Illinois Press Book Blog

Jessa Crispin, editor of Bookslut.com, includes Susan K. Freeman’s Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education before the 1960s in her latest piece for The Smart Set.

“It’s hard to believe how far backward we have gone in terms of sex education. Not that there was ever a sepia-toned time where boys and girls were told it’s OK to be gay, that sex before marriage can be a good thing, that marriage and children might not be for everyone. But there was a time when sex education — and not just ‘Keep it in your pants, kids’ — was seen as an important part of raising moral, healthy citizens.”

Mike Chasar posted an interesting piece (originally published in the Iowa City Press-Citizen) on his Poetry and Popular Culture blog regarding Barack Obama’s relationship with poet Frank Marshall Davis.

“Of the potential father figures in Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father, one of the first—and most mysterious—is a poet whom we only ever know as ‘Frank.’ Dreams from My Father credits Frank with being the sole older black man in Hawaii to take seriously the teenage Obama’s search for identity, and the poet thus becomes a major touchstone in Obama’s life. Nearly every time Obama reflects on his role models, the memory of Frank comes up. . . . ‘Frank’ is Frank Marshall Davis, a poet, journalist, and activist.”

John Hallwas, author of the new book Dime Novel Desperadoes: The Notorious Maxwell Brothers, starts his book tour on August 2nd at New Copperfield’s Book Service in his hometown of Macomb, Illinois. Check out the list of other dates here. More confirmations are coming soon.

Oni Buchanan will be reading poetry from the rooftops in New York City on August 5th. We hear that The New York Times will include a preview of that event in an upcoming weekend edition.

Stephane Dunn has scheduled a bookstore appearance at Charis Books & More in Atlanta on September 12th. She will be discussing her new book “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films.

PW Daily’s Book Maven blog points the way to the recent essay in the New York Times Book Review on book tours and speakers bureaus.

“In recent years, a growing number of writers, from the best-selling to the less so, have hit the rubber-chicken circuit, speaking at colleges and businesses, chambers of commerce, trade fairs and medical conventions. . . . The novelist David Leavitt recounted an event at an arts festival last month in Milan where he and several other writers discovered they had been booked to appear along with Jethro Tull.”

Incoming sophomores at my oldest son’s high school are given Kite Runner as a summer reading assignment (he is currently reading There Are No Children Here for his freshman assignment). Word circulating on the PTA e-mail list suggests that the district has received a written challenge to its use of Kite Runner in the schools. A committee will be formed and members will read the book before convening in August to make a recommendation to the board of education. I think The Catcher in the Rye is still approved but I better check on it.

Updated August 4, 2008: Here’s a link to the News-Gazette story on the challenge.

A handful of new books landed on my desk in the past two weeks:
-China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema edited by Poshek Fu (August 11, 2008)
-“Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films by Stephane Dunn (August 18, 2008)
-Kosovo Liberation Army: The Inside Story of an Insurgency by Henry H. Perritt Jr. (August 18, 2008)
-Dime Novel Desperadoes: The Notorious Maxwell Brothers by John E. Hallwas (August 25, 2008)
-On Poetry and Politics by Jean Paulhan, translated and edited by Jennifer Bajorek, Charlotte Mandell, and Eric Trudel (August 25, 2008)
-Sports in Chicago edited by Elliott Gorn
(September 8, 2008)

The publication dates are noted above but all will be available to order within the next week.

Of course I want the Cubs to win the World Series.  This year, 2008, would be great—exactly one hundred years after their last World Championship.  But secretly, in my heart-of-hearts, I’m not so sure.  I mean, then we’d be just like every other team that mostly loses.  We’d be the Kansas City Royals. 

Look what winning did to Red Sox fans:  Made them even bigger whiners.  There was dignity in standing up to the Yankee juggernaut, knowing what the outcome would be, but still heading to Fenway, putting up the good fight, then going under, year after year in that broken down old ballpark.  Now what does “Red Sox Nation” have?  Since 1920, two championships to the Yankee’s twenty six, and a whole lot of bitterness, because finally, they’re not the Yankees and never will be. 

Cubs fans were always better than Red Sox Fans.  It drives me nuts when the Bostons patronize me:  “Oh, next year will be your turn.”  GFY, jerks.  We know how to lose and still enjoy ourselves, still enjoy the game, despite the pain.  Our motto:  “Have another Old Style.”  I worry what success might do to us.

***

Elliott Gorn’s new edited collection, Sports in Chicago, will be published on September 8, 2008, by the University of Illinois Press.

The July 24 Fairfax edition of the Washington Post features a preview of Roni Stoneman’s upcoming weekend concert, background on this legendary performer, and a nod to her recent University of Illinois Press memoir.

“Veronica Loretta ‘Roni’ Stoneman may have celebrated her 70th birthday this year, but the woman often referred to as the ‘First Lady of Banjo’ shows no signs of slowing with regard to her performing schedule or her lightning-fast three-finger picking. . . . Last year, the University of Illinois Press published Stoneman’s memoir, Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story. The story, told through a series of interviews with Northwestern University writing professor Ellen Wright, includes tales from a lifetime in country music, chronicles Stoneman’s problems with abusive husbands and examines her relationships with her children.

PW Daily reported this morning that the Los Angeles Times is losing its standalone book section.

“Nancy Sullivan, executive director of corporate communications at the paper, confirmed that the book review staff has been cut from five to three and that, moving forward, book review coverage will be placed in the Calendar section of the paper where it will share space with features.”

The summer issue of Ms., just hitting the newsstands, features a piece by Stephane Dunn, adapted from her new book “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films.

“While Cleopatra Jones, Coffy, and Foxy Brown played up the feminist-era persona of a bold modern woman who refused to stay in her place, the characters’ Afro hairdos and funky outfits also referenced the Afrocentrism of the concurrent Black Power movement. Indeed, the villains were often ego-tripping white women.”