There are many ways to approach "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," the majestic, mystical and often maddening book that James Agee and Walker Evans published in 1941. I'm going [...]
Published November 25, 2011 in the National Catholic Reporter Friends of mine get angry with the Catholic Church hierarchy, and, Lord knows, there's enough reason for that. To err is [...]
You'd never know from reading "Killing Lincoln" that Bill O'Reilly is a conservative political commentator. O'Reilly, the host of The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel, doesn't use this [...]
Andre Norton's "No Night Without Stars" landed in bookstores in 1975. That was 23 years after her book "Star Man's Son," better known as "Daybreak — 2250 A.D.," appeared in [...]
As "Tinkers" opens, George is dying. Paul Harding makes this clear with his first sentence: "George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died." By the end of [...]
Striding purposely around a bend of a park path recently in Washington, D.C., Jim Chianakas suddenly saw before him the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. "There it is," he said. "Wow!" Beside [...]
Finishing "Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned" by John A. Farrell, I was surprised to find myself underwhelmed by the book. No question, it's a good solid effort. Farrell has [...]
When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, I thought he would be canonized. St. JFK? It seems silly now. Now that all the stories of Kennedy's womanizing have [...]
About midway through "The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution" by Mark Roseman, I got to wondering how writers like Roseman do it. I mean, writers who spend a good [...]
On Discworld, goblins live on — are beat up on, are exploited on, are starved on, die on — the edges. They stink. They steal chickens. They eat their young. [...]