So many images represent Walt Disney. There’s that mouse, of course, and all those movies. There’s so much music, countless cartoons, and aisles of toys Once there were even comic books. Characters like Donald Duck operated across many different media. We know about the cartoons starring an exasperated duck with a funny voice. But there was also an adventure series with Donald, his nephews, and a miserly Uncle Scrooge in comic books created by cartoonist Carl Barks.

Barks, who worked for Disney from 1942 to 1966, is now singled out for his comic-book creations. Other people have depicted Disney’s duck but they don’t have their stories being reprinted in full-color hardbound books from Fantagraphics (the complete Barks series is slated to be completed by 2026).

What sets Barks apart are his stories, said Peter Schilling, Jr., whose book, Carl Barks’ Duck, was published in 2014. “It’s the writing as well as the art,” he said.

Schilling discovered Barks as a kid when he and his brother were avid comic-book readers. What Schilling discovered was that the comics that Barks created—anonymously under the Walt Disney umbrella—were different from those drawn by other artists. “We read other Donald Duck comics but they weren’t the same. They weren’t from that guy,” he said.

That guy—Barks—toiled in anonymity until late in his career but the secret’s out now. “I look at his comics like little movies with Donald Duck as Cary Grant, whose career ran from comedy to serious drama,” said Schilling.

Along with his wide-ranging stories and explosive artwork, Barks was a creator of characters. He came up with Uncle Scrooge, Gyro Gearloose, the Woodchuck Manual, and the Beagle Boys, said Schilling.

As for a favorite story, Schilling cited several in his book but called “Vacation Time” “a forgotten masterpiece.”

“The End of Baseball: A Novel” by Peter Schilling Jr.

Another Schilling book, The End of Baseball—A Novel (2008), is a baseball novel of what might have been. Schilling writes a story featuring Bill Veeck, the real-life maverick promoter, who reportedly had a plan in 1944: buy the struggling Philadelphia Athletics franchise and replace the existing squad, a woeful bunch made up of players either too young or too old (World War II had depleted rosters for all teams) and replace them with star players from the Negro leagues.

Veeck was a baseball man, through and through. His father, William Sr., was a Chicago sportswriter who became president of the Chicago Cubs. After his father died in 1933, Veeck became treasurer of the Cubs. In 1941, he bought the Milwaukee Brewers, then a Cub minor league property. Veeck raised attendance with promotions by giving away live animals or scheduling morning games with free breakfast for overnight workers.

When it came to baseball promotions, no one could hold a candle to Veeck who, in 1951, sent Eddie Gaedel—all 3-foot-7 of him, up to the plate for one of the most famous one-day careers in baseball (he walked). Veeckis is also given credit for growing the ivy that still grows in Wrigley Field and introducing scoreboards that could dispense fireworks.

That was reality. In his book, Schilling related that Veeck, back from WWII service where he was injured while serving in the Marines, shared his revolutionary plan to integrate baseball with then-commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The baseball establishment then then thwarted the deal by having another buyer take over the Philadelphia franchise.

Did Veeck actually plan such a move three years before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier? Schilling thinks so and his book imagines the season that might have followed, raising awareness of some of the great players in the Negro leagues as well as anticipating some of the problems such a team would have faced.

In real life, Veeck headed a syndicate that bought the Cleveland India

Pickleball has become the fastest-growing sport in America. Ilana Long, author of Pickleballers, a debut romantic comedy set in Seattle, noted that as many as 50 million individuals are expected to play the sport in 2024.
The game, which Long calls multigenerational, serves as the backdrop for a story about a young woman who, on the rebound of a breakup, finds solace and redemption on the pickleball court.
Long, who said the sport gave her life during the pandemic, says she's met folks on the pickleball court she'd never have run into otherwise.
The pickleballer in Long's book is a newbie to the sport looking to recover from life’s swings and misses. Meg Bloomberg is in a pickle: What to do now that boyfriend Vance has left?
She finds hope on the ferry between Seattle and Bainbridge Island. That's where she meets Ethan Fine. The relationship gets off to an inauspicious start when his seatbelt locks up in her car. But Meg rises to the occasion to cut him loose.
"Maybe this was the new Meg Bloomberg. Bouncing on a strange man's lap, wielding a knife, and talking like a crustacean in a Disney movie," noted Long.
Fine, described as "a charismatic environmental consultant," is a resident of Bainbridge Island. Things look promising until Meg discovers that Ethan is sabotaging her home court. She decides the match is over. Or is it?



