As P.G. Konody notes in his 1907 book The Brothers van Eyck (Bell’s Miniature Series of Painters), very little is known about Hubert Van Eyck and much more about his [...]
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 [...]
On the one hand, it’s amazing that, for hundreds of years, people have been rewriting Psalm 23. You know, the one that begins: The Lord is my shepherd; I [...]
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 [...]
