Patrick Reardon

A thriller written more than half a century ago, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three by John Godey still thrills today. And it’s also something of a time capsule, [...]

“Think of them as fellow human beings,” Robert D. Richardson instructs the reader in the preface of his 2023 book Three Roads Back. And that is apt advice although, at [...]

Historian Andrea Wulf packs a lot into 337 pages in her 2015 book The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, and much of it will be surprising and [...]

Chicago-born Mary Fleming’s Civilisation Francaise is a novel of layers, like an onion, layers slowly peeled away for the reader to learn the stories of the book’s two central characters, [...]

Noir fiction, like film noir, deals with bad guys doing bad things, often to each other. So why do we care? James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity — serialized in 1936 [...]

John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner is one of the saddest novels ever published.  It’s sad not because it is maudlin, but because it isn’t.  Williams writes of William Stoner with [...]

D.R. Sherman’s Old Mali and the Boy, published in 1964, is a complex and poignant fable about love, set in northern India in the first half of the twentieth century. [...]