[2] He wrote primarily for the Chicago Reader, where he was for many years the TV critic, writing reviews also on opera and classical music.

[4] In 2001, a segment was adapted for broadcast by the public radio show This American Life[5] and later anthologized by its host, Ira Glass in a 2007 collection, The New Kings of Nonfiction.

It chronicled the American Midwest of several generations through the family history of the aunts and uncles with whom Lee spent summers as a boy in a small house in Edwardsville, Illinois.

Garrison Keillor called it “A gripping book that plunges you into a rich dark stretch of visceral history.

I read it in two sittings and got up shaken.” Its account of the civilian experience of the Siege of Vicksburg was adapted as an article in the quarterly Journal of Military History.