Patrick Reardon

Amid the many scenes of violence, sin and pain that Gustave Dore created to illustrate a mid-nineteenth century Bible, the image of Jephthah’s daughter dancing out to meet her victorious [...]

I wanted to like Cooler by the Lake by Larry Heinemann.  It is so saturated in Chicago.  Yet, it doesn’t hang together.  It is a string of sometimes witty, sometimes [...]

Science fiction can get complicated for authors who focus on the near-term future, as Robert A. Heinlein does in The Door into Summer. Consider this timeline: Heinlein writes the book [...]

It’s a night a couple weeks before Christmas, and Jody is at the shops around Union Square in downtown San Francisco where, writes Christopher Moore, droves of “package-laden shoppers trudged [...]

This priest was driving a bunch of us teenagers somewhere, and, as we headed down the Dan Ryan just past the turnoff for the Stevenson, he said, “Look out there [...]

Emily Neilson’s 2022 children’s book The Rainbow Parade is a joyful, colorful, exuberant celebration of diversity. It is based on her memories of going to the San Francisco Pride Parade [...]

Flee the Night in Anger, published in 1954 by Dan Keller, is a pleasant enough noir novel.  Its plot is overly complicated, but that’s par for the course with a [...]

At the start of Clair Huffaker’s 1958 Guns from Thunder Mountain, Larimer is riding with some of his new gold-mining partners and approaching a small log cabin on horseback when [...]

For eight months — September, 1940 to May, 1941 — the German Luftwaffe conducted a ferocious bombing campaign over London and other British cities and towns. An estimated 40,000 civilians [...]