Book review: “I Shall Wear Midnight” by Terry Pratchett
Wee Mad Arthur, terribly short and terribly powerful, is a funny character in Terry Pratchett’s fantasy Discworld which is a planet flat as a pancake and, so, pretty much by [...]
Poem: Workingman’s blues #7
Workingman’s blues #7 By Patrick T. Reardon Remember that story the Greeks used to tell about five runners, each on own path, with news of Crete — the one [...]
Book review: “Geographies of the Heart” by Caitlin Hamilton Summie
Two sisters, both around thirty, sit uneasily across from each other in a restaurant — Sarah, wife, mother, seamstress, and Glennie, an obstetrician-gynecologist married to her career. Six years ago, [...]
Book review: “A Coyote’s in the House” by Elmore Leonard
What, no sociopaths? Well, A Coyote’s in the House is, after all, a book for children. But, above all, it is a novel by Elmore Leonard who specializes in stories [...]
Poem: La Japonaise
La Japonaise By Patrick T. Reardon She’s large for a small woman when you turn the corner at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and there she is, in [...]
Book review: “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017” by Rashid Khalidi
As someone who didn’t know many of the details of the battles and wars between Israel and the Palestinian people over the past century and more, I came to Rashid [...]
Book review: “The Book of Revelation: A Biography” by Timothy Beal
Yoga is devil-worship — that’s what some American Christian leaders say, such as Mark Driscoll, an evangelical pastor who, in a 2010 sermon, told his congregation: “Yoga is demonic. If [...]
Essay: An artist is a kind of saint
He hasn’t been canonized, but I think of Michelangelo as a sort of saint. William Shakespeare, too. And Emily Dickinson, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Frank Sinatra, Beethoven, Aretha Franklin and Chaucer. I [...]
Book review: “What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve ‘What Ifs’ of History,” edited by Andrew Roberts
What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve ‘What Ifs’ of History, published in 2004, is, as its subtitle suggests, a serious work of counterfactual speculation. Which isn’t to say [...]
Book review: “Shadows on the Rock” by Willa Cather
About halfway through Shadows on the Rock, Willa Cather’s 1931 novel, Cecile, the 12-year-old daughter of Quebec apothecary Euclide Auclair, hears the story of a miracle that has happened in [...]