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Do you like television’s “Mad Men?” I sure do. Imagine my delight, then, to fall into Rona Jaffe’s first novel, “The Best of Everything” (1958). Set in the early Fifties, the story follows a handful of working girls at a Manhattan publishing house. Leisurely told, Jaffe (1931-2005) has a light touch with heavy themes. I

A shared prize set novelist Jonathan Franzen (“Freedom”) and biographer Isabel Wilkerson (“The Warmth of Other Suns”) on the same stage last Sunday. http://www.chicagohumanities.org/ through Nov. 13th. (Thanks for the treat, Deborah.) Migration figures in both works. In “Freedom,” Patty leaves the East Coast for a kinder, gentler life in the Midwest. In “Warmth…” six million

I’m one of the few readers on earth who didn’t finish Erik Larson’s 2004 mega-hit, “Devil in the White City.” I had researched and written about the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago — the White City — so those chapters bored me. The serial killer chapters scared me. I couldn’t read it! Now Larson has