Brick wall scripture By Patrick T. Reardon Read the brick wall scripture. Fingertip the prophecy braille. Shakespeare wrote a Bible of plays. Macbeth’s sin (3 Samuel). Lear’s rage against the pain (Job). Iago, more evil than Judas. Will...
Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign tackles an important subject in American history — the strike by Memphis sanitation workers in early 1967, the support given to the workers by civil rights and...
It’ll get you there By Patrick T. Reardon Follow 12 steps. Chew sugarless gum. Show up for counsel. Lines to stay within Enjoy breathing. Enjoy Diet Coke. Take medicine on time. Answer when asked. No need to understand. Check off boxes. Listen to...
Frederick Buechner’s 1997 novel On the Road with the Archangel is a wry, tender and knowing look at humans being humans. Which is to say, at the quirkiness at the center of what human beings say, do and think. It is a re-telling of the Book of...
Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon is one of those great works of literature that demands re-reading. Once through isn’t enough. There is just too much going on for a reader to absorb. It’s like a complex piece of music — like a...
“Long John” Wentworth, Chicago’s 6 foot-6-inch mayor, wanted to be Abraham Lincoln’s political boss. But Lincoln wasn’t biting. In late April, 1860, the Illinois Republican wrote to a political colleague, “The taste is in my mouth a little.” ...
Angels are out tonight By Patrick T. Reardon Tonight, the typewriter keys slam rhythm to ease coarse electricity under the skin. The Sister of the Sacred Heart pleads alms and sweats under her habit as angels stride thickly east and west on her...
Like Odysseus, the Ift warrior Ayyar spends much of Victory on Janus in long, eventful journeying. For 48 pages — nearly 20 percent — of Andre Norton’s 1966 science fiction novel, Ayyar is probing deeper and deeper into the stronghold of the...
Naill Renfro has the Green Sick and has been exiled into the great, dark forest. He awakens from a fever dream and drags himself to a nearby pool for a drink. Instead, he makes a shocking discovery when he looks in the water. ...
Adam Levin’s 2010 novel The Instructions is nothing if not ambitious. Weighing in at 1,030 pages, it deals deeply with the interior lives of pre-teens, the hair-splitting debates of Torah and Talmudic scholarship, the question of turning the...
There is a temptation to start off this review with a pun, but no dice. I know that I’m nowhere near as good at it as Terry Pratchett, as he shows in Soul Music, published in 1995. For instance, the talking raven — of course, there’s a...
When Bill Sikes is introduced in Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens describes him thusly: “The man who growled out these words, was a stoutly-built fellow of about five-and-thirty, in a black velveteen coat, very soiled drab breeches, lace-up half...
Elmore Leonard’s first novel The Bounty Hunters was published in 1953, just eight years after World War II, and it was part of a movement in American arts to reevaluate the national myths. On the surface level, the war seemed to endorse the...
The Song of Songs is one of three very odd books in the Bible. Ecclesiastes expresses a deep mournful existential angst not found anywhere else in the Jewish and Christian scriptures; life is short and hard. Meanwhile, Job wrestles...
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m feeling sort of left out. This past weekend, President Donald Trump tweeted about how much he dislikes singer and activist John Legend and his wife Chrissy Teigen, throwing schoolyard insults at them. But...
Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, published in Italian in 1975, is a literary memoir of high art and broad ambition. It covers the waterfront. The periodic table, of course, is a major subject — that list of chemical elements, now totaling...
On the occasion of this 126th Labor Day as a national holiday, I’d like to make a modest proposal: Let’s have a second one — Labor Day 2 — that’s not a day off. I know that might sound like heresy. A day off has been intertwined with the...
Visions By Patrick T. Reardon I see the hand of God write on the wall the sins of the king. I see the bloody knife. I see the father lead the son to slaughter. I smell the burning bush. I see the furnace, three inside unburnt. I hear the walls...
Near the very end of Julia Keller’s latest Acker’s Gap novel The Cold Way Home (Minotaur, 306 pages, $27.99), Jake Oakes wants something that he knows he may never get, and he tells the woman he loves, Molly Drucker: “I can’t wait and hope. ...
Granny Weatherwax hears a noise outside her witch’s cottage: There was something in the garden. It wasn’t much of a garden. There were the Herbs, and the soft fruit bushes, a bit of lawn, and, of course, the beehives. And it was open...
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