Patrick Reardon

Kalypso has been told by Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, to permit Odysseus to return home after being held on her island of Ogygia — and in her bed — [...]

In preparing my review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey, I made a detailed comparison of how it matched against Emily Wilson’s 2018 version and the 1967 rendering [...]

John Keegan opens The Face of Battle, his groundbreaking 1976 book on war, with an examination of generations of military historians and finds them wanting. For instance, he quotes at [...]

At any number of points in Saint Francis of Assisi, the book’s writers make the point that the thirteenth-century Italian mystic and friar has been many things to many people [...]

The 1897 image on pages 110-111 of Jeremy Black’s A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps is a striking bird’s-eye view of Chicago, looking out across the downtown to [...]

The young woman and Sulien, an older man from another part of the world, are talking about birds and their movements together. “It’s just amazing to me how they moved, [...]

It’s a few days before Christmas in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, and Chet is a long-haired obese cat. How obese?  Well, his human, a homeless guy “dirty beyond age [...]