Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MILWAUKEE -- The other morning, I told a woman at the gym about my $5 dress from Gap. I wasn't wearing it at the time. The dress just came up in conversation.

She shot out an arm for a high five.

I wear cheap on my sleeve. I also keep it in the dining room, where we eat at a Knoll conference table I scored for $50. The living room boasts a vintage Westnofa lounge chair purchased for $40, and a floor model lamp picked up from Pottery Barn for less than half its original price.

GREEN BAY. Wis. -- Gregg Williams put a bull's-eye on players. There's no sugarcoating this. The defensive coordinator paid his players for knockouts, for cart-offs, for injuring the opposition. His cowboy, malicious actions may go down as one of pro football's darkest secrets ever.

MILWAUKEE -- The woman charged with cutting the late-term fetus from a young mother, with hopes of passing the baby off as her own, suffers from a multiple personality disorder, according to the report of a new mental exam.

"WATERGATE." By Thomas Mallon. Pantheon. $26.95.

Even the biggest secrets have secrets lurking behind them.

And, Thomas Mallon suggests in his absorbing new novel "Watergate," America's biggest and dirtiest revealed secret was no exception.

FRIENDS LIKE US. By Lauren Fox. Knopf. 288 pages. $24.95.

As I read Lauren Fox's new novel, I dog-eared the pages with witty lines, or impressively bitter ones, or ones that made me laugh.

Please forgive me, Alfred A. Knopf, for what I've done to your book. I hadn't intended to make origami out of it.

MILWAUKEE -- In the mid-'50s, when pro football was just beginning to get its meat hooks into the psyche and pocketbooks of the American public, the rest of the NFL owners were putting the squeeze on the Green Bay Packers to move to Milwaukee.

In response, more than 70 percent of the city of Green Bay voters who participated in a referendum approved floating $960,000 worth of bonds to build Lambeau Field.

Roughly a half-century later, Packers president and non-owner Bob Harlan went door-to-door to sell a $295 million renovation that would mostly be financed with a sales-tax bump in Brown County.

"LIFE UPON THESE SHORES: LOOKING AT AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY 1513-2008." By Henry Louis Gates Jr. Knopf. $50.

222The great strength of "Life Upon These Shores" is the "abundance of images" that Gates, the editor-curator, and his team of associates have woven into this book. with more than 700 photos, maps, illustrations, posters and cartoons.