On the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man later known as D. B. Cooper hijacked a plane in Seattle, collected a ransom of $200,000 in used twenties, and parachuted into the forest of Washington or Oregon. He was never heard...
Read More"Isn't that the film with that great wave scene on the beach?" asked my inquisitive friend. Yep, that's the one. If you think the "wave" is just a fan phenomenon at sporting events, you've...
Read MorePeppy exhibit curator Jan Longone opened the upper door of the elegant old-timey wooden icebox, the size of a large stereo speaker, standing on the Clements Library carpet. Inside: a gleaming block of ice. Closer inspection...
Read MoreOnce upon a time, a very long time ago, in a desperate attempt to make her cantankerous children happy, a young mother loaded them in the car for a "mystery trip" to a motel on Lake Michigan. It was raining and cold...
Read MoreThere are no six degrees of separation between the Siegel-Schwall Band and the Chicago bluesmen who so powerfully influenced rock 'n' roll. Corky Siegel and Jim Schwall, white college students in the early 1960s, honed...
Read More
Nature's ability to restore and transform is a long-standing theme in Western life and culture. In the eighteenth century, Queen Marie Antoinette often found it amusing to escape the perfumed protocol at Versailles by...
Read MoreSomething about Richard Buckner's music makes people want to drink and break things. After one Buckner show, friends of mine split a whiskey bottle with him and took him to the nearby public radio station to surprise the...
Read MoreRodney Crowell's Fate's Right Hand mines the tunnels of a dangerous cave; issues of life, death, faith, and fate can easily sink the songs of a lesser writer. But Crowell's a master. The eleven songs here dig and...
Read MoreFew can match Mississippi-born songwriter Steve Forbert's way with a crowd. Although he always records with a band, he tours solo, with just a guitar. I saw Forbert play at a Vermont club a few winters back, with the outdoor...
Read MoreBack in 1980 we all knew about Judith Guest. Her first novel, Ordinary People, a story about a dysfunctional midwestern upper-middle-class family originally published in 1976, was turned into Robert Redford’s directorial...
Read MoreI do not know who decided to pair two extraordinary jazz pianists at this year’s Summer Festival, but it is an inspired idea. Ellis Marsalis and Danilo Pérez are both regarded as modern jazz players, in the broadest sense...
Read MoreWhen Porchsleeper guitarists Brian Raleigh and Derek Vertin were seniors in high school, they had a mutual friend who needed a place to stay. He spent the last part of the year moving between their two houses. Apparently, when...
Read MoreWhen my friends and I snuck into Nichols Arboretum with stolen dorm cafeteria trays on winter nights to go sliding down the hills back in the mid-1980s, the Arb was a wilder place — mostly just leaves and paths. When I visited...
Read MoreImagine taking your ten-month-old baby to the movies. You go into the theater knowing full well that unless the baby takes a nap, you'll be lucky to see even part of the show. You expect to endure the disapproving looks of...
Read MoreThe Flatlanders — Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and Joe Ely — are college buddies who played in honky-tonks in Lubbock, Texas, in the early 1970s. They recorded a country album, Jimmie Dale and the Flatlanders,...
Read MoreJames Hynes's two previous books, Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror and The Lecturer's Tale, both received a good deal of national attention for their blend of biting academic satire and sometimes...
Read More