W. E. B. Du Bois, the brilliant Black scholar and one of the most consequential Americans of the 20th century, operated on an international stage where many people had a difficult time believing that he existed. “At the turn of the century,”...
Near the very end of J. L. Carr’s exquisite short novel A Month in the Country, Moon finds the missing 400-year-old grave where, all along, he knew it would be. It is summer, 1920, and, as Tom Birkin watches, Moon has been digging into the North...
Let me tell you: I’m a huge Chicago history nerd, and I just gobbled up Benjamin Sells’s new book A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America, newly published by Northwestern University Press...
Performance artist Jefferson Pinder offers, as a fleeting monument to the long-gone Wall of Respect, a piece called “Bronzeville Etude” that anyone can do — taking a run up and down the streets (map included) around the site at 43rd Street and...
Foul ball By Patrick T. Reardon . Before he was a prophet, Yogi Moses played baseball and, one dry Sunday morning, took his catcher’s mitt out to Agamemnon Field for newspaper stunt to boost attendance in sleepy May Cincinnati and, as baseball...
For African Americans who took part in the Great Migration in the first half of the 20th century, the North was a Land of Hope that often disappointed. Some important aspects of life were better than back in the South, greater political and...
The Bell by Iris Murdoch, published in 1958, is something of a time capsule. It is difficult to imagine a novel like this being written today. Murdoch’s subject is holiness and sin. I suspect that no modern novelist would be able to take up...
Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip — two cold-blooded killers who, eventually, will get their comeuppance from the skeletal guy with the scythe — are tourists in Anhk-Morpork. Well, not actually tourists although they do some touristy things and obtain...
Sgt. Sibyl Sue Blue of the spaceport city of Hammond is just, as one of her police colleagues says, “a little bitty girl.” He says this after she knocks a gun from the hand of a skulking Centaurian — a humanoid extraterrestrial — and knees him...
Back around 2800 BC or 2700 BC — in other words, nearly 5,000 years ago — lived a Middle Eastern ruler who later became the inspiration for the hero of the first great work of world literature The Epic of Gilgamesh. This ruler may have been...
There’s something deeply attractive to the idea of bad guys doing good things. That was the idea behind the 1965 bestseller by E. M. Nathanson The Dirty Dozen, about a bunch of criminals who are recruited for a suicidal mission behind enemy lines...
The cover of Menachem Kaiser’s book features several line drawings of large apartment buildings on an orange and white background that gives the appearance of having been Scotch-taped in place. Each apartment building image is covered for...
I’m the sort who, when reading a novel, looks for the title in the text. Sometimes, it’s not there, but, often, I can find it. And, usually, its placement in the the book says something about what’s important in the story. In Rex...
In 1989, Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about a British butler, was published to great acclaim and great sales. The book was soon turned into a highly praised movie with Anthony Hopkins starring as the manservant, Stevens. Six...
Teddy Carella is the hero of Ed McBain’s fourth 87th Precinct novel The Con Man, published in 1957. Teddy — Theodora — was born without the ability to speak and without the ability to hear. But she’s quite a woman — smart and sensitive...
Elmore Leonard’s novel Split Images opens in this grim way: In the winter of 1981 a multimillionaire by the name of Robinson Daniels shot a Haitian refugee who had broken into his home in Palm Beach. The Haitian had walked to the ocean from...
At the center of Thomas R. Nevin’s revelatory, deeply felt and actively contemplative 2013 study The Last Years of Saint Therese: Doubt and Darkness, 1895-1897 are nearly two dozen sentences from early in her final autobiographical manuscript...
Early in the first in-depth examination of bravura in art, Nicola Suthor, a professor of art history at Yale, tells the story of Raphael and Michelangelo meeting on the street. Raphael was with a bunch of other men; Michelangelo was alone. ...
Fred Waitzkin’s 2019 novella Deep Water Blues has the feel of someone leisurely telling a simple modern-day sea saga about betrayal, violence and sharks amid a tropical paradise of cobalt skies and beautiful vistas. It’s as if a big-city...
Robert Stassi, a Methodist minister with two master’s degrees and a Ph. D., is explaining the exterminator business to the new recruit. Stassi is called The Most Dangerous Man because he has nothing left to lose in life. His wife died...
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