It’s getting to be that time of year where staying home and curling up in front of the fireplace with a good book is far preferable to doing anything outside. This week, the much-awaited Fall Books Special edition of the Chicago Reader came out. The theme this year is
“The Gritty City;” the stories about the rough and seamy side of Chicago that you would have seen in an old Mike Royko column, or an old edition of John Drummond’s “Chicago Chronicles” on the CBS 2 News of yore.
Here are some highlights (click the links for the reviews):
But now, retired Los Angeles police detective Steve Hodel writes in his new book that he thinks the “Lipstick Killer” wasn’t long-serving prisoner William Heirens, but his own father.
Columbia College history professor Dominic Pacyga has taken his expertise in the city’s history, both its glory and its past racial, ethnic and political strife, to write Chicago’s first biography. Jon-Henri Damski wrote vividly about both the dazzling and the seedy side of life in Chicago’s gay community in the 1970s through the 1990s, and his stories are being brought together 12 years after his death. Attorney Jeffrey Haas is revisiting the deadly shooting of Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton by police officers commissioned by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, and he’s calling Hampton’s death a murder.So put on your long underwear, have a beer and a shot and a bowl of czerina (look it up), and bury your nose in a fine book.
