"Miracle Ball" is a thin book, just 231 pages. And it could have been thinner. Even so, it's a sweet story, a sort of Pilgrim's Progress through the worlds of [...]
More than 40 years after it was first published, Jim Bouton's "Ball Four," his diary of his 1969 season with two major league teams, remains eminently readable and entertaining. And [...]
In 2005, the British publishing house of Canongate began producing a series of short novels based on myths from Western and non-Western civilizations. "The Penelopiad" by Margaret Atwood was among [...]
When my daughter saw me reading "The Odyssey," she made a face. Back in high school, I think it was, she had to read it, and hated it. Truth be [...]
Which is this nation's most hallowed ground? The phrase has been used to describe the Gettysburg battlefield, Arlington National Cemetery and Ground Zero. I write about this question in an [...]
Thomas Berger was born in 1924. He was 40 in 1964 when he published his best-known novel, "Little Big Man," chronicling the early life of Jack Crabb, a white who, [...]
Published in Illinois Heritage magazine in September, 2009 Daniel Burnham was depressed. The man known as “Uncle Dan” to his fellow architects and urban planners was someone who, through force [...]
An address at the Chicago History Museum, December 14, 2006 When Erik Larson introduces Sol Bloom in his best-selling book “The Devil in the White City,” Bloom is a young [...]
A half century after its publication, Thomas Berger's novel "Little Big Man" is still a fine read, interesting and entertaining. But it doesn't pack the wallop it did back in [...]
There is so much that is wonderful — and scary — in Richard Rhodes' 1986 history of the creation of nuclear weapons, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." For me, [...]