Sal's Site
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Peace Through Pieces
An avid hunter and seller of antiques for more than four decades, 84-year-old Bob Swisher no longer buys anything he can’t lift. He also no longer strips and refinishes furniture. Yet like his great old finds in still another store, Swisher is durable; he understands what personal restoration means.
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Meals at Maize Served with Authenticity, Love for Community
Armando likes to talk, and he breaks the ice when we first sit down by telling me about a well-known C-U writer who drunkenly approached the Sandovals only two weeks after Maize opened in 2011, seemingly coming at them with a complaint near closing time on a Friday night. But the this person wasn’t complaining.…
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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…
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An inspiring Christmas book for aspiring artists
The paintings in “A Village Christmas” are best viewed in a dim light, perhaps next to the glow of lights on a Christmas tree. That’s because most of them are nighttime illustrations of extravagant, lit-up houses surrounded by snowy yards and streets, lots of dressed-up people, and horses and carriages. Kinkade’s pieces take place in…
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Author Daniel Kraus Shares His Whalefall
Daniel Kraus is an unapologetically multi-genre author who has written almost every type of fictional book except a western, and even that type of read is coming soon from the Chicago resident. An “omnivorous” reader and writer by his own account, Kraus enjoys everything from romance books to thrillers, calling himself an “agent’s nightmare” because…