Larry W Green to be featured artist/author at National Kidney Foundation Gift of Life Gala

Larry W Green, author of Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy (2007, Wicker Park Press -- www.wickerparkpress.com) will be a featured artist at the 24th Annual Gift of Life Gala. They will feature Larry's colorful paintings and his book

Gift of Life Gala Saturday, November 14, 2009
Navy Pier Grand Ballroom | Chicago, Illinois
For more information go to: http://www.nkfi.org/ and scroll down to Upcoming Events and Programs

Images from forthcoming book, THE UNCANNY VALLEY: WAXWORKS PHOTOGRAPHS by ELEFTHERIA LIALIOS

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Happy Halloween from Wicker Park Press Ltd: -- proudly announcing the 2010 publication of THE UNCANNY VALLEY: WAXWORKS PHOTOGRAPHS OF ELEFTHERIA LIALIOS
By Eleftheria Lialios
Introduction by Dan Georgakas
Text and Captions by Hatto Fischer
Bibliographic information to come ...


Biography of the author/artist can be found here: http://fnewsmagazine.com/2005-dec/faculty.html

Revisiting WATER TANKS OF CHICAGO by Larry W Green

This book continues to sell and generate wide interest. People get really emotional about this book. Here is an online review I uncovered from the online version of FOREWORD MAGAZINE in November 2007:

Photography. WATER TANKS OF CHICAGO: A VANISHING URBAN LEGACY by Larry W. Green (Wicker Park Press, 37 b/w photographs, 50 pages, softcover, $19.95, 978-0-9789676-0-4): digital photographs and paintings depicting the art of historic tanks, iconic symbols of the city; preservationists and architectural enthusiasts are concerned about saving their distinct grand beauty and stark expediency.

Key titles forthcoming in Fall 2009

Nibble & Kuhn: A Novel, David Schmahmann Academy Chicago, Nov 09
ISBN 978-0-89733-592-8, $24.95, Cloth, Fiction
A legal thriller set in Boston; Robert B Parker calls it a “great book!”

Never Trust a Thin Cook, Eric Dregni, Univ. of Minnesota, Sept 09
ISBN 978-0-8166-6745-1, $22.95, Cloth, Travel/Memoir/Cuisine
The author of In Cod We Trust goes to Italy & learns culinary lessons

Triple Time: Stories, Anne Sanow, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Aug 09
ISBN 978-08229-4380-8, $24.95, Cloth, Fiction/Short Stories
2009 Drue Heinz Award -- fascinating tales set in Saudi Arabia

The Last of His Mind, John Thorndike, Swallow Press, Dec 09
ISBN 978-08040-1122-8, $24.95, Cloth, Memoir/Health
Bittersweet account of a son’s final year with his father; a candid portrait
of Alzheimer’s Disease

Kevin Kling’s Holiday Inn, Kevin Kling, Borealis Books, Nov 09
ISBN 978-0-87351-766-9, $22.95, Cloth, Essays/Humor
A playful romp through a year of holidays from the bestselling author of
The Dog Says How

Deadly Voyage: The SS Daniel J Merell Tragedy, Andrew Kantar,
Michigan State Univ. Sept 09, ISBN 978-0-87013-863-8, $16.95, Paper, History
The harrowing story of one of the worst shipwrecks in Great Lakes history

What Comes Down to US: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets, Jeff Worley,
Univ. Press of KY, Nov 09, ISBN 978-0-8031-2557-2, Cloth, Poetry
An accomplished collection of KY poets including Wendell Berry, Nikki Finney & James Baker Hall

Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples, Karine Moe, Univ of Georgia, Oct
ISBN 978-0-8203-3404-2, $19.95, Paper, Women Studies/Current Events
A comprehensive and provocative account of the opt-out revolution

Inside Fallujah, Ahmed Mansour, Interlink, Sept 09
ISBN 978-1-56656-778-7, $20.00, Paper, Politics/Middle East/Current Events
A courageous work of journalism by one of the few reporters on the gorund during the US siege of Fallujah in 2004

Hold Onto Your Dreams: Arthur Russell Tim Lawrence, Duke Univ. Nov 09
ISBN 978-0-8223-4485-8, $23.95, Paper, Music/Biography
The first biography of musician and composer Russell, one of the most important but least-known contributors to the NY C downtown scene in the 1970s and 80s

Wrong Place, Wrong Time is a timely analysis of young Black men's lives

John A Rich is a medical doctor from Boston's inner city. He managed to escape bad odds and create an impressive life for himself. And he's also written a great book here - Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men (Johns Hopkins UP, Dec 09, 978-0-8018-9363-6). It's all in the first-person, which makes the writing style accessible, and you can see the author's point-of-view throughout the book. Rich relates the stories of Black men such as Roy, a sensitive young man from the streets of Jamaica Plain in Boston, who Rich met in what's called pre-release, a kind of halfway house between jail and freedom. Rich talks to Roy and engages him in a fundamental way so he can be inspired to turn his life around. The stories related here are fascinating, and they teach us compassion and the ability to look deeper to the real people who are struggling with trauma and perpetual violence in their communities. He lets them speak for themselves, and their voices are eloquent. This is a needed book and hopefully will reach a wide audience.

University of Texas Press issues English-language translation of a modern Mexican classic

And Let the Earth Tremble at Its Centers, by Gonzalo Celorio
Translated from Spanish by Dick Gerdes, Foreword by Rubén Gallo

The world comes crashing down at the very center of the Mexican universe as the hero of this contemporary novel by scholar Celorio feels his life ebb away from excessive drinking and an inexplicable gunshot wound. He lies naked and vulnerable at the base of the flagpole that supports the huge red, white and green ensign, in the very midst of Mexico City’s own version of Tiananmen Square called the Zocalo.

The hero and the reader can see the irony of his situation in the predawn hours in the abandoned main square: -- dying utterly alone in the most populous city in the world. Statues in the Main Cathedral start to come loose from their perches where they have stood since the Spanish tore down the immense Aztec Pyramid and used the stones to build the vast Zocalo. Our hero is getting swept away much like the native culture of Mexico was by the colonists. In many ways it’s his own damn fault, but you get the sense reading this incredibly urbane and profane novel that essential history is being forgotten with the passing of our hapless hero. And especially Mexico City itself, the downtown area (El Centro) of which is also a main character in the book; Mexico City is found to be hurling itself forward into an unknown oblivion, its past crushed and relegated to mere garbage.

