Poem: “July 10, 1981”
July 10, 1981 On this porch, on this cool summer day, when the moon is benign in afternoon sky, when birds sing from wire to wire, I [...]
Book review: “Lincoln’s Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac” by Stephen W. Sears
In May, 1864, during the Battle of the Wilderness, when Ulysses S. Grant was new in command of the Northern troops facing the Rebels of Robert E. Lee, an irate [...]
Book review: “Architecture by Birds and Insects: A Natural Act” by Peggy Macnamara
Some birds and bugs construct nests by sewing or weaving strands of material together. And some fashion nests out of various kinds of paper-like stuff that they create using their [...]
Book review: “You Suck: A Love Story” by Christopher Moore
You Suck: A Love Story, published in 2007, is a sequel to Christopher Moore’s 1995 novel Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story. It was then followed, in 2010, by Bite Me: [...]
Book review: “Galactic Derelict” by Andre Norton
Galactic Derelict, published in 1959, is the second in a series of Andre Norton novels that began a year earlier with Time Traders. After stumbling onto a long-lost alien technology [...]
Signing (and selling) books on Sunday morning at the Printers Row Lit Fest
I nabbed the coveted 10 am-noon slot on Sunday, June 11, at the Printers Row Lit Fest in the South Loop, and I'll be signing and selling copies of the Pulitzer [...]
Like politics, all faith is local
There is a common phrase in American democracy asserting that “All politics is local.” It’s most often attributed to Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, the masterful Massachusetts Democratic Congressman who, from 1977 [...]
Book review: “The Book of Joan” by Lidia Yuknavitch
In her new novel The Book of Joan, Lidia Yuknavitch creates a central character Joan of Dirt who shares some parallels with the fifteenth-century French heroine and Roman Catholic saint [...]
Book review: “Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story” by Christopher Moore
The key scene in Christopher Moore’s 1995 comic novel Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, comes at the end of the first of three sections. In the aftermath of making love [...]
Book review: “Called Out: A novel of base ball and America in 1908” by Floyd Sullivan
August Herrmann, president of the Cincinnati Reds, arrived early for a meeting in the New York office of the National League, and he made himself at home. He sat down [...]