If you know anything about me, you know that my goal is to pack as much book news into the Star Tribune as is humanly possible. No editor can stop me. I am relentless. It's not enough, I say, to run two full pages of reviews and columns on Sundays; no, we must also run mini reviews on Mondays and a review from another newspaper most Tuesdays.
But even then, it's not possible to mention every book that deserves it. There are so many, and so many good ones.
So here are two more, both by writers you might know — they might even be your neighbors.
Robert Lacy, a Texas native, has lived in Minneapolis since the 1970s, teaching at the University of Minnesota and at the Loft Literary Center (and doing many other things).
His latest book (his fourth), "The House on Brown Street," was published earlier this year by Stephen F. Austin State University Press and is a collection of graceful memoiristic essays about growing up in Texas, serving in the Marine Corps and living in Minneapolis.
He worked for a while on the copy desk of the Minneapolis Star (the afternoon paper that eventually merged with the Tribune) and in "The Rim Man" he writes movingly about another copy editor who influenced his life.
The title essay is about a house in Iowa City where he lived while studying at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and it's peppered with memories of Kurt Vonnegut, Andre Dubus, Richard Yates and many other writers. (He used to watch Dubus do situps — 200 in the amount of time it took Lacy to smoke a cigarette.)
Perhaps of most interest here are the essays set in Minnesota, including "On the Dangers of Hero Worship," which looks at the very flawed life of Charles Lindbergh ("Seven children? With three different women? And nobody knew?") and "Home: An Essay," about how Minnesota has changed since he moved here in 1972. ("I take no credit," he notes.)
