For one reason or another, I’ve owned a copy of the Richard Hughes novel A High Wind in Jamaica, for about 40 years, but it wasn’t until the past week that I read it. The book, originally called The Innocent Voyage, was published in 1929, but my paperback isn’t that old.  It was printed, as…

As P.D. James’s 1975 mystery The Black Tower opens, Police Commander Adam Dalgliesh has just learned that the doctors made a mistake.  He’s not going to die of acute leukemia.  He just had a case of what they’ve decided was atypical mononucleosis. “I congratulate you, Commander.  You had us worried.” “I had you interested; you…

Havelock Vetinari, not yet Patrician — in fact, still a student in the Assassin’s Guild — is a lot better at the work of “inhuming” targets than his teachers realize.  This is back thirty-plus years ago. His rich and conniving aunt, Lady Roberta Meserole, known as Madam, tells Havelock that she’s heard he scored a…

Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes, completed during the first decade of the 14th century, are one of the treasures of Western civilization. And Giuseppe Basile’s Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, published in 1993, is itself a treasure — a lavish, loving large-format photographic record of the art, featuring hundreds of images, many depicting details with great…

And when he finally gets to heaven, after spending 30 years meandering the Universe and then racing a comet, Captain Elias Stormfield of San Francisco (size 13 halo) finds out that a lot of his preconceived notions and a lot of what generations of preachers have told him are just plain wrong. He bumps into…

Space Prison by Tom Godwin is a crackerjack novel that richly fulfills the modest boast on its cover: “A Science-Fiction Adventure.” In fact, I wonder if the book would have done better in terms of sale and had more staying power in terms of reprints if it had had a more accurate title. Space Prison…

In the 1850s, Swedish writer Fredricka Bremer visited to Chicago and, to say the least, was not impressed. Ben Wilson notes in his sweeping and astute Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention that boosters promoted Chicago as “Queen of the Lake.” But Bremer dubbed it “one of the most miserable and ugly…

Philip K. Dick performs a clever feat of literary dipsy-doodle at the end of his 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, and he throws into question the reality of the world in which his reader lives. I won’t get into how he does this so as not to ruin any surprise for future…

In his introduction to Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come, T. J. Clark makes it clear that the subtext of the book has to do with the efforts in the past and of today to impose a heaven on earth. The key word there is “impose.”  Often, this involves a religiously visioned…

Drew Gilpin Faust’s 2008 book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is an extraordinary achievement that answers a needed but previously unasked question: How did Americans deal — culturally, materially and, above all, emotionally — with the grisly and inconceivable reality of more than 600,000 soldier deaths during the Civil War?…