Month: August 2012

Buddy Guy’s autobiography traces his blues journey to Chicago

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When he first came to Chicago almost 55 years ago, legendary bluesmen like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Little Walter were part of the city’s music scene.
“I arrived here in from Louisiana and the greatest blues players in the world were all alive and playing here,” says Buddy Guy, considered one of the greatest blues guitarists of all time. “You go to sleep, wake up and 55 years have passed. After me and B.B. King, everyone else is gone. Every time I get interviewed, I say, ‘They’re no longer here. I’m looking up at that band in heaven and think there’s the best blues band.’ It seems like yesterday that I was called a little young punk, when we were all living. I went to sleep, woke up and now I’m the senior citizen.”
Not wanting to lose the information and the street sense he learned from those years, Guy recently co-authored, with David Ritz, his autobiography, When I Left Home: My Story (DeCapo Press 2012; $26). Ritz previously co-authored autobiographies about Ray Charles and Etta James.   Gaye
“I guess I’m the only one left that can tell you about it,” says Guy who arrived here on September 25, 1957 and still calls Chicago his home. “That’s what made David say, ‘let me get it while you’re still in your right mind and can remember a lot of that stuff’.”
 Guy was driven to play music from a very young age. Growing up poor in an isolated area of Louisiana, he first made a guitar out of window screen wires strung over tin cans and rubber bands stretched out and tacked to the wall before his father bought him a $4.35 guitar, a gift that changed his life. At 21, he moved to Chicago with hopes of playing with the greats but after six months and no luck and no job, he was about to ask his father for bus fare back home.
Jammin’ with Eric Clapton
That same night, he was asked by a stranger to come to the 708 Club and there Guy was invited  to play blues alongside Otis Rush. His magnificent performance had club goers demanding more and by the end of the evening Guy was sitting in Muddy Waters’ red Chevy. His life was about to change forever.
 “I followed the blues ever since I was a young child,” writes Guy in the preface to his book. “Followed the blues from a plantation way out in the middle of nowhere to the knife-and-gun concrete jungle of Chicago. The blues took my life and turned it upside down. Had me going places and doing things that, when I look back, seem crazy. The blues turned me wild. They brought out something in me I didn’t even know was there. So here I am—a seventy-five-year-old man sitting on a bar stool in a blues club, trying to figure out exactly how I got here. Any way you look at it, it’s a helluva story.”
What: Legendary blues musician Buddy Guy discusses his autobiography  
When: Tue. August 28, 6pm
Where: Harold Washington Library Center, Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, 400 S. State Street, Chicago
Cost: Free
FYI: 312-747-4850;  please note that Mr. Guy will not be signing any memorabilia besides copies of his book

What's for dinner next decade?

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While many of us are moving backwards foodwise, reveling in heritage vegetables, foraging woods for forgotten greens and enjoying farmhouse dinners, Josh Schonwald is looking towards what we’ll be putting on our tables in the years to come.
Will it be cobia, touted as “the next salmon” and prized because it grows ten times faster than most fish and is tastier than Chilean sea bass, a new microgreen or meat grown in a Petri dish?
These are topics that lead Schonwald to travel the world and chronicling his adventures in his very witty and easy to read book The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food (Harper 2012; $25.99).
The taste of tomorrow is also about the taste of yesterday.
“There used to be just one lettuce,” says Schonwald who lives in Evanston, Illinois. “Iceberg.”
And it use to come in a round ball and people either tore it into pieces or cut it into wedges. Now we face rows of bagged shredded mixes of greens in the supermarket.
Schonwald became interested in how food evolves after interviewing a professor of aquaculture at the University of Miami who believed in the cobia revolution.
“What intrigued me was that there were people like him who had such strong ideas about breakthroughs in food,” says Schonwald. “And I started thinking, if there’s a new fish, is there a new cow, a new tomato?”
Though he’s somewhat hesitant to make future food predictions – after all cobia still hasn’t come to market – Schonwald does believe that purslane, a green favored by Alice Waters, herself a foodinista who changed the way we eat.
“It’s native to India and they say Gandhi loved it,” says Schonwald. “And it not only is very high in vitamin A and beta carotene, it has more omega 3’s than any leafy green plant.”
Crickets also make his list as does Sub-Sahara cuisine.
“Why some foods make it and some don’t and the people who believe in them fascinates me,” says Schonwald who also explores GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and a Pentagon lab developing food substitutes.
But for those who still yearn for the foods our grandmother made, take heart.
“I think one of the foods of tomorrow,” says Schonwald “will be the foods of the past.”

