The book of Genesis in the Bible has a lot of odd stuff, like incest: Abraham and Sarah aren’t just married, but they’re also brother and sister. Abraham lets Sarah [...]
Published in 1959, Alas, Babylon was among the first wave of novels to speculate about how the world, and the United States in particular, would look in the aftermath of [...]
Coleman Hawkins (1904-1969) By Patrick T. Reardon skeleton ancient network burned out the final sparks of life and music linger on true fire dies hard (he honeys his tenor sax [...]
Nestor and Stick are talking about dreams. For most people, Nestor Soto is a scary dude — a Paraguay-born, Cuba-raised, Miami drug lord, also called El Chaco, a free-basing, voodoo-worshipping [...]
For more than half a century — for 52 years, to be exact — Robert A. Caro has been working full-time to research, understand and write about power in America. [...]
Andre Norton’s 1964 novel Night of Masks is a claustrophobic reading experience — and not in a good way. This book followed her novel Catseye, published three years earlier, and, [...]
For the general public, Christianity before the Protestant Reformation is viewed as a fairly monolithic institution. Yet, in Royal Books and Holy Bones, Eamon Duffy explains that, nowadays, historians of [...]
She broke By Patrick T. Reardon She broke my arm when I was a baby. It wasn’t my arm but call it an arm. It mended crooked, at an odd [...]
Born a slave during the Civil War, Ida B. Wells was among the first generation of African-Americans who, in the wake of emancipation, had to define themselves in a radically [...]
Stone fence I built me a stone fence by stacking one glass of Maker's Mark whiskey on another, interspersed with large lumps of ice, mortared with sweet cider. I built [...]
