Essay: Soul Seeing — At 69, I still find grace and God on the basketball court
The video of me playing basketball didn’t exactly go viral, but it did cause a bit of a stir among my Facebook friends. And, later, it got me wondering about [...]
Poem: “Rita”
Rita Locked in her leg braces, she smiles as though the act were a somersault. Patrick T. Reardon 3.25.19 This poem originally appeared in Sparrow magazine in 1977.
Essay: Complaining about just about everything
I want to complain about complaining. Wait, let me rephrase that. I’d like to make some observations about the tendency of modern Americans to find fault with just about anything. [...]
Book review: “Things That Go Trump in the Night: Poems of Treason and Resistance” by Paul Fericano
The final poem in Paul Fericano’s new biting, silly and fittingly sophomoric poetry collection Things That Go Trump in the Night: Poems of Treason and Resistance (Poems-For-All Press, 90 pages, [...]
Book review: “The Jazz Alphabet” by Neil Shapiro
There are many pleasures in Neil Shapiro’s newly published The Jazz Alphabet — and you don’t have to be a jazz aficionado to enjoy them. This book by Neil — [...]
Book review: “Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” by Hannah Arendt
Early in Eichmann in Jerusalem, her insightful, sober and controversial 1964 book, Hannah Arendt notes that Adolf Eichmann — tried, convicted and executed in Jerusalem for war crimes, genocide and [...]
Book review: “Unnatural Axe” by Tom Huth
Published in 1969, Tom Huth’s Unnatural Axe is a time capsule from a moment — a very short blip — in American time. The innocence of the 1960's idealism and [...]
Book review: “Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings” by Christopher Moore
In his 2003 novel Fluke, Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, Christopher Moore gets all science-y on us. And more than a little science fiction-y (but without all [...]
Book review: “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
Moby Dick is an epic piece of literature on a par with Homer’s Iliad and Shakespeare’s King Lear and the Bible’s Job. It is densely rich in language and structure, [...]
Book review: The poetry of “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
One of the great pleasures of reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is his wondrously muscular prose. So thick with meaning and image, so meaty with psychological insight, so dense and [...]