the return of the lush, full-scale, read-it-with-your-Sunday-coffee book review section at Chicago Tribune

On this Spring forward day, the moon still in the sky and the birds nest-building outside my window, I'd like to celebrate the return of a full-scale book review section to Chicago Tribune, a paper I have written for, freelance style, for years.  The section is called Printers Row, and it's deep and wide ranging—traditional book reviews mixed with essays by readers and writers and booksellers, some celebrity talk, a crossword puzzle, Sudoku.  It's the kind of thing that makes me wish that I lived in the Windy City, but fortunately those of us who don't can download the weekly publication and scroll through pages that look like actual newsprint.  (Imagine.)

Here's this Sunday's edition, with one of my reviews of a new Mei-Ling Hopgood parenting book (How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm & Other Adventures in Parenting) appearing on page 19.  Huge congratulations to Elizabeth Taylor, for making this important thing happen.  Printers Row, like the new Slate Book Review, introduced by Dan Kois in early March, signal, I think, the dawning of a new era, in which books again are given the space they deserve by "traditional" media.

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