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About Ilana Long
Ilana Long first heard about pickleball when her sporty friend confessed that she was addicted to a game that was “like ping-pong but standing on the table.” Shortly after, Long joined the pickleball craze despite her utter lack of hand-eye… More about Ilana Long

Whenever the Jurassic Park/World franchise launches another movie entry, the national media runs to quote “a dinosaur guy” for a professional analysis. One of the guys they call is David Hone, a zoologist at Queen Mary University in London and the author of How Fast Did T.rex Run? and the Tyrannosaur Chronicles.

Hone’s latest book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior (Princeton University Press), seeks to provide answers as to how dinosaurs may have moved, fed, grew, and reproduced.

Deducing dinosaur behavior isn’t easy when all you’ve got to go on are a few bones but Hone believes it’s possible. His book uses comparisons to living species as well as referencing the latest studies on prehistoric behavior. Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior uses diagrams, photographs, and the artwork of Florida artist Gabriel Ugueto to flesh out the dinosaur behavior picture.

Hone said discoveries from two centuries of research have expanded our view of life on the planet 70 million years ago. “We’ve been in a golden age of dinosaur discovery for the past 30 or 40 years and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon. Dinosaurs are no longer considered the cold-blooded, tail-dragging, stupid, lizard-like monsters of the Victorian age, but are instead recognized as animals that were upright, active, fast-growing, and if not especially intelligent, certainly not stupid,” he said.

Hone's a critic when it comes to the latest Jurassic Park movies. “The first ones (starting in 1993) were fine but the last few have been really woeful—both as movies and as a dinosaur spectacle,” he said. Dinosaurs depicted in recent films are less accurate than the Jurassic Park movies of 30 years ago, noted Hone.

As a scientist and writer whose first two books focused on the Tyrannosaurus rex, Hone is in a good position to comment on the creature he classifies as one of a kind. “Take an orca (killer whale) and put it on legs and you’ve got an extraordinary predator. Probably more scientific papers have been written about T.rex than any other dinosaur,” he said.

As for how fast a T.rex run can run, Hone said a beast that could reach a weight of seven tons could make 15 mph--not enough to challenge a Jeep as depicted in the first Jurassic Park movie but it could definitely outrun a man, he said.

The T.rex may have lost a battle with a Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park 3 but the author, whose next book will focus on Spinosaurus research, says that outcome would have been unlikely. T.rex had a decided size advantage, said Hone, comparing the confrontation as combat between a lion and a cheetah.

Figuring out how creatures behaved millions of years ago remains an ongoing challenge for scientists but Hone said it’s worth remembering that “the sum total of the behaviors of dinosaurs across 1,500 species and 170 million years were much more complex and interesting than we can ever know.”

A plaque standing in downtown Bloomington, Ill. pays tribute to that city’s circus heritage:

“In the era before movies, television, and the internet, it was the circus that entertained us…For more than 80 years, spanning the 1870s until the 1950s, countless numbers of brave Bloomington men and women risked their lives to entertain massive crowds by performing aerial tricks high up on the flying trapeze.”

After two local brothers, Howard and Fred Green installed a trapeze rigging in a Bloomington building in 1875, the town became known as a center for trapeze artists. When the Green brothers went on to international fame, others were inspired to perform.

Bloomington became the center of activity for aerialist training and trapeze act recruitment in the United States. More than 200 people from the Bloomington area became circus performers, according to the McLean County Historical Society.

Charting that history today is Maureen Brunsdale, a Special Collections Librarian at Illinois State University’s Milner Library since 2008.

Brunsdale has published dozens of articles and, in 2013, wrote her first circus book, The Bloomington-Normal Circus Legacy with co-author Mark Schmitt. In the Shadow of the Big Top: The Life of Ringling's Unlikely Circus Savior (2023) is Brunsdale’s second book on the circus.

In the Shadow tells the story of Art Concello, a trapeze artist who trained at the Bloomington YMCA and in a fabled barn on Bloomington’s Emerson Street. Concello became known for performing the triple somersault, “the killer trick,” as it was called because so many trapeze artists had died trying to perform it, said Brunsdale.