And let the earth tremble at its centers is a line from the Mexican national anthem. You have the idea of rebirth and redemption when you walk along the dark and seedy confines of the Zona Historico in Mexico City with our well-read and knowledgeable hero. It’s all so uncertain, but Celorio is a master storyteller and the reader is riveted by our hero’s fateful walk through history, and then onto the next world.

Dick Gerdes and University of Texas Press have done English readers an immense favor by bringing this stark and original novel to print.

Northern Illinois University Press to debut new fiction series

NIU Press is taking a departure into fiction with the establishment of a new series called Switchgrass Books - http://www.switchgrass.niu.edu/switchgrass/ - and they are billing it as “authentic voices of the Midwest.” One of the first books in the intriguing new series is by Chicagoan Joseph G. Peterson, called Beautiful Piece. What follows is a brief review of this book:

Plinking at the dump

Joe Peterson hits a bull’s-eye with his new novel, Beautiful Piece. The narrator of this stark tale, set during a brutal heat wave in Chicago, acquires a Glock 10 mm automatic almost by accident and through sheer happenstance. “Odd, a gun,” he says. “I wouldn’t own a gun even if I could.” But that’s not all he comes to own, as he takes up a torrid affair with Lucy, a girl he meets at the gas station in the middle of a blistering hot day. Problem is that Lucy is engaged to another man, a certain Matthew Gliss, who the narrator, named Robert, knows and likes. This realization of love is new to Robert, who finds himself at thirty-five years old living alone in a one bedroom dump, as he calls his apartment, and desperately lonely.

The unrelenting heat of the Chicago summer goes a little bit to Robert’s head and he starts fantasizing about dying alone in his one bedroom dump. His upstairs neighbor, simply called the Vet, also lives alone. The Vet is severely damaged from his tours of Vietnam during that war. These two unlikely types form an alliance, and they agree to call each other every morning just to make sure each one is still alive. Robert has a rough time getting along with the Vet, who is so much older and worldly wise, but comes to respect and admire him with all his eccentricities. Robert has another friend named Epstein. Epstein is a mystic who can turn into a stone while they go fishing on the Des Plaines River. Epstein is well-adjusted and has a wife and kids, and lives in a different world from Robert. Robert has Epstein call him up every third morning just in case he was to expire from the heat and no one would know. This is his contingency plan to stay connected with the outside world.

Robert goes to the dump on the outskirts of town with the Vet to go plinking with the Glock. There is a certain poetic meaning to the way the gun goes off and rearranges everything. The Vet loves the mechanicals, and Robert starts to rethink his relationship with the world. His instincts tell him to try and be more like the mystical Epstein and try to be one with the natural world, but his love for Lucy upends everything for him.

There is a wry humor and interesting sentence construction that make up this raw tale of urban lost souls. There is a compulsive repeating of information and unorthodox narrative construction that reminded me of Joseph Heller’s Something Happened. It’s more than just a stylistic exercise in fiction writing; Peterson has something fundamental to say about human nature here, and the tale is funny and heartbreakingly wise.

Printed catalogs are vital to the publishing process

American Association of University Presses (AAUP) President Alex Holzman recently sent an email message to his colleagues concerning seasonal catalogs where he states he is “utterly befuddled” by why his fellow university presses bother to print them. The color ink used in the catalogs is pretty, Holzman says, but is a complete waste of money, and he castigates the university presses for being behind the times by still issuing catalogs on paper. “Do folks genuinely find that more beautiful catalogues lead to better sales? To better acquisitions? To better university relations? Can you quantify that somehow?” The economic rationale of Holzman’s argument seems to hinge on the fact that university administrations would applaud the cost savings of eliminating catalogs, therefore slashing marketing budgets, and there would be very little collateral damage because independent bookstores are going the way of the Dodo, and the reps who call on these bookstores are just as behind the times as the marketing departments at the university presses whom they represent for continuing the use of paper catalogs as essential sales tools.

I am one of the sales reps for Temple University Press where Holzman is currently the director. I have no recollection of howling in protest over his suggestion, as he stated was the case with his reps, but I have to say that with all due respect that paper catalogs reflect the essential character of a university press, and I have yet to see a better alternative for selling books than the use of a catalog, color or not. Furthermore, the catalog transcends the mundane process of selling books to retailers, librarians, wholesalers, and teachers: it serves multiple purposes such as list development, publicity, and public relations. A catalog enhances the personal expression of the authors whose books are listed there. A catalog expresses the worldview and outlook of the publisher, be it programmatic or a special series of books that the publisher is developing. It’s there for the world to see in a cohesive, integrated format that has stood the test of time.

A publisher can lose creative control over the development process when you take catalogs out of the mix. One could argue that the dissemination of information is now relegated to the Internet, ceded to Google, to Microsoft, to Intel, to Amazon.com, and to the electric utilities powering computers, polluting the air with coal-burning power plants. There is a political element to this that should not be ignored. How are various books represented in culture? Who controls the process of how books are distributed, digested, and reviewed in the greater quotidian? The cost to the publisher should not be measured here in money saved or set-aside, but in something greater, something more important, and something akin to saving their souls.

My guess is that the bound book itself will be next on the digital hit list, and university presses will be harshly criticized down the road for not saving money by going exclusively digital with their offerings. With Pandora’s box thrown open, ultimately we need to ask: what is the role of a university press in the world today?

Midwest Book Review cites Tom Palazolo's At Maxwell Street

The Photography Shelf
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/feb_09.htm#photography
At Maxwell Street
Tom Palazzolo
Wicker Park Press PO Box 5318, River Forest, IL 60305-5318
9780978967611, $45.00, http://www.wickerparkpress.com/

Chicago's Maxwell Street had its beginnings as an old-world style European market place in the 19th century and evolved into Chicago's official open-air market in the 20th century as a tri-part combination of sidewalk storefront shops, curbside vending sheds, and vending plywood table-tops on wooden horses lining each side of the street. A pedestrian only area because of the density of vendors, Maxwell Street was a true Chicago and enduring cultural landmark. Now in "At Maxwell Street: Chicago's Historic Marketplace Recalled In Words And Photographs" by Tom Palazzolo, we are provided with a wealth of black-and-white captioned images along with informative commentaries by Lori Grove, Jack Helbig, Lionel Bottari, Linda Platt, and others. Enhanced with an accompanying DVD, At Maxwell Street is an especially recommended addition to personal, community, and academic library Photogaphy and American History reference collections in general, and Chicago History supplemental reading lists in particular.

