Something new at Not for Attribution:
Have been groping lately for breakfast-table reading. Nothing autocratic, you know, a la the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes (the good one). Something to feed the mind without requiring Great Books-style concentration.
Groping, I say, because of the increasingly slim and flimsy offerings in my two daily newspapers, Chi Trib and Sun-Times, both as to interest-level (don’t care about this, don’t care about that, over and over, I say to myself), lack of imagination (dying for a good lede, even a good head), and even-handed, let-chips-fall coverage. . . . .
Blithe Spirit 
Jim,
Have you read Kevin Baker’s historical novel “Paradise Alley?”
Set in NYC at the time of the Draft Riots in July of 1863, Kevin Baker an editor for American Heritage Magazine, has written what might arguably be the finest example of historical fiction since Thackeray or Tolstoy.
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