With wife Antoinette, they became known as the Flying Concellos, charting circus history with their circus. Antoinette, a trapeze pioneer in her own right, Brunsdale noted, later became the first woman to perform the triple somersault.

But Art went on to perform amazing feats on the ground, she said. He demonstrated the same skill as an executive as he did on the flying trapeze “after hanging up his tights as a performer,” noted Brunsdale. Concello handled the crushing task of transporting circus acts (that usually only stayed in the same place for two days) with hundreds of people plus animals and equipment from town to town with remarkable efficiency, she said.

Concello is credited with later working out the logistics of transitioning circus acts from tents to indoor arenas, enabling circus acts to reach the public in the 20th century.

Concello also played a major role in the making of The Greatest Show on Earth, the Cecil B. DeMille film made in 1952. Concello trained Betty Hutton on the trapeze for the movie while Charlton Heston’s role as circus manager is a character reportedly based on Concello, himself.

“Once the biggest moneymaker in the world of entertainment, the circus may not have the elevated status it once did but it’s still with us,” said Brunsdale, citing circus acts still performed on television, the success of the Cirque du Soleil, and a revived Ringling Brothers touring show.

Bloomington-Normal’s circus heritage is celebrated every April when the Gamma Phi Circus performs on the Illinois State University campus, a tradition since 1929, Brunsdale noted.

Decades before the Civil War, Illinois meant freedom for those seeking to escape slavery. Larry McClellan’s Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois is his third book exploring the phenomenon known as the Underground Railroad.

McClellan, a resident of Crete, Illinois, some 35 miles south of Chicago, served as a professor of sociology at Governors State University, the Chicago school he helped found 54 years ago.

“It was neither underground nor a railroad,” said McClellan. The Underground Railroad was a freedom movement that depended on a fundamental human situation, he said. “When people on the run showed up at the door, the folks who lived on a farm had to make a human decision: are we going to help these folks?”

“The thing most striking to me is how ordinarily human this all becomes. There were people running for their freedom and other people saying, my gosh, we have to help,” said McClellan.

“Perhaps the stories of secret hiding places, tunnels, and other collaborations kept deeply hidden were experienced in other parts of Illinois and other states,” noted McClellan. “However in Chicago and northern Illinois, in large part because of broad-based abolitionist sentiments by the 1850s, activists needed to be discrete but not totally secretive.”

That doesn’t mean there weren’t dangers for those who sought to help people find freedom. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 strengthened penalties on those who assisted freedom seekers. “Its passage terrorized Black people across the northern states, creating fear for settled families as well as for freedom seekers traveling toward Canada. The new law meant that places such as Chicago and other places in northeastern Illinois were no longer outside the reach of slave catchers and kidnappers,” he said.

Illinois was classified as a free state but that label could be misleading, he said. “In southern Illinois, the population was overwhelmingly pro-slavery. When we get to central Illinois—places like Springfield and Peoria where folks followed the Illinois River—sentiment is mixed with a substantially larger number of people who are anti-slavery (compared to southern Illinois),” said McClellan.

The Underground Railroad operated through Peoria and neighboring communities, he said. “On both sides of the Illinois River, you literally had hundreds of people who were walking on their way to freedom. They were coming through,” said McClellan.

The number of people who actually “ran” the Underground Railroad was very small, he said. Within the general population, there may have been a majority that considered themselves opposed to slavery but only a minority of those were abolitionists, individuals calling for the repeal of slavery. Smaller still within the abolitionist group were those people willing to break the law and help people escape, said McClellan.

McClellan, whose research on the Underground Railroad spans three decades, estimates that 3,000 to 4,500- freedom seekers came through northeastern Illinois. The total number of people who sought freedom across the country through the Underground Railroad is estimated to be between 30,000 to 50,000, he said.

“We have great journey stories and, in addition, we have a great set of location stories, places where freedom seekers found help and places that began to be identified as places of refuge. Here in Illinois, we can document at least 200 places where freedom seekers found help. In my research some 60 sites in northeastern Illinois alone have been identified,” said McClellan.

McClellan said information on the operation of the Underground Railroad throughout the state will soon be submitted to the Illinois Legislature. He also announced that work is underway on documenting the Chicago to Detroit Freedom Trail, a route taken by many freedom seekers who sought refuge in Canada.