St Lawrence Seaway’s 50th Anniversary Inspires Two New Books

You can look at the St Lawrence Seaway from a number of perspectives. You can see it as a spectacular feat of engineering, a brash and bold opening of world trade routes across the North American continent, or as an unmitigated ecological disaster. Jeff Alexander takes the last view in his book, Pandora’s Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway ($29.95, 416 pages, ISBN 978-0-87013-857-7, Michigan State University Press). Alexander pulls no punches in his book, and shows how the opening of waterways reeked havoc on the Great Lakes as invasive foreign species moved in along with the trading vessels from the high seas. Eric Reeves, a former Coast Guard Staff Officer for the Great Lakes ballast-monitoring program, says Alexander’s book, “tells the twisted story of this exotic disaster – and the story of our abject failure to prevent it.”

In a 2004 article in the Star Tribune, Few ships checked for invasive species, writer Tom Meersman spells it out, “These untested ships -- nearly 3,500 since 1995 -- are loaded with cargo, rather than ballast water. In theory, their nearly empty ballast tanks shouldn't be teeming with foreign creatures. But they are, scientists have discovered. Even ships with nearly empty ballast tanks can carry millions of tiny invaders in residual water and mud that can end up dumped into Great Lakes ports. Once established in the world's largest freshwater lake chain, an invader like the European round goby can become a permanent resident, out-eating, out-reproducing and overpowering native species. Two-thirds of the 79 non-native species discovered in the lakes since the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959 almost certainly arrived in ballast tanks, according to recent U.S. and Canadian research analyzed by the Star Tribune.” http://www.greatlakesdirectory.org/ny/061604_great_lakes.htm

And so it seems that ocean freighters are laying waste to the Great Lakes ecosystems, and little was done has been done about it. Alexander is an award-winning writer, and author of a previous Michigan State book, The Muskegon: The Majesty and Tragedy of Michigan’s Rarest River. He blends science with first-hand accounts in a readable, journalistic style.

The St Lawrence Seaway may be bad news for the wondrous lakes on both sides of the United States-Canadian border, but the story of its construction is well-told by Calire Puccia Parham, a history instructor at Siena College in Loudonville, NY. The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project: An Oral History of the Greatest Construction Show on Earth ($34.95, 328 pages, 40 b/w illustrations, ISBN 978-0-8156-0913-1, Syracuse University Press) is a vivid tribute to the hard work and dedication of the project’s 22,000 workers. It was a phenomenal feat of engineering and manufacturing, and involved unprecedented cooperation between the governments of the United States and Canada.

The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project consisted of a series of locks, canals, and dams that tamed the ferocious St Lawrence River. Perham’s book draws on first-hand accounts of various engineers, laborers, and carpenters who built the Seaway in 1959. This book offers a human side to the massive international public works project. Perham is an expert on the history of the area, and she wrote a previous book on two towns that are separated by the St. Lawrence River: in Canada, Cornwall, Ontario, and in the United States, Massena, New York. The book is From Great Wilderness to Seaway Town (State University of New York Press) and offers various perspectives on the people inhabiting the area. Her new book is tells an important and almost forgotten story of how the St. Lawrence Seaway came to be built, and vividly recounts the experiences of the people who labored to make it a reality.

Tom Palazzolo captures Maxwell Street Market in his Unique Lens

Steve Balkin, professor of Economics at Roosevelt University in Chicago, had this to say to Tom Palazzolo, compiler and editor of At Maxwell Street: Chicago's Historic Marketplace Recalled in Words and Photographs:

" I was very impressed with your book. Of all the photographers that shot the Maxwell Street area, your photos best capture the soul and spirit of the place. They are works of art -- the subject matter and the photographs. It was the last place that connected the old world to the new, a remarkable place of authentic folk culture. I appreciate your sensitivity to Maxwell Street's gritty urban beauty. You are a hero for history. But for all the bastards that destroyed Maxwell Street, they should spend eternity in Schaumburg. "
-- http://faculty.roosevelt.edu/balkin/

And also, the following excerpted comments about this book:

"His book serves as a historic record about the phenomenon that was Maxwell Street … To see Maxwell Street through the eyes and lens of Tom Palazzolo with the help of photos and stories of his students, friends and wife, is to be transported back to a place that engages all the senses: images of the people, including merchants, shoppers and street performers, the products, and outsider art on a massive scale; the sounds of jazz and blues; the smells of street food, of Polish sausage sandwiches (of particular interest to Tom); and the feel of the market and the goods being sold by vendors, hawkers and pullers who drew people into the stores."
-- CHRISTINE VERNON Contributing Reporter -- Chicago Journal
see http://chicagojournal.com/main.asp?Search=1&ArticleID=6713&SectionID=5&SubSectionID=5&S=1

Bob Sirott, host of WGN AM 720 Radio, the Noon Show, calls this book, “quite a nice little keepsake.” http://wgnradio.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46757&Itemid=557

Book Information:
AT MAXWELL STREET: CHICAGO’S HISTORIC MARKETPLACE RECALLED IN WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
Compiled by Tom Palazzolo
With Introduction by Jack Helbig & Foreword by Lori Grove
$45, Hardcover with DVD, ISBN 978-0-9789676-1-1 Wicker Park Press -- http://www.wickerparkpress.com/

Author of Water Tanks of Chicago to be featured on WGN TV’s Midday News with Steve Sanders on Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Larry W. Green, a Chicago artist, will talk about his 2007 book Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy ($19.95, paperback, ISBN 978-0-9789676-0-4, Wicker Park Press) on WGN TV Midday News program on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at approximately 11:25 am. This is local Channel 9, and nationally syndicated on Cable TV through WGN America.

Water Tanks of Chicago remains the only book on the subject of Chicago’s disappearing rooftop water tanks. Tony Jones, Past President of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Green is a 1975 graduate, says in his foreword to the book: “Chicago’s crumbling water-tanks take on a new significance when seen in Green’s paintings – surely we knew they were there, they’d registered, but they weren’t the star of the street-show. But we’ve woken up to them, become part of his celebration of them as dynamic incidents in what is clearly a Chicago landscape.”

