Elizabeth Taylor

One summer evening, those of us returning home to our little street in Chicago found it transformed. The streets once pocked with potholes had been replaced by beautiful brick. Upon...

Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years By Cari Beauchamp Knopf, 506 pages, $35 Meet the financier who created -- and destroyed -- actress Gloria Swanson, bought his own film...

"It's like watching paint dry." But who really has time to watch the paint dry? Probably not even the painters. In this week's Magazine about home renovations, we get the...

The Survivors Club The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life By Ben Sherwood Grand Central, 383 pages, $25.99 These are days when a survival guide really comes in...

Obama makes history," the headlines blare. But aren't the voters the ones who made history? Who really owns that history? We carry the past with us, usually deeply embedded in...

Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting By Kitty Burns Florey Melville House, 186 pages, $22.95 "Why can't the keyboard and the pen lie down together ... and...

There's no place like home and, with a little click of her heels, our advice columnist is there. This week, the Tribune's "Ask Amy," Amy Dickinson, reflects on her childhood...

The Best American Short Stories of the Century With an Introduction by John Updike Edited by John Updike Co-edited by Katrina Kenison Houghton Mifflin, 835 pages, $19.95 (paper) Readers mourned...

At this point in the year, we will try anything. Well-intentioned aspirations have fallen by the wayside and we may have to succumb to what our parents called hocus-pocus. Funny...

Pushcart Prize XXXIII Best of the Small Presses, 2009 edition Edited by Bill Henderson With the Pushcart Prize Editors Pushcart Press, 618 pages, $16.95 Behind just about every book are...