Patrick Reardon

In 1955, early in his struggle for civil rights, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. likened the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to the destruction of the Egyptian [...]

Many readers are likely to dismiss Robert Alter’s The Art of Bible Translation as inside-baseball for Bible scholars.  After all, the Bible is the Bible, right? Well, not really.  The [...]

Emmeline Pankhurst was a prim, proper, middle-class Victorian Englishwoman who, on a day in early July, 1914, a few days before her 56th birthday, was rearrested by authorities for her [...]

The cover of Christian Flesh by Paul J. Griffiths is a warning that this book of moral theology is not for the faint of heart. It is a detail from [...]

Sylvia Kedge, the young physically impaired woman who was the secretary of murder victim Maurice Seton, has just had an emotional melt-down, and one of the policemen is pushing her [...]

About midway through Nicholas Orme’s fascinating Medieval Children — a history of what it was like to be a child in Europe in medieval times leading up to the Enlightenment [...]

Well, OK. Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, published in 1967, has sold millions of copies over the past half century.  But it’s not the book she submitted to her [...]

To my mind, the most masterful touch in Joan Lindsay’s very well-crafted novel Picnic at Hanging Rock is the disappearance of the self-contained, seemingly logic-driven mathematics teacher Greta McCraw. Sure, [...]

Tom Wolfe published The Right Stuff in 1979, a full 52 years after Charles Lindbergh, the first celebrity flyboy, shocked and captivated the nation with his aerial deering-do, crossing the [...]

The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, published in 1959, collects Robert Heinlein’s novella of the same title plus five short stories — all of which exist in Twilight Zone territory. [...]