Brad Thor: Black List

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There are A lists and B lists but the one list you never want to be on is the Black List (Simon & Schuster 2012; $27), the secret government list seen only by the President of the United States and his secret team of advisors. The bad part of this list of people who are considered to be enemies of the United States is once you’re  on it, the only way to get off is because you’re dead.   
That’s a problem for counterterrorism operative Scott Harvath who must discover how he made the list, elude the myriad of killers intent on crossing his name off the list and, as if that weren’t enough, stop the massive terror attack about to take down the United States ‘digital infrastructure.
It’s the ultimate paranoia thriller and a typical Thor suspense novel – a compelling fast moving read based on both fiction and fact. Indeed, Thor, the New York Times bestselling author of  Full Black, The Last Patriot and Blowback, recognized by NPR as one of the “100 Best Thrillers,” was given the name factoid writer by Glenn Beck for the way he merges fact and fiction.
Thor, who lives in Chicago, considers himself as an entertainer but loves that people are learning as they read his books.
“I want to be the fact-ion guy,” says Thor noting that Harvath is his alter ego and gets to do things he can’t. “One of coolest pieces of email I get is when people say that they loved my book and had to read  it with their laptop open, because they couldn’t tell where the facts ended and the fiction began.” 
But writing his super-charged novels, all 12 of them, is also a learning experience for Thor.
“There’s a lot of that in Black List, primarily to do with electronic surveillance that I didn’t know about and data collection assessment and mining,” he says. “The most interesting books for me are those from which I learn things, which while I’m being entertained, I also take away an information packet. I like the idea that my books get people talking. I want people not only to get that great thrill, but I want them to walk away feeling smarter, feeling like they’ve  learned something by reading one of my books, not like a textbook or a school book, but about really cool things.”
Ifyougo:
What: Brad Thor book signing
When: Saturday, August 25 at 1:00pm
Where: Costco, 2746 N. Clybourne Ave., Chicago, IL
Cost: Free
FYI: 773-360-2053

The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

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What if Abraham Lincoln had survived the assassination attempt on his life?  Would he still have been considered the great statesman and hero that he is today?
Maybe not, writes Stephen Carter, the William Nelson Cromwell professor of law at Yale,  in his latest book The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln: A Novel  (Knopf 2012; $26.95).
Carter, a long time fan of the 16th president who has read an immense amount of books about Lincoln, notes that highly educated abolitionists in Lincoln’s day, though vehemently against slavery were also resentful of the president. Many considered Lincoln, who had very little formal schooling and hailed from deep poverty in both rural Kentucky and Indiana, as not having the intellectual heft for the job as president. Some also thought he was moving too slowly in freeing the slaves. Besides that, Lincoln was playing to win the war, no matter what and rules were often broken.
“I think Lincoln was our greatest president; I have no question about that,” says Carter, author of four other novels including the best selling The Emperor of Ocean Park. “ But at the same time, there were a lot of things that Lincoln did during his presidency, in order to win the Civil War, which could be called into question. And so my idea was to write a courtroom drama that was crafted around that possibility. The path I sketch in my fiction is one possible path history might have taken.”
The list of what the Lincoln administration was egregious. Opposition newspapers were shuttered, editors locked up, reporters at the front who wrote unfavorable stories were subject to court martial, habeas corpus was suspended and Lincoln both ignored court orders and declared martial law.
“For Lincoln, all of this was justified by his need to win the war,” says Carter.  “And that’s the question  in my novel that the Senate has to confront — did Lincoln have a justification for the various things he attempted to do that he said were necessary?”
Asked if he thinks Lincoln could get elected today, Carter has a quick answer.
“Not a chance,” he says. “Lincoln would been dismissed as uneducated and too folksy. He also wasn’t very telegenic and had a funny voice.”