CCLaP Fridays: The Blue Kind, by Kathryn Born

Today’s book review: “The Blue Kind,” a dystopian drug novel by Chicago-area author Kathryn Born, and put out by academic imprint Switchgrass. Says reviewer Karl Wolff, “More novelists writing in science fiction should take these kinds of chances.” Continue reading CCLaP Fridays: The Blue Kind, by Kathryn Born

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Mondays with the Supremes: Part VIII: Longrunners: Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and William Rehnquist

In this penultimate installment of Mondays with the Supremes, I cover the tenures of three Supreme Court justices who were on the Court for decades. Continue reading Mondays with the Supremes: Part VIII: Longrunners: Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and William Rehnquist

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CCLaP Fridays: On Being Human: the Culture

Today in Karl Wolff’s CCLaP essay series “On Being Human,” it’s ‘The Culture’ novels by Iain Banks, in which humans, aliens, and machines all live in a post-scarcity utopia. Banks’s novels follow eccentrics and troublemakers in a society where humans can switch gender, become aliens, and even become machines. Continue reading CCLaP Fridays: On Being Human: the Culture

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Mondays with the Supremes: Part I: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

I begin a limited-run series where I review three books about the Supreme Court of the United States, exploring its historical and ideological conflicts, and the transformations it wrought upon law and society. Continue reading Mondays with the Supremes: Part I: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

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Drive Me Out of My Mind, by Chad Faries

These days memoirs are a dime a dozen, glutting the market with tales of the self-absorbed.  Fortunately, Chad Faries stands out in this crowded field with his unique tale of childhood in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  Drive Me Out of My Mind: 24 Houses in 10 Years, a Memoir, follows Chad’s childhood from roughly 1971 to 1980.  Chad’s singularly strange upbringing and poetic sensibility create a memoir unlike any other.  Most memoirs focus on bourgeois nuclear families and the travails of growing up middle-class in the suburbs.  In childhood, Chad discerned the differences of his family and “families on TV.” Chad’s … Continue reading Drive Me Out of My Mind, by Chad Faries

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