The nine best books of 2017
In addition to the groups of books I highlighted on Tuesday, I wanted to honor the nine individual books that I read in 2017. These were books that left an [...]
The best groups of books of 2017
Looking back over the 60-plus books I read in 2017, I am struck by how many of the best — 19 to be exact — fall into groups that comprise [...]
Book review: “Pronto” by Elmore Leonard
There’s no indication in Elmore Leonard’s 1993 crime novel Pronto what the title is supposed to mean. In American English, “pronto” is an adverb, meaning “quickly.” It comes from Spanish [...]
Book review: “Fashion” by Christopher Breward
Well, what is fashion? In Fashion, a carefully calibrated look at Western couture over the past 200 years, Christopher Breward notes that fashion can be viewed “as art, social process, [...]
Book review: “Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc,” edited by Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood
Published in 1996, Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, edited by Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood, is a collection of eighteen scholarly essays looking at various aspects of the [...]
Book review: “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” by Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit’s 2005 A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a celebration of much that is disdained and feared by mainstream American society: The Unknown Loss Getting Lost Being [...]
Chicago History: The Brooklyn Bridge and Chicago’s elevated Loop
The Brooklyn Bridge and Chicago’s elevated Loop don’t seem to have much in common aside from being large transportation structures. From its completion in 1883, the 1,600-foot suspension bridge spanning [...]
Book Review: “The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago,” edited by Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Rebecca Zorach
Fifty years ago, William Walker, a veteran muralist, proposed to a group of other black artists and photographers that they collaborate to produce a mural on the side of a [...]
Book review: “The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337-1453” by Desmond Seward
Desmond Seward is adamant in The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337-1453: No matter what the French or several generations of modern writers, such as George Bernard Shaw, [...]
Book Review: “The Ninth Hour” by Alice McDermott
Sister St. Saviour, a no-nonsense Catholic nun with the networking skills of Tammany Hall, stands in the near dawn at the window of a burned-out apartment in her Brooklyn neighborhood [...]