The comics page has long been a place for cars and energy. Comic strips like Otto Auto, Toonerville Folks, and Gasoline Alley related a nation that happily motored about in a car-centric world.

Daniel Worden, an art professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, relates that history in Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics.

“This book analyzes how comics represented this transition to fossil fuels from the late nineteenth century to the present, a transition that shaped the comics medium itself,” wrote Worden, who teaches a course on comics at RIT.

“I write this book during an ongoing climate crisis, and comics are relevant to this crisis because the medium both shaped fossil fuel culture and offers ways of making, reading, seeing, and belonging that pull away from the time and space of fossil fuel culture,” he noted.

Comic artists in magazines and newspapers chronicled America’s oil industry, comparing the growth of Standard Oil to an octopus reaching out across the country. One of Worden’s favorite examples is Oil John, the Detective, a strip by Gus Mager that caricatured the oil trust. Oily John is a lanky John D. Rockefeller who captures small dealers, “a ridiculous miser out to get the little guy,” noted Worden.

Along with being the focus of comic art, oil companies were also comic enablers, distributing their own four-page funnies in the 1930s before traditional stapled comic books were produced, said Worden.

“The media landscape has changed. Comics are everywhere now,” he said, adding that the traditional printed comics in newspapers and magazines have migrated to the internet and graphic novels.

Worden’s Rochester class focuses more on “serious” comics such as the work of Joe Sacco whose comics have focused on subjects such as the Bosnian War and the conflict between Israel and Palestine than superhero exploits, he said.

“There have been a number of good non-fiction comics about climate change,” said Worden, citing examples such Science comics that detail the origin and impact of climate change in its “Wild Weather” series.

Worden sees comics as becoming a regional asset. He organizes the Rochester Indie Comics Festival every spring that brings 60 to 80 comic book artists to the town where they can sell their comics to the public.

Having just attended a similar festival in Columbus, Ohio, Worden said he sees comics not only becoming more of a regional issue but serving as a tool to help educate the public.

Doug Villhard knew that Red Grange might have been the greatest running back in the history of college football. He was also singularly responsible for helping make the National Football League an established professional league. But Villhard said what drew him to write the historical novel, The Golden Age of Red, was Grange’s alliance with C.C. Pyle, the man who became America’s first sports agent.

The University of Illinois is the setting as the book takes off with Pyle running the Virginia Theater in Champaign, Illinois. The year is 1924 and it's the year that Red Grange, already America’s darling, turns in a performance for the ages against a vaunted Michigan team.

Villhard paints a picture of Pyle as a Hollywood has-been who still has connections (Charlie Chaplin visits him in Champaign). Pyle is a 42-year-old former actor forced to live in the past. Yet he notices when the newsreel lights up the screen in the 1,500-seat theater (that still stands, by the way), customers go wild when Grange’s exploits are shown. “This guy’s a national hero right here on campus and he doesn’t even know it,” figures Pyle who lets Grange sneak in the backdoor to watch the movies to avoid the crowd’s adulation.

The story takes off from there as Villhard takes us on a thrill ride with the man sportswriter Grantland Rice called the Galloping Ghost. Grange charges through a spectacular career with Illinois and carries on to boost the fortunes of the Chicago Bears in the rough-and-tumble NFL, a league that Villhard said was closer to professional wrestling than what we know today as pro football.

The U of I will rededicate the 100-year-old Memorial Stadium on Oct. 19 with ceremonies to include a Red Grange symposium.

College football was a very big deal in the 1920s, especially at big state schools like Illinois and Michigan. That’s why they built a stadium to hold 67,000 in 1924 (today Memorial Stadium has been enlarged to hold more than 80,000). Of course there just weren’t enough seats in any stadium to accommodate all the people who wanted to watch Red Grange play football in 1924.

If you were lucky enough to get one of those seats back on Oct. 18, 1924, you had to be worried at the prospect of facing a fabled Michigan team that came into Champaign riding a 20-game winning streak.

Following the Michigan coach’s old-school strategy that valued field position over all else, they kicked the ball to Grange who takes it at the five-yard-line.

Big mistake. Grange runs it back for a touchdown and the rout is on. Grange proceeds to score four times before halftime. In the second half, Grange scores another touchdown, throws a TD pass, and intercepts two passes while playing defense. Final score: Illini 39 Michigan 14.

