The other day, I started reading Jane Austen’s delightfully droll and perceptive 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, and it’s gotten me thinking about the cancel culture. “Cancel culture” is a fairly new term predominately used by conservatives to...
Jim Butcher’s 2000 novel Storm Front, the first of the very successful series of Dresden Files novels — 17 so far with more on the horizon — is a rip-snorting, crackerjack, page-turner of urban fantasy. It features Harry Blackstone Copperfield...
After reading “State of Relax” by Eileen Myles By Patrick T. Reardon . “Cows kissing goats” — Bible-immersed — I see lions bedding with lambs. . Calliope of poem, lustful, subtle — nation un-uniting itself and sighing...
There is much that is surprising and interesting and fascinating in Paul Kriwaczek’s 2010 book Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization. And much in Kriwaczek’s storytelling that is infuriating. It is astonishing that the...
Actually, Beowulf isn’t a character in Tom Holt’s 1988 comic novel Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? (although that is, of course, a fun title). He’s not even mentioned until a few pages from the end. One of the dozen of his Norse contemporaries who...
Andre Norton’s 1970 novel Dread Companion opens with Kilda c’ Rhyn detailing for the reader the mystery at the heart of her story. She was 16 when she landed on Dylan as the servant/nanny of a rich family. That was in the year 2421 After...
For me, the high point of my reading of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice came near the end of the 1813 novel when Elizabeth Bennett receives a letter from her aunt, Mrs. Gardiner. But, before I get to that, let’s go about a hundred pages earlier...
At the Chicago Tribune where I worked for 32 years, the story of Bill Recktenwald and the parking meters was legendary — and instructive. From 1984 to early 1987, Chicago suffered a huge loss in parking meter revenue — 42 percent — and city...
In 1958, Gregory Peck starred as the revenge-driven Jim Douglass in the brooding and beautiful western The Bravados. The movie was based on a novel of the same name, published the year before by Frank O’Rourke, and, as is the nature...
Frank Ryan has his 10 rules, and Stick — Ernest Stickley Jr. — buys into them. The result is very lucrative. Ryan’s Rules was the original title of Elmore Leonard’s 1976 novel, called Swag in all of its later editions. And the rules...
On the night of March 9, 1860, a storm-driven schooner with only 15 boys aboard, ages 8 to 14, crashes into the shore of an unknown island. And so begins Jules Verne’s Two Years’ Vacation, also known as Adrift in the Pacific, a novel...
Rarely in literature does there appear someone as vitally alive as Fargo Burns, a character whose chaotically self-destructive actions and courting of danger and fragmenting psyche co-exist with — and, in a strange, odd way, complement — a...
One of the opening paragraphs of Sam Weller’s short story “All the Summer Before Us” is this: “We were eighteen, me and Dave and Bill; childhood friends on the cusp of adulthood. On a silent country road we had discovered an old concrete...
On September 9, 2017, I wandered over to Westminster Abbey because I was in London for the first time seeing the sights and I knew it was chockful of a lot of historical stuff. When I got inside, it was a magical place. For one thing, this...
Pauline Saliga, executive director of the Society of Architectural Historians, echoes Etta James to say “at last” to the arrival of Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975 (the Monacelli Pres, $60, 343 pages). But this comment in her...
When you long for something, when you dream about finding something, you’re hoping. The word “hope” in this sense doesn’t appear in The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma by Barry Werth until about two-thirds of the way through the book...
Christian beliefs, theology and history are rooted in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John as well as the Acts of the Apostles, the twenty Epistles and the Book of Revelation — the New Testament. The earliest Gospel is Mark, written around...
In my early 20s, I read a lot of Ed McBain 87th Precinct books. There was a detective who had a white streak through his hair from an old wound, and I remember one of my journalistic colleagues at the time, a Vietnam vet, had a white streak...
Some random thoughts about John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8, published in 1935: Unmentionables O’Hara seems to go out of his way to mention everything that, in polite society of 1930s America, was considered unmentionable. These unmentionables...
Rincewind, the not very good wizard (or “Wizzard,” as his pointy hat says), is fleeing from gaol on the continent of XXXX, a place that’s pretty much unknown to the rest of Discworld because of its distance from all other land and because of the...
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