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By Mary Timmins
In summer, the thoughts turn to
vacation. To parks and forests and
lakes and walks on the beach. To
swimming. And boating, too. And
perhaps even to shipwrecks and desert
islands and what one might read
if stranded there. So, though the
distance is, fortunately for most
of us, well removed from actual
disaster, from summer to survival
is just a space of steps, from the
pleasures of the season to the needs
of life.
Thus, for this year’s summer
reading feature, ways of getting
along in a world that’s often
difficult and sometimes wondrous
is the theme for a selection of
books written by University of Illinois
graduates. The subjects range from
small towns, water insects and writer
Harper Lee to pirates, war and going
adrift.
Indeed, the potent survival nightmare
of being lost at sea faces the four
main characters in “Still
Summer” (Warner Books), a
forthcoming work from Jacquelyn
Mitchard ’71. Due
out in August, the novel focuses
on three lifelong friends, with
a teenaged daughter in tow, whose
pleasure sail in the Caribbean takes
a hard tack into the wind when the
crew goes overboard. Rocking helplessly
aboard their chartered yacht, the
women face down hunger, thirst,
sharks and pirates, not necessarily
in that order.
“You don’t think of
survival as taking place on a vacation
in the Caribbean,” said Mitchard.
“It’s the ultimate ‘what
if’ book. …What if paradise
turned into hell?” The best-selling
author of 12 other books –
her first work, “The Deep
End of the Ocean,” was a New
York Times No. 1 best-seller and
the basis for a 1999 feature film
with Michelle Pfeiffer – Mitchard
will be the keynote speaker at Writers
Come Home; co-sponsored by the UI
Alumni Association and the Illini
Union Bookstore, this annual Homecoming
event will take place on Oct. 24.
“I think of myself as being
a U of I student,” said Mitchard,
who studied creative writing with
Mark Costello ’58
LAS, author of “The Murphy
Stories,” during her two years
at Illinois. “It’s where
I learned the best things I ever
learned – and the only things
I ever learned – about writing.”
Pirates are spotted through a very
different sort of spyglass in “X
Marks the Spot: The Archaeology
of Piracy” (The University
Press of Florida). Compiled by Russell
K. Skowronek ’79
LAS and his lifelong friend and
colleague Charles R. Ewen, this
collection of scholarly essays deals
with uncovering the physical evidence
of who pirates were and how and
where they lived. Subjects include
Long John Silver, Jean Lafitte,
the pirates of the Mississippi and
Ohio rivers, the legendary Jamaican
city of Port Royal and, of course,
the Caribbean at large. “It
never hurts to run on [actor] Johnny
Depp’s coattails,” joked
Skowronek, who has observed that
most books on pirates tend to offer
“the same stories told and
told and told again.” Thus
Skowronek, who teaches anthropology
and archaeology at Santa Clara University,
decided to pursue a “true
story of pirates as told by archaeologists.”
The book has attracted a lot of
academic praise and popular attention
– unlike, curiously, real
pirates themselves, whom Skowronek
describes as “chameleons whose
ability to blend into their surroundings
makes finding hard evidence about
them a challenge.
“If they weren’t caught
in the act, they were legitimate
sailors,” said Skowronek.
Truly lurid stories of survival
– and of death – take
place every day in urban Chicago
as described in “Defending
the Damned: Inside Chicago’s
Cook County Public Defender’s
Office” (Atria Books). This
nonfiction work by freelance Chicago
writer Kevin Davis
’85 COM details the often
misunderstood mission of those who
stand up in court for heinous criminals,
including rapists and murderers.
Davis focuses on a 2003 capital
murder case in which a young ex-convict
went on trial for shooting a Chicago
police officer and was defended
by the flamboyant attorney Marijane
Placek.
“The public defenders really
have to steel themselves,”
said Davis, an award-winning journalist
and former crime reporter for the
South Florida Sun Sentinel. “Their
job is so thankless but so important.
I really came away with a new respect
for what they do.” On July
18, Davis will participate in a
discussion at the Chicago Public
Library about the city’s criminal
justice system, along with best-selling
legal thriller writer Scott Turow.
Speaking of legal thrillers, attorney
and novelist David Ellis
’85 BUS has just come out
with his latest page-turner. “Eye
of the Beholder” (G.P. Putnam
& Sons) delves into a series
of horrific slayings that echo a
massacre in a college basement that
happened 15 years earlier. Having
secured the execution of the suspect
in the original case, prominent
lawyer Paul Riley must now confront
the question: Has the real murderer
survived? Ellis, who serves as counsel
to the speaker of the Illinois House
of Representatives, has won popular
and critical recognition for his
novels, including the Edgar Award-winning
“Line of Vision” and
“In the Company of Liars,”
a tour de force thriller with a
narrative that unfolds in reverse
chronological order.
