Everyone, I suppose, has a sense of the what-if of history. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to Ford’s Theater that night and had avoided assassination? What if I had [...]
A half a century ago, as a new political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Dick Simpson won election to the Chicago City Council for the [...]
In his poem “The Hourglass. The Pebble. The Throne of God,” Faisal Mohyuddin ponders “the lightless language of elegy.” His father is dead, and he is grieving. And he wonders [...]
The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City is Kevin Baker’s love letter to the city and the sport and the way they have intertwined for [...]
Some thoughts on re-reading Trevanian’s The Eiger Sanction nearly half a century after I first read it: The thriller The Eiger Sanction was published in 1972 and quickly became [...]
There are two original sins in P.D. James’s 1994 Original Sin. One is central to the mystery. The other is a mournful shadow of history. The story also features the [...]
Salman Rushdie’s 1990 novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories is joyous, inventive, delightful, funny, fun, enticing, stimulating, dazzling and playful. It opens with a sentence about “a sad city, [...]
Less than two years ago, novelist Salman Rushdie was the victim of a stabbing attack that left him near death. His newly published nonfiction book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted [...]
About five years ago, I read two books that knocked my socks off — the exquisitely evocative Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and that massive, epic, beautiful whale of [...]
A time in America By Patrick T. Reardon “Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers. One hundred million angels singin'. Multitudes are marchin' to the big kettledrum.” — Johnny Cash, [...]
