"Lost" in Key West

My author buddy Jimmy (J.D.) Gordon and I dodged the Noel tropical storm/hurricane bullet and soaked up five days in paradise down at the place where the road comes to an end in Florida, Key West.

I'll be writing more about the trip soon, but first have to catch up on some sleep (something they do very little of 90 miles north of Cuba).

In the meantime, whet your appetite with my "Lost" in Key West photo journal.

Nope, we never found that darned shaker of salt. Thought for sure it would show up in that ivy.

Interview: Author Frank S. Joseph

Frank S. Joseph left Chicago in 1969 and vowed never to come back. You might think that he was a Cubs fan who had finally thrown in the towel after the Cubs infamous late-season collapse that year.

But he wasn't a Cubs fan. In fact, he was just the opposite, a die-hard White Sox fan who had grown up on the South Side.

It wasn't baseball, or even football (the Bears that year posted a 1-13 record), that pushed Joseph away. Rather, it was the political turmoil in Chicago at the time. Joseph, a hardened journalist, had seen more than he could take.

Although he didn't keep his vow never to return, he never did move back. But in many ways the Chicago that he grew up with never left him. And in his debut novel, To Love Mercy, Joseph returns to the Chicago that he left behind and brings back some of its treasured memories from days gone by (places like Bronzeville, Comiskey Park, Maxwell Street and Riverview) while also exploring some of the racial and ethnic divisions that continued to haunt him long after he tried to walk away from them.

That's the intro to my interview with Joseph at chicagowrites.org.

Book Review: Good Money After Bad

With his appropriately named protagonist Chance Skinner, who of course always seems to have a Lucky Strike dangling from his lips, Donald G. Evans provides a fascinating insider's glimpse into the dizzily seductive and oftentimes ugly world of sports gambling.

Using Wrigley Field, the home ballpark of baseball's Chicago Cubs, a team well-known for misfortune and losing, Evans sets a tone of doom that builds throughout his winning debut.

Like holding a pair of aces and jacks in your hand, you won't want to put this one down. Evans doesn't disappoint all the way to the end when he gives the reader a thrilling and surprsing payoff.

Put your money down on this one. "Good Money After Bad" is certainly a good bet.

To learn more about the author, visit Evans' website and read my interview with him at chicagowrites.org.

Blog + Law = Blawg

Blog is a fusion of the words web and log, or an online journal. How popular are blogs? Well, one indicator is blog search engine Technorati, which is currently tracking a whopping 105.1 million blogs.

My good friend Bill Gratsch, a Detroit lawyer who specializes in web technologies for the legal community, was clever enough to take the fusion one step further when he created blawg.com, a law blog directory which currently tracks over 1,700 blogs whose focus is various aspects of the law.

Bill recently started writing his own blog for blawg, the Blawg Blog, and asked me if I'd write a weekly blog entry for it highlighting books about the law, from fiction to non-fiction and academic to popular.

Well, you know that I wouldn't be writing this blog entry if I'd turned down Bill's invitation. Now every Saturday you'll find a new book report from me in my latest gig as the Blawg Book Highlighter.

My first book report is on One L, Scott Turow's memoir about his first year at Harvard Law School. Read it here.

LOST in Margaritaville

Never say never again.

That's my new motto. Because I keep saying that I'm done with promoting and touring on behalf of my book, Lost in the Ivy.

Then something comes along that I can't turn down. First it was The Book Cellar in Chicago's Lincoln Square. Then it was the Printers Row Book Fair.

Now it's Meeting of the Minds.

Don't know what that is? Well, then you're not a true Parrothead. Because Meeting of the Minds is the annual convention of Parrotheads, a commonly used nickname for fans of musician Jimmy Buffett. And 3,500 of these grass skirt-wearing, margarita-drinking devotees of all things Jimmy will be gathering in Key West, Florida, Nov. 1-4.

And I'll be there signing my book. Thanks to my good friend and fellow author, JD Gordon, for inviting me and getting me in. The two of us will be flying on Halloween, in Spirit Airways' "big seats."

Now all I gotta find is that lost shaker of salt. Maybe I'll find it in the ivy.

Update on Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at 10:15PM by Randy Richardson

To see when I'll be signing and who will be signing with me, go to Appearances.