MACOMB -- In 1999 Jeff Biggers of Macomb returned to the site of his grandparents' former home at Eagle Creek with his mother and uncle and was astounded by what he saw.
He knew strip mining was happening in the area -- as it had all his life -- but felt a profound sense of discomfort seeing the family farm was obliterated.
"I stood with my mother and Uncle Richard at the rim of a lunar expanse of ruts and rocks and broken earth," begins his book "Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland."
ELDORADO -- Eldorado native Rosalie Murray has returned home and is promoting children's books modeled after the antics of her pets.
AJDABIYA, Libya — Witnesses say Libyan warplanes have struck the rebel-held oil port in the eastern town of Brega.
GLEN CARBON -- Glen Carbon author Bill Nunes is no fan of blank space on a page. Nunes likes information and photographs and his books reflect that preference.
HARRISBURG -- Historian and author Jon Musgrave offers an inside look of the 1920s gang war between Charlie Birger and the Shelton Brothers in his latest book "Secrets of the Herrin Gangs."
PLAINFELD, Conn. -- Having spent a year on military duty in Iraq, standing in sub-freezing water for about 15 minutes was not that difficult a challenge for Samantha Young.
HARRISBURG -- The Harrisburg High School Drama Department is putting the finishing touches on "Little Women," which will begin showing this weekend at the SIC George T. Dennis Center for the Visual and Performing Arts.
ELDORADO -- Present and former art students of Zettie Shults are hoping for a good crowd to view their works at a show and reception 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at Eldorado Memorial Library.
Joe Mathieu has illustrated more than 100 children’s books and has created thousands of illustrations for Sesame Street books and other products.
Nothing kills the mood before a show like a clunky cell phone announcement or fundraising pitch from the stage.
Five questions with Femke Hiemstra about "Rock Candy," her lovely and surreal book of collected art.
Leon Chiappini hooks a tire-sized cymbal around his finger and spins it like a basketball. He hits it and listens for the ding, the gravel and the growl: elements of crash that the average ear can’t hear. If it’s not perfect, Chiappini tosses it in the reject pile. “After 49 years, I’d better know if it’s good,” he said with a laugh.
I like to think of film critic Roger Ebert as a sieve. When Hollywood releases a film, it's probably going to go through him. And after taking in a flick and sharing his thoughts, his readers are left with just the stuff that they can use - a solid opinion, a little humor, an idea of whether or not they'll be wanting to shell out their money to take a look themselves.
Checklists, writes Boston surgeon and author Atul Gawande in his book “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” are considered by many to be beneath us. Yet Gawande proves, without a doubt, that checklists — cognitive safety nets — save lives, millions of dollars and untold heartache, whether the task is flying an airplane, building a skyscraper or operating on an adrenal gland.
Bruce Brown of Springfield first discovered comic books as a child. A specialist recommended them to Brown’s parents to help their son overcome some reading difficulties. Now he not only enjoys reading comic books, he writes them, too. Brown’s latest graphic novel, released earlier this year, is “Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom.”
Jonathan Dee’s new critically acclaimed novel “The Privileges” starts with a wedding, impressive for the deft writing that conveys the controlled chaos, the edgy anxieties, the many tensions springing from family members’ vying needs.
In bestselling author Chris Bohjalian’s “Secrets of Eden,” some mysteries untangle themselves as we approach the last pages of his cleverly told novel.
In 2007, Dr. David Dosa wrote an essay for The New England Journal of Medicine about a cat at the Steere House nursing home in Providence, R.I., who apparently had the ability to sense when a patient was going to die. The media picked up the story and almost overnight, Oscar the cat became an international phenomenon.
SOUTHEASTERN ILLINOIS COLLEGE — Imagine walking into a party hosted by the deputy mayor of New York and finding out he has shot himself in the earlobe — and his wife is missing.
That’s exactly the situation in which partygoers find themselves in Rumors, a Neil Simon-penned play scheduled for three upcoming performances by the SIC Theater Department.
Daniel Menaker, author and editor, has been thinking a lot about the qualities of good conversation. His new book, “A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation,” is an entertaining, thought-provoking, at times irritating compendium that considers the history, the structure, the process, the value of conversation.