Novelist Ray Elliott,
MS ’84 COM, offers an imaginative
vision of surviving one of the key
battles of the World War II Pacific
theater in “Iwo Blasted Again”
(Tales Press). Taking its title
from a poem by Bill Madden, a Marine
veteran of the bloody 36-day siege
in which almost 7,000 Americans
and more than 21,000 Japanese were
killed, the novel focuses on the
final 36 hours in the life of Jack
Britton, who is dying in a veterans
hospital many years after the conflict.
Britton recalls, in a sometimes
hallucinatory stream of consciousness,
the battle and the friends he lost
on Iwo Jima, as well as other pains
– and joys – of his
life.
“One-third of the Marine
casualties in the Pacific were on
Iwo,” said Elliott who, like
his protagonist, is a former Marine
and English teacher and also a freelance
writer. (Elliott is the spouse of
Vanessa Faurie
’87 COM, editor of Illinois
Alumni.) The novel draws on
a range of influences, from veterans’
firsthand accounts to the writer
James Jones to the work of Luther
Lorance, MD ’26 (UIC). A Navy
doctor who tended the wounded from
Iwo in the military hospital at
Pearl Harbor, Lorance encouraged
the men to write about the battle
as a way of dealing with their stress.
When Lorance’s family donated
the letters to the UI Library, Elliott
wrote an article about the acquisition
for Illinois Alumni in 2003 and
was moved eventually to travel to
Iwo Jima for the observance of the
battle’s 60th anniversary
in 2005.
The struggle to survive as a writer
and as a friend is documented by
Charles Shields
’74 LAS, AM ’79 LAS,
in “Mockingbird” (Henry
Holt and Company), the first-ever
biography of Harper Lee. The ephemeral
author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,”
Lee wrote her 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning
work – which has sold 30 million
copies since its publication and
was made into an Academy Award-winning
film starring Gregory Peck –
about a trial in which a character
modeled on her father serves as
the defense attorney of a black
man wrongfully accused of raping
a white woman.
Shields, a former English teacher,
interviewed more than 600 subjects
for the book, though the famously
reclusive Lee was not among them.
What has emerged is the story of
a woman who wrote slowly and painstakingly
and who never re-created the initial
success of her first novel, the
only book she ever published. Lee
was also a lifelong friend of literary
luminary Truman Capote, whom she
accompanied on his travels to Kansas
when he was writing about the murder
of the Clutter family in “In
Cold Blood.” “Capote
never had a better or more loyal
friend,” said Shields. “Betraying
her by downplaying her contribution
to ‘In Cold Blood’ was
one of the most reprehensible things
he did in his life. But he was jealous
of her success.” Shields is
now at work on a biography of author
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Surviving high school is a passage
most make and many would prefer
to forget. Not Larry Doyle
’80 LAS, MS ’83 COM.
In “I Love You, Beth Cooper:
A Novel” (HarperCollins Publishers),
he follows the foibles of Denis
Cooverman, the nerdy debate-team
captain at Buffalo Grove High School,
who has fallen in love with Beth
Cooper, the head cheerleader. Having
chosen to announce this fact in
his public address at graduation
– “He shuffled forward,
careful not to step on his gown,
which the rental place had insufficiently
hemmed, subsequently claiming he
had gotten shorter since his fitting”
– Cooverman must cope with
the next 24 hours, including the
effect of his message on Beth Cooper’s
big, Army-issue boyfriend.
Doyle has long deployed his signature
wit as an Emmy-winning writer for
“The Simpsons” (which
he also produced) and the “Beavis
and Butt-Head” television
cartoon series and as a player at
such magazines as The New Yorker,
Spy, the National Lampoon, Esquire,
GQ, Rolling Stone, Harpers and Time.
Any baby boomer who remembers nuclear
attack drills from the school days
of the ’50s and ’60s
– when hiding beneath one’s
desk to avoid fallout was considered
practical – will have a special
appreciation for “This Is
Only a Test: How Washington D.C.
Prepared for Nuclear War”
(Palgrave Macmillan). Written by
David F. Krugler,
AM ’93 LAS, PHD ’97
LAS, this social history deals with
the foreboding and resolve that
rippled through the American government
and the nation in the aftermath
of World War II’s atomic devastation
and the onset of the Cold War. Strategies
to defend D.C. from “the bomb”
included repeated attempts at organizing
civil defense, thwarted plans for
the geographic dispersal of government
offices and the construction of
secret bunkers that never got used,
deep in the mountains of Pennsylvania
and also under the White House.
“We look at the ’50s
civil defense and laugh,”
said Krugler, who teaches history
at the University of Wisconsin,
Platteville, pointing out that “duct
tape and plastic sheeting to fend
off a chemical attack” –
as advised by the U.S. Department
of Homeland Security in 2003 –
“is also ludicrous.”
Another way of life, a more distant
time in history and far different
challenges to survival are recalled
in “Nauvoo: Mormon City on
the Mississippi River” (Houghton
Mifflin Company). Photographs and
text by Raymond Bial
’70 LAS, MS ’79 LIS,
tell the story of the Mormon settlement,
which, in its mid-19th-century heyday,
was more populous than Chicago.