Water tanks have been omnipresent in Chicago for the past 136 years, but are often overlooked and/or taken for granted in the urban environment. Green’s vibrant images of these iconic structures gently remind readers of their historical and cultural significance to the city. The tanks, strong symbols of the city’s industrial past, are rapidly becoming extinct. It is a primary mission of this book to call attention to the plight of the water tanks, and to raise awareness of the urgent need to preserve them.

Green’s paintings are currently being featured in the Museum of Science and Industry’s ongoing Black Creativity Exhibit and Program (January 15 – March 1, 2009). This is a juried art show, and it is a good chance for museum visitors to see Green’s colorful and distinctive paintings of the city’s water tanks up close. For more information about this groundbreaking exhibit, visit www.msichicago.org

Mayor Richard M. Daley was quoted in the Chicago Tribune in 2005 in a speech at the Chicago Cultural Center saying, “This is all about the history of the city of Chicago, the architects, engineers and tradesman who built these wonderful tanks basically reflect the great history of Chicago.” Water Tanks of Chicago is both an artist’s bold statement about the plight of the tanks, and a clarion call to save these picturesque rooftop structures from demolition and the industrial scrapheap of history.

Harry W Schwartz Bookshops: An Appreciation

On Inauguration Day, a day filled with hope and promise as Barack Obama takes office as President in Washington, D.C., I just got the news that this storied bookstore chain in Milwaukee is closing in a couple months. I cut my teeth selling books to A. David Schwartz in the mid 1980s. He was a tough buyer, and always swore by his weekly reports which he poured over while I sat there. I would daydream, staring out the window while he worked, and one time I had the audacity to yawn, and he would look up from his printout and say, “Am I boring you?”

David would mumble things like “unacceptable” as he looked over the printouts, sighing over the poor sales, and getting him to order from certain publishers was like pulling teeth. On the other hand he was a raging lefty, and publishers that had books that were left-of-center he would buy in bulk and load them up in his stores. Sometimes I could not write fast enough ...

He was supportive in other ways. I went to his house on more than one occasion to do holiday title presentations to the bookstore staff. I got up there and gave my spiel, and I remember David once telling me that my talk was laced with equal parts humor and terror. It made me think, and I respected him as an elder statesman in the business, one that we inherited from his father, Harry W. Schwartz.

Over time Schwartz stopped buying books direct from publishers and instead went to Ingram Book Company, a major distributor in Tennessee . They would buy some books direct from publishers, and when they moved into their Third Ward downtown offices it was always a pleasure to meet with them. David sadly passed on, but his wife and daughter took over the business, and they had incredibly loyal employees like Daniel Goldin, senior buyer, Elly Gore, children’s buyer, Nancy Quinn, coop manager, Jason Kennedy, small press buyer, and Jack Covert of 800-CEO-READ. These are all fine people, consummate professionals who know their business inside out.

It’s sad when a bookstore chain dissolves, and this one was extra special. The good news in all of this is that Daniel Goldin is planning to open a store, called Boswell's, in their flagship location on Downer Avenue, doors down from the original Schwartz location that opened in 1925 or 1926. Their Mequon location, a suburban store that always surprized me with the kind of books they could sell, is also being brought back by Lenora Hurley, manager of the Schwartz store there. It will be called Next Chapter Books in the same location. Life goes on, but it's always important to remember the past, as I'm sure President Obama will eloquently reiterate later today in his Inaugural Address.

For more, check out the story in the Miwaukee Journal-Sentinel and ShelfAwareness.

Filmmaker Tom Palazzolo records Maxwell Street Market history in his new book

Memoir of Place
from Wednesday Journal - Oak Park, IL - 1/13/2009
CHRISTINE VERNON Contributing Writer

Tom Palazzolo's new book, At Maxwell Street, is described by his wife, Marcia, a contributor to the book, as a "memoir of place." Over the years, Tom has filmed what has become, with the passage of time, historic, archival footage of the city of Chicago, going back to his days as a student at the School of the Art Institute more than 40 years ago.

Growing up in St. Louis, he watched as many landmarks were torn down but when he arrived in Chicago in 1960, he was happy to see that many landmarks still remained here. The 50 or so films he has made include footage of Riverview, Clark Street, and the '68 Democratic Convention but Palazzolo always had a particular love of and appreciation for Maxwell Street, or The Maxwell Street Market, as it was properly called. The book serves as a record of the phenomenon that was Maxwell Street. Along with oral histories in the book, there is a DVD made with students from the School of the Art Institute in 1982. The book includes still shots of the people, places and things, showing the market in three layers: storefronts, tables on the street, and small huts.

Maxwell Street, as seen through the lens of Tom Palazzolo and friends, is a collection of merchants, shoppers, street performers, products, found and outsider art on a massive scale, jazz and blues being performed by original artists, food being cooked and prepared by street vendors (including Polish sausage sandwich, of which Palazzolo seems particularly fond), and the dynamics of the market-goods being sold by vendors and hawkers and "pullers" who drew people into the stores.

The documentary accompanying the book opens with Casey Jones, Chicken Man (aka Chicken Charlie), a one man band who was seen around Chicago, often at Maxwell Street, with his accordion and trained chicken. Populated with characters from all aspects of society, there are no bad actors on this set; everyone contributes to the festivities, which Palazzolo calls "more fun and more real than modern malls, sometimes dangerous, and often funny." Accompanied by students, he found the people he filmed more open and interested in talking to him.
Asked if Maxwell Street should have been saved, he responds, "Absolutely. It is an antidote to the slickness the city is becoming." The book is a manifesto of his love of the sociology, culture and aesthetics of Maxwell Street. "Chicago soul," he calls it and "a distinctly American phenomenon." The book and accompanying DVD, brings a heightened awareness of what Maxwell Street was really about and what has been lost in the sanitizing and extinction of a unique street market.

Many Chicagoans have personal memories of Maxwell Street. William Cowhey, former real estate professional with Arthur Rubloff & Co. and former head of the Civic Federation of Chicago, recalled that Maxwell Street was always the place to go on Sundays when the other stores were closed, and he remembers how much fun it was to go there as a teen. The heydey of Maxwell Street he said was in the 1930s and late '40s. Kathy Coleman English has memories of her great grandfather Katzen, a rabbi, who came to Maxwell Street from Georgia in Russia. Jose Alvarez, owner of Renaissance Furniture Restoration, in business 40 years, says that you will find "real" Mexican food there but shares Palazzolo's passion for the "Polish and black" sandwich, which he says you can smell from a mile away and is best with grilled onions and mustard.
Palazzolo began documenting Maxwell Street for a class at the School of the Art Institute taught by Ken Josephson. He would complete an assignment at the last minute by rushing to Maxwell Street on a Sunday and getting his prints ready for Monday class. "Socially conscious work" he says he favored back then. As he visited Maxwell Street with his girlfriend, Marcia Daehn, a photography student at IIT, he would pick up the tab for her "Polish," a sure sign for the woman who became his wife, collaborator, and mother of his three children.

