Month: January 2025
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Authoritarian Rule in a College Town
Our world has no shortage of power-hungry dictators, sadly. What might the college town of Champaign-Urbana have looked like in 1991 under an authoritarian government? Author Sarah Lariviere, a Champaign, Illinois, native with deep roots in Central Illinois, offers a look at such a life in her rousing novel Riot Act, published in 2024 by…
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Q&A with Archer Cook: ‘Her Second Husband’ and a Second Chance
The memoir Her Second Husband by Archer Cook was the surprise read of 2024 for me. It’s about “a husband who lived through an abusive relationship” with a woman named Hildegard. I thought at first this was an odd premise for someone’s life story, but as I delved into Cook’s world, I saw how his…