Martin Luther, the world-changing religious reformer who sparked the Reformation, was also “a great hater, unrelenting in his hatred of the papacy,” writes historian Lyndal Roper in her book Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther’s World and...
Book review: “Wild in the World” by John Donovan Published more than half a century ago, John Donovan’s Wild in the World is an exquisitely imagined, delicately rendered novel, terse and forlorn, a fable of the human condition. No time or space...
Fredric Brown’s murder mystery The Fabulous Clipjoint, first published in 1947 and reissued last December by Penzler Publishers, was good enough to win an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. But you don’t have to be a fan of detective fiction to...
Thomas Cromwell, newly named Earl of Essex, is walking at three in the afternoon to the council chamber with one councilor Audley at his side, another Fitzwilliam behind him. Norfolk goes before and behind, speaking to his sword-carrying...
Holy Spirit By Patrick T. Reardon . Holy Spirit (in caps), aka Holy Ghost, aka Paraclete. . With Father and Jesus = Trinity. . In art, dove, like the one that left the ark, came back with green twig, like dove over the Jordan and the...
I don’t get it. I mean, I don’t understand why anyone would divide Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels into those for adults (35) and those for young adults (6). It’s not like he reverted to words of single syllables or to Mother Goose ideas...
As it starts, Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson seems to be a kind of cozy for mystery lovers. It centers on an internet blog list that bookstore owner Malcolm Kershaw posted back in 2004, titled “Eight Perfect Murders” and listing seven...
Ian Buruma’s Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 is a compact history of the island nation, dense with incident and insight, yet also stylishly written. In an animated 177 pages (about 50,000 words), the Dutch-born Buruma tells a complex story that starts...
Jasper P. Duckworth is a critic in an alternate universe Chicago for Chicago Shoulders, a New City-like (or, if you will, Third Coast Review-like) publication — the Associate Media Critic, which is to say that he’s assigned to review, wittily and...
How it went By Patrick T. Reardon . It was Amen. Finger in the dish. Bread, broken. Cup, given. Blood, flesh. . The wind was not empty. The angel knew the score. . The kiss, the sword, the healing in torch...
It turns out, in Andre Norton’s 1959 Secret of the Lost Race, that the secret about the survivors of the much earlier civilization is pretty eye-popping, biologically speaking. But, because it is the twist at the very end of the novel — it...
The Curious Odyssey of Rudolph Bloom by Chicago writer Richard Reeder is a curious book, and not just because it owes its inspiration to that famous and famously challenging James Joyce novel Ulysses. It’s also a curious book because, in its 104...
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Science Fiction — the generic, er, science fiction novel, written by John Silbersack and published in late 1981 by Jove Books — is readable and reasonably entertaining. That’s what was promised for No-Frills...
Finally, Tom Cullen comes out and asks Lucy Nichols, “Why would a good-looking girl like you…?” If the 1987 novel Bandits were your run-of-the-mill crime novel, Lucy might be (a) a stripper, (b) a garbage worker, (c) a detective or (d) a whore...
First of all, a story: In April, 2010, I was in downtown Duluth on a freelance writing assignment, and, by 5 pm or so, I’d finished my interviews and was back at the Holiday Inn. Somehow, it clicked that Duluth was where Bob Dylan spent his...
Hallie wants Larry Morgan to write a book about her parents Charity and Sid Lang. After all, he’s a famous novelist, and, for 35 years, Larry and his wife Sally have been close friends of the couple. Wallace Stegner, who offers this scene...
How By Patrick T. Reardon . Ash the milk. Ash the caped-boy hero snapshot. . Ash Blacktop, signboards, white t-shirt boy. Ash left hand bunt. Ash weight circles lift. . How keen? . Ash altar-boy uniform. Ash linebacker uniform, grade school...
For a quarter of a century, I’ve used Donald L. Miller’s City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, one of the most popular books of Chicago history, as an important resource for my writing. Published in 1996 by Simon...
Henry Morton Robinson’s novel The Cardinal, originally published in 1950, was reissued in January, 1963, in anticipation of the upcoming release of the Otto Preminger movie of the same name. As best I can remember, I read the book sometime that...
Maurice, the beat-up but brainy cat, has leapt from the stable loft onto the mouse in the time-honored tradition of predator and prey — only to stop short when the mouse squeaks, “Squeak!” “Okay, here’s the deal,” said Maurice to the shivering...
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