Market history

Often referred to as the largest open air market in the U.S., Maxwell Street was named after Dr. Philip Maxwell, an early settler and it first appeared on a map in 1847. From 1880 to 1920, the area was a magnet for poor Eastern European Jews and even as late as 1982 when Palazzolo made his documentary, one black clerk in a store referred to the area as "Jew Town." His Jewish boss noted there were only 10 Jewish merchants left at that point. But as one historian wrote, "the only color that mattered was green."

Maxwell Street Market became the official name in 1912. It was a gateway both for foreign immigrants and domestic immigrants who relocated from the South, providing them with an outlet for their entrepreneurial skills, a livelihood, a social network and a sense of community, not to mention goods and services needed for everyday living. It ran from the late 1800s until 1994 when the University of Illinois at Chicago expanded and developers positioned themselves for the coming real estate feeding frenzy. The area was labeled "blighted," buildings were condemned, services and improvements were withheld and the decline to justify redevelopment was assured.

Although preservation authorities cited numerous buildings of significance, many were taken by eminent domain and lost to by the 1970s and '80s "erasing yet another chunk of the city's soul," as Palazzolo says. The area shrank with the construction of the Dan Ryan in 1957. At one time, the center was Maxwell Street and Halsted but the market eventually shriveled to five blocks, from Morgan to Halsted, then one block from Halsted east to Union. By the time preservationists mounted an effort to save this unique treasure, it was too late. They judged it "an irretrievable loss of historic integrity." A rich repository of information about the battle to save Maxwell Street can be found online.

After a stint on Canal Street, the market moved to DesPlaines Street between Harrison and Roosevelt (2008) and it is there you will find it today with space for more than 500 vendors every Sunday of the year, weather permitting. Roosevelt University Professor Steve Balkin, who maintains a website on open air markets, wants the public to know that the New Maxwell Street needs consideration and encouragement from the City of Chicago in order to thrive. He calls the area now "a sliver of a sliver, at great risk because of mismanagement by the city." In order to thrive, he suggests the city lower vendor fees (there was a recent substantial fee hike); allow vendors to park near their sites (rather than at remote parking areas); provide more parking; provide easy access for blues and other entertainers to perform there; and, eliminate "the harshness, capriciousness and corruption of market regulations enforcers."

Camera-ready couple

Tom and Marcia Palazzolo first met in the Art Institute of Chicago where Marcia was a waitress in the Garden Restaurant and Tom was a guard outside. They didn't even speak the first year except through a glass window.

As a couple, the Palazzolos' involvement on the Chicago and Oak Park art scene is extensive. Marcia was president of the Oak Park Art League for six years and before that a board member. Tom was frequently enlisted in the mechanics of maintaining the building. Now Tom serves on the OPAL board. Marcia has been involved in the Historical Society of OP-RF for over 30 years.
Oak Park historian Gary Schwab says the new book helps him to recall his own roots-a grandfather who took him to Maxwell Street almost every Sunday morning. "Our house and my father's camera shop were filled with stuff from Maxwell Street, much of which I still have," Schwab said. "My father was born in the neighborhood of Maxwell Street in 1910, and his family lived there until moving to the North Side. Maxwell Street was a great place to learn about Chicago outside of one's usual insular neighborhood experience."

Both Palazzolo resumes include years of teaching. Tom spent 36 years at Daley College where he taught photography, art and art history. He also taught film at the School of the Art Institute.
Marcia's jobs were closer to home. She spent 17 years teaching at Dominican University, two years at Concordia University and 21 years on the faculty of Elmhurst College where she has taught photography, bookbinding, water color, and printmaking.

With this labor of love concluded, Tom Palazzolo is interested in painting and completing forgotten projects from the past, mining old work that is still meaningful to him. In filmmaking, he admits he doesn't find learning all the new technology very interesting. At the same time, he notes the quality of modern filmmaking is improving. He appreciates the recent explosion of social documentaries, a genre he prefers over "artsy" works. When he was making his films, there were only about 10 other people doing the same kind of work in Chicago. He still finds people and places energizing but doesn't expect to be "in the thick of things," filming events on the street, as he did at the Democratic Convention of 1968.

When he shot Maxwell Street with his students, he had an inkling it might be a historic opportunity. There were rumors that Daley wanted to eliminate the market and make the city a showcase. He said it was the perfect venue to teach sound and lighting. He loved the "ruggedness" of it and the fact that it was the antithesis of Hollywood. "No one paid attention to the people at the lower end of society. People loved it when the students paid attention to them; they opened up, were sweet."

Honolulu Star-Bulletin's Amazing Feature Story on all things Charlie Chan

The return of Charlie Chan
By Burl Burlingame
POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Jan 11, 2009

Authors know that sometimes novels take on a life of their own during the writing. Sometimes a secondary character is so full of verve and life that they wind up taking center stage, and the writer doesn't know where it comes from, because it's magical and unbidden, but there the character is, and the spotlight shifts to where the action is.

So it was with mystery novelist Earl Derr Biggers, who paid a lot of attention to Honolulu during a sojourn here and knocked out a murder mystery, "House Without a Key," that is chockablock with keen observations about Hawaii in the early '20s.

And there's a minor character, Honolulu Police detective Charlie Chan, who grows to dominate the book, which became a best-seller. Biggers immediately knocked out a sequel, "The Chinese Parrot," which made Chan a central character, and this was such a hit that it became a film.

Biggers, knowing now that Charlie Chan was buttering his bread, wrote four more novels featuring the rotund policeman who lived on Punchbowl's slopes and spoke in aphorisms. Biggers died in the early '30s, about when Charlie Chan films became a cottage industry, even spawning also-ran competition like Mr. Moto. Although Detective Chan himself was generally played by Caucasians, his extended family gave work to a whole generation of struggling Asian actors.

