In late 1972, Ed Marciniak, a perennial social critic and justice activist, became president of the Institute of Urban Life, a small program affiliated with Loyola University Chicago.  He had just finished a twelve-year run as an “insider,” working in the Richard J. Daley administration where he’d had to temper his voice and his actions.…

Kate Wilhelm envisions a community of clones as a really dysfunctional family.  Wait, that’s not quite right.  In her 1976 science-fiction novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, she envisions a community of clones as the most functional family you could think of — that is, if “functional” means ruthlessly efficient and totally focused on…

A book means something different to an author than it does to a reader. Actually, each reader has a personal experience of the book, different in small and large ways from the experience of every other reader.  But all of them are coming to the book as a completed thing.  The author, by contrast, started…

In the final pages of his adroit and illuminating 2012 book Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, Laurent Dubois brings Ricardo Seitenfus onto the stage. In December, 2010, Seitenfus — a Brazilian law professor and the head of the Organization of American States mission to Haiti in the aftermath of its catastrophic earthquake eleven months earlier…

William M. Stableford’s 1971 transposition of Homer’s Iliad into The Days of Glory is a clever piece of science fiction, especially for a guy who was then in his early 20s. But maybe it was too clever. I’m not sure that, half a century ago, many sci-fi readers would have been tempted to pick up…

For the past two millenniums, Christianity has so influenced Western society that there is an expectation that a spiritual leader, like Jesus, should be without sin.  In the Catholic Church, the veneration of saints can easily turn these figures into paragons of perfection.  And, in the United States, there is a knee-jerk reaction of shock…

Why do I read a book?  I mean, this particular book or that one.  I mean, what triggers the decision to open a book and start reading. Obviously, there are books we have to read — for a book review, say, or for research or for school or in the course of doing a job. …