Mark Twain once umpired a baseball game. Earvin Magic Johnson and a group of investors are willing to pony up $2 billion for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Estleman still prefers using his 1967 Olympia and his 1923 Underwood to bang out his novels, including his more than 30 books featuring Detroit private eye Amos Walker.

Reverby, the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Women´s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College and an historian of American women, medicine and nursing, speaks April 5 at the Michigan State University’s World View Lecture Series.

He will not be wearing his "Out for Trout" baseball cap: His former boss Michael Moore borrowed the cap for the filming of "Roger and Me" and never gave it back. Moore writes about the theft in the foreword to Hamper’s 1991 cult classic book "Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line."

Busch — an artist, actor, soldier and now author — shows his poetic vision of life and death in this unusual memoir, which doesn’t follow the usual conventions. For example, the story isn’t linear, but is broken into the sub-categories of Arms, Water, Metal, Soil, Bone, Wood, Blood and Ash, things the author refers to as elemental. Typically, he alternates chapters on his war experience with those of growing up.

Doug Stanton was just outgrowing his "Cat in the Hat" stage when the author Gay Talese, one of the progenitors of the "new journalism" movement, wrote a seminal article for Esquire on Frank Sinatra that still influences the Traverse City writer.

Eric Freedman, co author of “Presidents and Black America: A Documentary History,” said the history of the presidency is one of “oversimplification and gentrification.” Freedman is an associate professor of journalism at Michigan State University and a Pulitzer Prize winner for his investigative reporting at The Detroit News in 1994.

Think about how our lives have been enriched by the letters of Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, the Apostle Paul, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, C.S.

The literary world is full of books that began as diaries, journals or caches of letters. "Marley & Me," the best-selling memoir by former newspaper columnist John Grogan, comes immediately to mind. Grogan told me in a 2005 interview that it took him a couple of weeks to turn his weekly columns and journal entries about his dog Marley into a book.

If the Rust Belt had a capital city, it would be Detroit, where people have been making cars for more than 100 years. That may sound like a Clint Eastwood Super Bowl half-time ad, but Lolita Hernandez, author of “Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant,” insists, “The factory is the city.”