The original Biggers' novels are coming back into print, courtesy publishers Academy Chicago and copyright owners 4Kids Entertainment, who also represent, among other things, the Royal Air Force. The first two, "The House Without a Key" and "The Chinese Parrot," are out now. "Behind That Curtain" and "The Black Camel" will be published in May, and "Charlie Chan Carries On" and "Keeper of the Keys" will be released in the fall.

"The Chan novels by Biggers have lasting appeal because they are such compelling reading. Biggers was a great writer," said Eric Miller, vice president of Academy Chicago. "Whether he was writing about Punchbowl Hill in Honolulu or about San Francisco where he once lived, Biggers was the consummate stylist. His books have stood the test of time very well. In fact, in some ways they were ahead of their time."

Hawaii pop-culture guru DeSoto Brown said Charlie, as an Asian character, was groundbreaking in American culture at a time -- the 1920s into the '40s. Asian immigration was restricted, and Asian characters in fiction were usually sinister and mysterious. "Charlie Chan, conversely, was not only the good guy, but was in fact actually better at crime-solving than the haole characters. In the movies, he is always treated with respect for his intelligence and talents."

This is certainly the year for the return of Charlie Chan. Biggers will be "Ghost of Honor" at the "Left Coast Crime" annual mystery fans convention, to be held in Hawaii this year, March 7 to 12 at the Marriott Waikoloa Resort.

Here's another point of relativity, courtesy Brown: "Both Charlie Chan and Barack Obama have a similar sort of background -- both originated in 'exotic' Hawaii, but they also went on to greater fame in the larger outside world. Their actions and abilities are rooted in their innate abilities, and, they move beyond what others of their respective races had previously been able to accomplish."

Case closed.

Original novels put Chan back in perspective

The books that launched Charlie Chan are pretty much forgotten today, hidden behind the many movies and comics and TV appearances by the Chinese detective, whose presence even today raised raises a suspicion of subliminal racism. Academy Chicago's relaunch of the original series puts Chan back into his proper perspective, that of a literary sleuth acting within a well-plotted page-turner.

"The House Without a Key"
and "The Chinese Parrot"
By Earl Derr Biggers
(Academy Chicago)
$14.95 each

Reading these books is a definite pleasure. Author Biggers is a smooth strategist, clever plotter and keen observer, and the novels give the same escapist tingle as the best of Agatha Christie. No less than Rex Stout -- creator of the Nero Wolfe series -- declared that Charlie Chan was one of the best fictional detectives ever, right up there with Sherlock Holmes.

"The House Without a Key" focuses on the travails of young John Quincy Winterslip, a stuffy Boston-Brahmin investments broker who is paying a visit to the family black sheep, a rich swindler who lives in a mansion on Waikiki Beach -- found dead the day John Quincy arrives.
Honolulu at the time is described most vividly by Biggers, who has a discerning eye for the polyglot social structure of the islands, including a detective of Asian origin in a position of authority and respect. This was written at the height of "yellow peril" hysteria, mind you.
In "The Chinese Parrot," Chan is taken out of familiar tropical surroundings and plopped into the California desert, and still manages to outwit incompetent local police.

In both books the central character is a young, feckless chap who manages to grow up over the course of the investigation, as well as fall under the sway of a charming young lady. But Chan is the polarizing figure, the catalyst and clearly the smartest guy in the room.

Is Chan a racist stereotype? Maybe. But he'll track down whoever killed you and solve the case.

New York Times Book Review chimes in about Charlie Chan

"When did publishers get so smart about reissuing out-of-print mysteries? For the longest time, paperback reprints were just last year’s best sellers, but not anymore. Pioneers of 1950s American noir like Ross Mac­donald are shown true respect when Vintage Crime’s Black Lizard imprint reissues their books in sturdy editions with properly sleazy covers. The classic English mystery of the 1930s and ’40s also lives on so long as Rue Morgue keeps the faith by reprinting master craftsmen like Nicholas Blake and Michael Gilbert. But it takes a special kind of wit to resurrect Charlie Chan, as Academy Chicago has done with THE CHINESE PARROT and THE HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY (paper, $14.95 each), ingenious puzzle mysteries written by Earl Derr Biggers in the 1920s. Another brainstorm, on the part of Felony & Mayhem, has brought THE PEKING MAN IS MISSING (paper, $14.95) back into print. This speculative novel was written by Claire Taschdjian, an amateur archaeologist who was one of the last people to handle the bones of Peking Man before they were lost — or stolen — during World War II. Last year’s best seller? Don’t make me laugh."
-- Marilyn Stasio - from CRIME - Revenge Theory

Enter Charlie Chan, hero of the Honolulu Police

Academy Chicago will launch (bring back) Charlie Chan in the fall of 2008! The books, 6 total by Earl Derr Biggers about the legendary Chinese-Hawaiian Police Inspector, still are compelling to read. A list of the titles is below. ACP will do two each for the next three seasons in paperback at $14.95.

An interesting back story: -- considerable research went into finding the rights to the books. Biggers wrote them in the mid-1920s to early 1930s after a trip to Hawaii. They were renewed by his widow, Eleanor Biggers, in the mid 1950s, and assigned to a company called Leisure Concepts. LC were the ones that sold the rights to all the movies you still see on television, primarily with Warner Orland playing the dimunitive detective. CC became a Hollywood icon. The last movie was made in 1971. However, Twentieth Century Fox, a News Group Company, and the owners of Harper Collins are the license holders for all things CC. They renewed their last option to make a movie in 1996 (or 1997). Since the mid 1980s, LC became a mega-licensing company called 4 Kids Entertainment (type "4 Kids Entertainment" into Google or Yahoo and you will see the have a ton of cartoon-like characters). They are located on Ave. of the Americas in NYC and do a land-office business.

ACP (that is, me) called 4 Kids (once I found out they owned the rights) and said we were interested in publishing the 6 CC mysteries by Biggers. Because of the late Rep Sonny Bono (R-CA), copyrights were extended another 90 years beyond the life of the author, that's life + 90 years. 4 Kids didn't even know they owned the rights (as a trademark) to CC until I called them! They had to get the contract out of a cold storage vault! They were required to ask Twentieth Century Fox if they wanted to do the books, and they declined! So 4 Kids was free to sign a contract with ACP, and now we are doing the first two in September 08.

