-century sculptor who’s been largely forgotten, but his work hasn’t been. A member of the Jewish faith who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, Ezekiel is described as a complex figure. Samantha Baskind, an art historian at Cleveland State University, examines some of that complexity in her book, Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor. As the first Jewish American artist to win international acclaim, Ezekiel (1844-1917) was a pro...
David Obst wants to end America’s love affair with the car. Saving Ourselves from Big Car defines “Big Car” as that complex of companies in the automobile, oil, insurance, media, and concrete industries that promote and entrench auto dependence. Author David Obst (pronounced “oops-t”), the former literary agent for Woodward and Bernstein, is still on the case. Instead of Watergate, he’s exposing how these companies have pursued profit at the expense of the common good. He details how the indu...
When it comes to World War II, you often hear about "the arsenal of democracy," a characterization of U.S. factories that produced all the food, medical supplies, tanks, planes, and tractors that helped win the war. In Launching Liberty, Doug Most writes about the U.S. effort required to build the ships needed to transport those goods overseas. The Liberty Ships were 440-foot cargo ships built to the same exact specifications. Over 2,700 were built between 1941 and 1945. When packed full of c...
If draining the swamp strikes you as a good idea, you're not listening to Clare Howard and David Zalaznik. The pair, former journalists with the Peoria Journal Star, have just written their second book extolling the benefits of wetlands. Their first, In the Spirit of Wetlands (2022), captured the beauty and importance of wetlands in Illinois. This time, Wisdom of the Marsh (Syracuse University Press) focuses on the Montezuma Wetlands Complex in central New York. "Wetlands are much more than s...
Hollywood came under scrutiny after World War II as the fear of Communism gripped the country. The Cold War came to Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings over possible Communist infiltration in the movie industry. Films were analyzed for messages that might be interpreted as promoting Communist views, such as Song of Russia, a wartime musical released when the Soviet Union was a U.S. ally. No pre-war congressional investigation ev...
Tiffany Jenkins takes a look at privacy in her new book, Strangers and Intimates. As Jenkins points out, the whole concept of privacy is a relatively recent development. She points to an article published in 1890 by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, who finished one-two in their graduating class from Harvard Law School in 1875. Brandeis went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. The two legal scholars asserted that people without a public role had “a right to be left alone,” embracing the pu...
T. Lindsay Baker’s Eating Up Route 66 is not your typical Mother Road guidebook. It’s a history—with business notes, photographs, and recipes. Baker, a retired history professor from Texas has written plenty about the American West. Twelve years of research went into his latest effort, and not just in libraries and museums. An antique-car enthusiast, Baker traveled the road in a 1930 Ford station wagon in 2017. Not just a day trip, mind you, but the length of the route--and back. In a f...
If you haven’t read an oral history before, it’s like flashing through comments that sometimes follow an online article. Only with a difference: you don’t see those back-and-forth arguments that always seem to break out among those commenting. For Garrett Graff, it’s his third oral history effort. After 9-11 (The Only Plane in the Sky) and D-Day (When the Sea Came Alive), this time it’s the creation and delivery of the atomic bomb during World War II. The Devil Reached Toward the Sky follows ...
When you get through reading America America by Greg Grandin, a Yale University history professor, you have to wonder what might have been when it comes to U.S. policies regarding Latin America over the years. Grandin figures that Washington had a hand in 16 regime changes in Latin American countries between 1961 and 1969. He goes into great detail outlining U.S. involvement in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Brazil. While U.S. officials are interfering with Latin American governments, ma...
Liza Tully’s previous literary effort was a grim thriller set in Siberia. “It was a suspense novel, but I realized it was very dark,” she said. The author, who wrote Finding Katarina M under the pseudonym Elisabeth Elo, decided to follow that with something a little lighter. The result? The feel-good mystery, The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant. Her latest effort teams Aubrey Merritt, “a brilliant Boomer detective," with Olivia Blount, “an ambitious Gen Z assistant.” To...
Michael Doyle's Nightmare in the Pacific is a book about an aspect of World War II you probably haven’t heard before: the saga of Artie Shaw, the big-band leader who took his group on a whirlwind tour of the Pacific in 1942-1943. What makes this story so interesting are the characters involved: Artie Shaw, himself, the motley group of band members that Shaw recruited himself, as well as figures from the worlds of the military and show business. Even before the United States joined the w...
A new book looks at the short history of the freedom of choice. Some of us have more choices than we’ve ever had—from what to buy and where to live and whom to love, even what to believe--but how did that come about? That’s the basis of the book Sophia Rosenfeld has written, called The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. Rosenfeld said she wanted to find those times when the early forms of choice were taking shape—when you could marry whomever you wanted, shop for what you mig...
China is sometimes described as the forgotten theater of war during World War II. But it’s unlikely that the Chinese people have forgotten their eight-year war with Japan, a ferocious engagement that began four years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's estimated that as many as 20 million Chinese died in the war. In Fallen Tigers, Daniel Jackson recounts U.S. involvement in China, where the country provided supplies and air support to a nation that desperately needed it. U.S. airmen who ...
Play This Book Loud is the literary equivalent of a trip to the record store, that enchanting experience of searching for something new from something old. Joe Bonomo (pronounced Bo-know-mo, not the Turkish Taffy), an English professor at Northern Illinois University, starts his book that way, recalling the days of the coronavirus when he was offered hand sanitizer and plastic gloves at Green Tangerine, his local record shop. From there, we depart on essays on Van Halen’s “Panama,...
McKeesport, Pa. has been through a lot in recent decades. Andrew Conte tells the story in his book, Death of the Daily News. The town, located 20 miles from Pittsburgh, once manufactured about 70 percent of all steel tubing used in the United States, earning the moniker of “Tube City.” Like other towns in southwestern Pennsylvania, McKeesport fell on hard times in the 1970s and 1980s as foreign steel imports undercut American manufacturers. The city’s population, that once topped 50,000 in th...
Robert Ingersoll lived in Peoria from 1857 to 1877. He was hailed as the greatest orator of his time, the latter half of the 19th century. While Ingersoll attracted huge crowds, he had plenty of critics who called him “the Great Infidel” because of his criticism of organized religion. “Religion can make a good man somewhat better,” Ingersoll mused, “but usually it only makes bad men worse.” While decrying the Bible and organized religion, Ingersoll supported women’s rights while opposin...
Anti-Communist feelings reached a fever pitch in the United States following World War II. The big war was won, but the Cold War was on. Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter, addresses this point in his fourth book, Red Scare, where he takes you back to that postwar period, where, as author Stacy Schiff put it in one of the blurbs on the book’s back cover, “a group of hardened conservatives lost their heads and a country lost its way.” “Everywhere it seemed the Communists were on the offensi...
Bruce Pollock has been around. He’s covered a lot of ground. Best known as a rock critic, he's the author of 17 books on popular music, the founding editor of Guitar (for the Practicing Musician), a former record producer, and he’s been published in Playboy, Saturday Review, TV Guide, New York Times, Crawdaddy, and many others. You can find him online at brucepollockthewriter.com. His latest book, They’re Playing My Song, is a collection of articles based on interviews he’s done over the year...
