Poem: Suffer
Suffer By Patrick T. Reardon Suffer the children to visit the prophet. Suffer the shearwaters and other birds to cringe at the raptor sound from a machine. Saint [...]
Book review: “Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth
In the annals of English-language literature, Alexander Portnoy is one of the great characters — larger than life in his sexual obsessions, his anti-Jewish Jewishness, his psychological complexes, his arrogant [...]
Book review: “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” by John Godey
A thriller written more than half a century ago, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three by John Godey still thrills today. And it’s also something of a time capsule, [...]
Book review: “Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives” by Robert D. Richardson
“Think of them as fellow human beings,” Robert D. Richardson instructs the reader in the preface of his 2023 book Three Roads Back. And that is apt advice although, at [...]
Book review: “The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World” by Andrea Wulf
Historian Andrea Wulf packs a lot into 337 pages in her 2015 book The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, and much of it will be surprising and [...]
Poem: The day before the 1996 Democratic National Convention
The day before the 1996 Democratic National Convention By Patrick T. Reardon They were famous and short, the two of them and the folkie others, guitarless, skittering and kittering [...]
Book review: “Civilisation Francaise” by Mary Fleming
Chicago-born Mary Fleming’s Civilisation Francaise is a novel of layers, like an onion, layers slowly peeled away for the reader to learn the stories of the book’s two central characters, [...]
Poem: Mount of Olives
Mount of Olives Patrick T. Reardon On the dark Mount of Olives, in a rain-jeweled copse above the garden, I removed my breastplate. I unwound my belt. My robe [...]
Book review: “Double Indemnity” by James M. Cain
Noir fiction, like film noir, deals with bad guys doing bad things, often to each other. So why do we care? James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity — serialized in 1936 [...]