News & Events

There’s a group of former members of Congress who now label the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate as dysfunctional institutions incapable of meeting the needs of our troubled nation. The report by the Association of Former Members of Congress is available at https://www.usafmc.org/congressxroads It’s worth a look. But I have to say that …

It’s not that I didn’t find things to laugh aloud about in Christopher Buckley’s new political satire, Make Russia Great Again. It’s that so much of what he conjures up in his imitable style is, well, just so plausible. The book is set in the present moment and in the voice of a Roger Stone-like …

In 1983 central Illinois was shocked by the killings of a young mother and her three children, a case that became the subject of my book, Reasonable Doubt. The husband and father, David Hendricks, was convicted and later acquitted of the murders. They were members of an almost primitive fundamentalist Christian group. Prosecutors claimed Hendricks’s …

Words can inspire. But they can also be dangerous. Words on Fire author Helio Fred Garcia spells out why and how President Trump’s rhetoric is reckless and perilous. I’ve personally experienced Garcia to be a great teacher, and that skill shows in this new, easy-to-read and interesting book. After laying a firm foundation of how …

It was a lengthy, interesting profile of journalist and author Lionel Shriver in a recent issue of The New Yorker that stirred me to read the most disturbing fiction I’ve ever encountered—her “We Need to Talk About Kevin”. I don’t read that much fiction. When I do, it tends not to be of the American …