In 1991, Sports Illustrated cited Grange’s performance in that game as “the most unforgettable moment in sports.”

Another major character in Villhard’s novel is Coach Bob Zuppke, the Illini coach. Villhard believes the only reason Zuppke isn’t regarded as one of the great football coaches of all time--like Knute Rockne and Amos Alonzo Stagg--was his refusal to sign out-of-state students that later cost him wins in the highly competitive Big Ten. He believed that if you were a true footballer and grew up in Illinois, you should play for the Illini, said Villhard.

The field at Memorial Stadium is named for Zuppke, the "razzle dazzle" coach credited with inventing the huddle, the screen pass, the spiral snap, and the flea flicker (The QB hands the ball off to a running back who laterals the ball to a receiver. The receiver then laterals the ball back to the quarterback for a pass). Zuppke and Grange shared a special relationship but the coach opposed Red going pro and didn’t talk to Grange for years after his greatest star joined the Bears.

It’s a story of World War II but it’s also a story of politics, power, seduction, and intrigue. Did I leave anything out?

Pamela Churchill Harriman didn’t as Sonia Purnell’s book, Kingmaker, makes clear. The British biographer and journalist spent five years gathering information on Harriman’s life, including gaining access to a wealth of fresh research, interviews, and newly discovered sources.

Harriman, who died in 1997, is well-known as Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, the 20-year-old who played cards with Winston in the middle of the night when bombs were falling on London but she was also a power broker whose influence extends to the present. It was Harriman who bolstered Joe Biden’s career back in 1988 early in the Delaware senator’s career.

Pamela Harriman got around, to put it mildly. She successfully wooed W. Averill Harriman, the wealthy businessman who came to London as Franklin Roosevelt’s “Lend Lease” representative in 1940—before America was in the war. Lend Lease was the result of Churchill’s efforts in urging FDR to provide a beleaguered Britain with much-needed war supplies—much to the annoyance of the U.S. separatist movement.

This was a time when England was just hanging on, rapidly running out of manpower, munitions, and supplies as Nazi forces loomed across the channel. But she did even more to advance “Operation Seduction USA,” as Purnell put it: she bedded generals, high-ranking officials, and representatives of the media (most notably Ed Murrow whose “This is London” broadcasts helped Americans experience England’s plight during the Blitz)—all for the sake of jolly old England.

She married Randolph Churchill and had his child, Winston II, but the prime minister’s son, awash in gambling problems, was a disaster as a husband, said Purnell. The pair were divorced following the war and Pamela found herself out of a job along with father-in-law Winston, as Clement Attlee and the Labour Party swept to power in 1945.

After moving to France, she spent time with playboy Prince Aly Khan before falling in love with Gianni Agnelli, the head of auto giant Fiat. After four years the couple broke up but Agnelli, whose own career is one for the books, stayed in touch-- calling Pamela every morning at seven for the rest of her life, said Purnell.

In 1960 Pamela moved to America and married Leland Hayward, the Broadway producer with shows like South Pacific, The Sound of Music, Mister Roberts and Gypsy to his credit. Harriman enjoyed their 11-year marriage until his death. At age 51, she married Harriman, her lover from the war, and now 79 and a widower.

Being married to the elder statesman of the Democratic Party kicked off a new chapter in Pamela’s illustrious life—that of a person of influence. “Adversity galvanized her,” noted Purnell, pointing to how she countered the Reagan landslide of 1980 by pumping up Democratic hopes. Harriman reminded them that Churchill came back (getting re-elected prime minister in 1951) and that Democrats could, too.

At her funeral, Clinton acknowledged that without Harriman’s support, he might never have been president. Purnell noted that it was through Harriman’s connections in Washington, her hobnobbing with the high and mighty, that allowed a young politician from the state of Arkansas to gain visibility and ascend to the national stage. A grateful Clinton named her U.S. ambassador to France, a position she held until her death.

There was virtually nobody of substance in the 20th century that Harriman didn’t know or work with, Purnell said, offering a list that included such luminaries as Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Nelson Mandela.

Earlier biographies have painted Harriman as a sex-obsessed gold digger, a courtesan who craved power, as “the other woman” in her relationships with married men. There w