FROM MY SHELF TO YOURS

  • Valerie’s Home Cooking: More than 100 Delicious Recipes to Share with Friends and Family

    I had the chance to chat with Valerie Bertinelli when she was in Chicago a few weeks ago to sign copies of her new cookbook, Valerie’s Home Cooking: More than 100 Delicious Recipes to Share with Friends and Family (Oxmoor House 2017; $30). It’s always interesting to meet someone in real time that you’ve, in…

  • Gretchen Carlson’s “Be Fierce: Stop Sexual Harassment and Take Your Power Back”

    Gretchen Carlson shows how to fight back.

  • The story behind ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’

    Several decades ago, George Saunders and his wife were visiting Washington D.C. when their cousin mentioned that anecdotal evidence indicated President Abraham Lincoln had surreptitiously visited the tomb of his 11-year-old son, Willie. For years, the story of Lincoln, so overcome by grief, that he stole into the monument where his son was interred, nagged…

  • How the French Saved America

    Give credit to France for the forming of our nation because without their help we might still be, as stereotypes go, eating crumpets, drinking tea and speaking with British accents. That’s the focus of a new book by noted author Tom Shachtman in his latest book How the French Saved America: Soldiers, Sailors, Diplomats, Louis…

  • If These Walls Could Talk: Chicago Bears: Stories from the Chicago Bears Sideline, Locker Room, and Press Box

    How hard was it to transition from football super-stardom to everyday life? I ask Otis Wilson, #55 of the Super Bowl XXwinning Chicago Bears and front row performer in the famed Super Bowl Shuffle which even now trends high on You Tube with 21,238 views in the last three months alone. “You have to have…

  • Al Capone’s Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago during Prohibition

    Prohibition in Chicago was the ultimate business opportunity for the violent men who made up the many gangs who fought to control alcohol as well as narcotics, gambling, labor and business racketeering and prostitution in the city. And while there were turf wars during Prohibition in many American cities, Chicago was the bloodiest of all.…

  • The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home

    More than just a lovely French Renaissance chateau set in amazing landscape of forests, formal gardens and mountains, Biltmore, the home of George and Edith Vanderbilt as told by Denise Kiernan in her latest book, The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home, is also a…

  • The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

    Lisbeth Salander, computer hacker extraordinaire, social misfit and martial arts expert, is back in The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye.  The fifth in the Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, Salander sentenced to prison for several months after she protects an autistic child in her typical law-breaking but righteous way. But even prison bars…

  • Author shares Rosh Hashanah recipes: Cookbook offers sweet, savory recipes to celebrate the new year

    Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, celebrates heritage and a chance for rejuvenation. Emily Paster, author of the newly released “The Joys of Jewish Preserving: Modern Recipes with Traditional Roots, for Jams, Pickles, Fruit Butters, and More — for Holidays and Every Day” said the most common Rosh Hashanah tradition is to eat sweet foods…

  • Are You Sleeping by Kathleen Barber

    Kathleen Barber’s thriller Are You Sleeping? (Gallery Books 2017; $26) tells the story of  Josie Buhrman who thought she had put the trauma of her early life behind her, when a hit investigative podcast about her father’s murder brings the past back, compelling her return to the small Illinois town of Elm Park where she…