Liz Viall
Instructor
Dept. of Journalism
BB2544
217.581.7117

Eastern Illinois University

Contact information:
ekviall@eiu.edu

Volume 4, No. 1
August/Sept 2007

The Thirteenth Tale

Diane Setterfield

My Cat Spit McGee

Willlie Morris

TR: The Last Romantic

H.W. Brands

A traditional gothic tale with a twist. It's modern day and the heroine is a biographer who is hired to write the story of a famous author. It was hard to put this book down. I wanted to find out what happened next.

Willie Morris might go down in history as the author of My Dog Skip (and the subsequent movie), but read his account of Spit McGee. After having dogs all his life, Morris married "the cat lady" and found himself with a cat as a companion.

Morris, a Rhodes scholar, was a notable journalist - first at the University of Texas and later as editor of Harper's Magazine. He died in 1999.

H.W. Brands is a professor at Texas A & M. His biographies are fascinating. Reading about Theodore Roosevelt was surprising. The man had many attributes and faults. Of interest, also, is the fact that the same family gave us two presidents.

Volume 1, No. 1
August/September 2004

Volume 1, No. 2
October/November 2004

Volume 1, No. 3
January/February 2005

Volume 2, No. 1
September/October 2005

Volume 2, No. 2
November/December 2005

Volume 2, No. 3
January/February 2006

Volume 3, No. 1
September 2006

Volume 3, No. 2
January/February 2007

Volume 3, No. 3
April/May 2007

Patriot Hearts

Barbara Hambly

Cold Name Ginger

Steve Kemper

Barbara Hambly started out writing science fiction and horror fiction. She branched out to historical fiction with a series of novels about Benjamin January, a free man of color and a doctor, living in 1830s New Orleans.

Here she gives us her take on the four "First Ladies" - Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolly Madison and Sally Hemmings. It's an interesting portrait of the women.

What does it take to be a visionary? Dean Kamen is one and is also a multi-millionaire. The story of his invention and development of the Segway gives us a good picture of the production of a product in the "big leagues." It also sometimes makes you think that all those visionaries are also jerks.