It gets better. Two English companies had Biggers CC books that they published in 1996 and 1997, figuring they were in the public domain. Leonaur and Echo Library are selling POD editions of the first two CC titles, primamrily on Amazon.com, Amazon has since promised to yank those titles from their site, since they violate 4 Kids as the copyright holder to the books.

Charlie Chan books by Earl Derr Biggers:

Academy Chicago has already issued the first two books in the series, The House without a Key and The Chinese Parrot. In Spring 2009 they will issue three and four in the series, Behind that Curtain and The Black Camel. In Fall 2009, Academy Chicago will complete the series by publishing numbers five and six, Charlie Chan Carries On and The Keeper of the Keys.

Pre-Socratic Philosophy Publisher Turns to Genre Fiction with a Big Bang

The words Suspense, Thriller, and Philosophical Fiction don’t go together very often, and when they do the result will likely be intriguing. And so Parmenides Publishing of Las Vegas, and late of Zurich and Athens, has published its first two mysteries in their Parmenides Fiction line. Pythagorean Crimes (paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-930972-27-2)
by Greek author Tefcros Michaelides is being called “a masterfully-told story” and “a thriller of the mind.” Michaelides is a professor of Mathematics at Athens College in Greece, and the tale starts out in fin-de-siècle Paris at an international mathematics conference that is attended by such math heavyweights as Bertrand Russell, Hilbert, Poincaré, and Gödel. The whole mix will add up to murder and mayhem as the story jumps back and forth in time.

The book I want to write about is Black Market Truth: Book One of the Aristotle Quest (paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-930972-31-5) by Sharon Kaye, a professor of philosophy at John Carroll University. Kaye is the author of Philosophy for Teens and Lost and Philosophy, and she brings her pop-infused training to good use here in a crackerjack story that is being called “rip-roaring,” fast-paced,” “daring,” and “very entertaining.” I really dug this book. It draws circles around books like The Da Vinci Code, which it invariably gets compared to, and The Dante Club, and instructs readers while it has them eagerly turning the pages to find out what happens next.

The main character is Dana McCarter, a famous academic expert on ancient Greek philosophy and paleography, and in particular, Aristotle. One day Dana, living in New York, is approached in her office by a mysterious stranger who has an ancient parchment manuscript he would like her to decipher. It turns out to be, as the story goes, one of the lost dialogues of Aristotle. This is incendiary stuff that was pilfered from the dark recesses of the Vatican, no less, and several people will lose their heads over the secret recovery, and ultimate cover-up of the existence of these dialogues. The contents of Aristotle’s lost dialogues turn out to be controversial in the extreme. The amazing thing is that while Dana’s character gets to take a peek at each of stolen Aristotle manuscripts that come her way in the course of the tale, she lets the reader actually read the dialogues themselves, and they develop into a story all their own. We learn about Aristotle the man, and Aristotle the great thinker. Or, as Michael Tierno points out, this “brings Aristotle to life in an entertaining and dramatic way.”

There is more than one parallel story being told in Black Market Truth. There are scenes played out in Second Life, a virtual world of avatars in cyberspace that eerily mirror what is going on in the story. The plot thickens, the blood flows, and nothing is what it seems. This is fascinating stuff, and the best part is there are two more books in the series. Parmenides will announce Book Two in the Aristotle Quest for Fall 2009.

Abraham Lincoln’s Life Outlined in 2,024 Pages

Random House balked when historian Michael Burlingame, a professor at Connecticut College, turned in his massive biography of Lincoln at over 2,000 pages. They had to say no to the eminent Lincoln scholar. Burlingame turned to Johns Hopkins University Press and they have produced a regal two volume boxed set ($125.00 hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8018-8993-6) simply entitled Abraham Lincoln: A Life. It might take a lifetime to read such a tome, but the book is getting rave reviews and is selling briskly off the shelves, despite a severe economic downturn. Ingram Book Company, the national wholesaler based in Tennessee, is sold out as I write this. This book is becoming a hot commodity.

Burlingame’s book is billed as the first multi-volume biography of the iconic 16^th president in many decades. Publishers Weekly says, "This book supplants [Carl] Sandburg and supersedes all other biographies. Future Lincoln books cannot be written without it, and from no other book can a general reader learn so much about Abraham Lincoln. It is the essential title for the bicentennial."—James L. Swanson. Others have weighed in, including Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals, “No one in recent history has uncovered more fresh sources than Michael Burlingame. This profound and masterful portrait will be read and studied for years to come." And the publisher itself says, “Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, this landmark publication establishes Burlingame as the most assiduous Lincoln biographer of recent memory and brings Lincoln alive to modern readers as never before.”

Americans love an anniversary, and so do librarians and the media. 2009 marks 200 years since Lincoln’s birth in Kentucky on February 12, 1809, the basis for President’s Day along with George Washington. So the buzz for this book seems to be just beginning.

"At Maxwell Street" featured in Chicago Journal

Often referred to as the largest open air market in the U.S., Maxwell Street was named after Dr. Philip Maxwell, an early settler, and first appeared on a map in 1847.
From 1880 to 1920, the area was a neighborhood of poor Eastern European Jews, a legacy that lingered as late as 1982 when Tom Palazzolo made his documentary. One black clerk in a store refers to the area as "Jew Town."
His Jewish boss, looking on, tells the filmmaker that at that time there were only 10 Jewish merchants left in the area and that he expected the area would soon be Korean.
But from all the photographic and film records of Maxwell Street, it is clear that the market was diverse, "a thriving marketplace with a vibrant and lively street culture" and as one historian has written, "the only color that mattered was green."
The Maxwell Street Market became official in 1912. It provided immigrants with an outlet for their entrepreneurial skills, a livelihood, a social network and a sense of community, as well as the goods and services needed for everyday living.
It ran until 1994. As buildings were gradually condemned, services and improvements were withheld. The decline to justify redevelopment of the area was assured.
After a stint on Canal Street, the Maxwell Street Market moved to Desplaines Street between Harrison and Roosevelt, and it is there you will find it today with space for more than 500 vendors every Sunday of the year, weather permitting.