All that changed with the murder
of the Mormon leader Joseph Smith
in 1844. More than a century after
the Mormons reacted by fleeing Nauvoo
for their ultimate destination of
Salt Lake City, the town has been
restored and now attracts 3 million
visitors a year. Bial’s photographs
capture the architecture, literal
and figurative, of the Mormons’
lives, accompanied by text suitable
for readers 8 and up.
Bial has published more than 80
books for children and adults, including
“Amish Home,” his award-winning
depiction of Amish life through
photos of buildings and furniture.
Explaining that the culture’s
beliefs preclude portraiture, Bial
remarked, “My idea was to
do a book about the culture without
showing the people themselves. I’m
kind of the opposite of a paparazzi.”
“A grasshopper-katydid-cricket
buffet” is what birds order,
in order to survive, in “Today
at the Bluebird Café”
(Simon & Schuster). Impeccably
rhymed by Deborah Ruddell
’71 FAA, this illustrated
collection of poems frames images
of individual birds, some whimsical
and some true-to-life, including
what they look like, what they do
and what they eat. “I was
touring Peru in a silver canoe,
and my guide was a toucan named
Zeke – a talkative fellow
with splashes of yellow and green
on his eye-catching beak.”
“Frozen dead guy” and
“survival” are not ordinarily
terms one would expect to find in
the same sentence, but small-town
life inspires creative solutions,
as Bill Geist ’68
COM, HON ’05, well knows.
In his seventh book, titled “Way
Off the Road: Discovering the Peculiar
Charms of Small Town America”
(Broadway Books), Geist visits tiny
burgs and podunk places throughout
America’s midsection that
show flair for the problems of a
declining economy. Case in point:
Nederland, Colo., where, some years
ago, Trygve Bauge iced down his
late grandfather in a garden shed
in lieu of making payments to the
cryogenic facility in California
where the body had previously been
stored. After Bauge was deported
to Norway, Nederland soldiered on,
its citizens not only continuing
to preserve grandpa in large amounts
of ice but creating a whole tourist
“Frozen Dead Guy” sub-industry:
parades, hats, T-shirts, look-alike
contests, information center and
the contents of the garden shed
itself, $25 for a peek.
The book also celebrates such attractions
of Geist’s native Illinois
(he grew up in Champaign) as the
moonburgers of Moonshine (“in
Clark County and almost impossible
to find”) and the white squirrels
of Olney (where “it is illegal
to harass a squirrel”). The
CBS guy in the RV who has been covering
quirky America, lo these 20 years,
Geist was hired by uber-road journalist
Charles Kurault, who called him,
appropriately enough, from the road
one long-ago day. “I could
hear coins going into a payphone,”
Geist, who was then working at The
New York Times, recalled. “I
believe he was in Texas.”
The wondrous survival tactics of
aquatic insects are luminously detailed
by Gilbert Waldbauer,
MS ’56 LAS, PHD ’60
LAS, in “A Walk around the
Pond” (Harvard University
Press). A member of the entomology
faculty at Illinois for more than
40 years before his retirement in
1995, Waldbauer blends “Nova”-caliber
observations with a child’s
fascination in this book (his seventh),
describing the watery adaptations
of such creatures as mosquitoes,
dragonflies and aquatic spiders.
Habitats range from the infinity
of the ocean down to humble tree
holes, which can host remarkably
robust ranges of buggy life.
For Arthur Saltzman
’75 LAS, AM ’76 LAS,
PHD ’79 LAS, surviving equates
with understanding. A veteran literary
critic and essayist who teaches
at Missouri Southern State University,
Saltzman explores not one but many
meanings for life in “Nearer”
(Parlor Press), his latest collection
of essays. An eclectic gathering
of intensely literary pieces written
in elaborate, witty prose, “Nearer”
addresses topics as varied as why
celebrities should give up when
their fame starts to fade, how video
games deprive the younger generation
of the joy of exploring the physical
world and “The Incredible
Shrinking Man,”a classic science
fiction movie from the ’50s,
an era when “Our underground
testing disturbed the earth like
indigestion, and out of its bowels
rose every imaginable amalgamation
of menacing tentacles and weird
cilia, the fanged and festering
effects of our technological presumption.”
Saltzman understands survival on
any number of levels, having gone
to parties and events to which he
had not been invited, while a graduate
student at U of I, so that he could
eat for free. Better fed now and
also better recognized, he said
of his work: “I’m interested
in the way that language shapes
the world it describes. I like using
metaphor as an investigative tool
– to surprise yourself into
new understandings.”
Surprising yourself into new understandings.
Yes, reading (whether on a desert
island or a sofa in front of the
air conditioner), is like that,
too.
Outdoor image by Michele
Westmorland/Getty Images
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