Remembering Maxwell Street
New book includes DVD documentary of historic market
By CHRISTINE VERNON Contributing Reporter -- Chicago Journal

Tom Palazzolo's new book At Maxwell Street (cloth, $45, ISBN 978-0-9789676-1-1, Wicker Park Press) is described by his wife, Marcia, a contributor to the book, as a "memoir of place."
Over the years, Tom Palazzolo has filmed what has become, by the passage of time, historic and archival footage of the city of Chicago from as far back as his days as a student at the School of the Art Institute more than 40 years ago.
Growing up in St. Louis, he watched as many landmarks were torn down, and arrived in Chicago in 1960 enthusiastic to see that many landmarks still remained.
Included among the 50 or so films he has made is footage of Riverview, Clark Street, and the 1968 Democratic convention. But Palazzolo always had a particular love of and appreciation for Maxwell Street and its eponymous, now gone, market.
His book serves as a historic record about the phenomenon that was Maxwell Street. Along with the oral histories in the book, there is a DVD made with students from the School of the Art Institute in 1982. The book includes many still shots, images of the people, places and things where the market was in three layers-storefronts, tables on the street and small huts.
To see Maxwell Street through the eyes and lens of Tom Palazzolo with the help of photos and stories of his students, friends and wife, is to be transported back to a place that engages all the senses: images of the people, including merchants, shoppers and street performers, the products, and outsider art on a massive scale; the sounds of jazz and blues; the smells of street food, of Polish sausage sandwiches (of particular interest to Tom); and the feel of the market and the goods being sold by vendors, hawkers and pullers who drew people into the stores.
The documentary accompanying the book opens with Casey Jones, Chicken Man (aqua Chicken Charlie), a one-man band who was seen around Chicago and often at Maxwell Street, with his accordion and trained chicken.
There are no bad actors on this set; everyone contributes to the festivities which Palazzolo calls "more fun and more real than modern malls, sometimes dangerous, and often funny."
Accompanied by students, Palazzolo found the people he filmed more open and interested in talking to him. When asked if Maxwell Street should have been saved, Palazzolo responds, "Absolutely, it is an antidote to the slickness the city is becoming."
Palazzolo book combines his love of the sociology, culture and aesthetics. "Chicago soul" he calls it, "a distinctly American phenomenon."
At a public reception for Palazzolo's new book the week before Christmas, each person in the audience seemed to have a personal story to tell about their experiences at Maxwell Street.
William Cowhey, a West Sider, former real estate professional with Arthur Rubloff & Co. and former head of the Civic Federation of Chicago, remembers that at one time, the rents on Halsted Street were more than the rents per square foot on State Street.
Cowhey recalled that Maxwell Street was always the place to go on Sundays when the other stores were closed and how much fun it was to go there as a teen. He said the heyday of Maxwell was in the 1930s and late 1940s.
Kathy Coleman English spoke of her great grandfather Katzen, a rabbi, who came to Maxwell Street from Georgia in Russia.
Palazzolo says he started out documenting Maxwell Street for a class at the School of the Art Institute. He would fill an assignment at the last minute by rushing to Maxwell Street on a Sunday and getting his prints ready for Monday class. Soon he found out that he loved the images.
Gradually, as he visited Maxwell Street with his girlfriend, Marcia Daehn, a photography student at IIT, he would pick up the tab for her "polish," a great investment for the woman who became his wife, collaborator and mother of his three children.

Usagi Yojimbo Rabbit Dynamite

The thing that prompted my interest in this series of manga books was a request from my 7-year-old nephew for volumes 6 and 7 of the series. I’d never heard of it before, and I quickly discovered that there are some 22 books in the series and bookstores didn’t carry the whole series, even ones with a concentration on comics. For the most part they had the most recent books on their shelves and that was it. Through searching online, and consulting specialty stores I figured out that volumes 6 and 7 were still in print. I ended up ordering them from a comic book bookstore in Chicago called Challengers Comics and Conversation. The staff there was super nice, and they even suggested some other books my young nephew would like that were related to Stan Sakai’s samurai rabbit.

I went to a superstore and they had this huge manga section – two entire walls and a double-sided kiosk of books – and it seemed this was the only section in the store where buyers were actually seriously shopping. They didn’t carry one Usagi Yojimbo book! That didn’t seem to bode well. It amazes me how far comic books have come since the days we sold them with LPC Group. LPC was the distributor for Marvel, Dark Horse, Image Comics, Tokyo Pop, and a host of other publishers before they went out of business as a distributor. Bookstores at the time were just getting hip to the idea of comics as a real goldmine, and we were on the cutting edge of a comic book revolution.

Comics are also used more by teachers to encourage reading, especially with reluctant boys and late readers across the spectrum. I remember sitting in a parent-teacher group session and the teacher telling parents how she was going to utilize comics to engage the kids to read in a 7th grade class. One parent raised her hand and said, I think the new term for comics is graphic novels. The teacher got really excited and said, wow, graphic novels - I’m going to have to remember that! I almost fell out my chair trying to repress my laughter. I had sit in so many sales meetings with publishers in this genre, and pitched the books to bookstores countless times, that it amused me to no end to see the teacher’s epiphany with graphic novels.

We do still sell some cutting edge books about comics, and they are published by University Press of Mississippi. Every season they have new and interesting books about comics and the art of comics, or graphic novels as they are called in the trade – see this link http://upmississippi.blogspot.com/2007/08/journey-into-comics.html for more detailed information about their books. It seems to me every self-respecting comic bookshop should carry their stuff.

Comic book readers and specialists in popular culture always seem to be looking for the latest thing or trend in comics. One of the things that came out of the Japanese comic book craze was producing books that read from right to left, which is Asian style. That was a big thing at one point. Then it was comics from places like Korea that were all the rage, and whatever was being shown on Cartoon Network that could be turned into a book series. A new book from University of Texas Press seems to be exploring new territory, and is worth noting here: -- Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez, by Frederick Luis Aldama. Aldama is professor of English and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He’s also the director of their Latino Studies Department. He seems well-qualified to write a book such as this. He’s the author of a previous book called Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Artists and Writers. The book explores Latino representations in comics, from Marvel superheroes, and the likely suspects, to Latino masters such as Richard Dominguez. Shedding a much-needed spotlight on a vibrant segment of comics, Your Brian on Latino Comics illuminates the world of such superheroes as Firebird, Vibe, and the Blue Beetle, as well as profiling creative artists actively working in the genre, such as Laura Molina, Frank Espinosa, and Rafael Navarro. There are twenty-one interviews in the book and readers will get a real sense of the evolution of Latino expression in this format, as well as the influences, innovations, and many Latino transcendences of mainstream techniques. The amazing creativity of the people involved will inspire as well as entertain readers of comics and graphic literature.