Shea Serrano’s Basketball (and Other Things): A Collection of Questions Asked, Answered, Illustrated is a bag-of-potato-chips sort of book. No, that’s not quite right. It’s the book equivalent of seven or eight bags of over-salted, over-flavored...
In the Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus takes a trip to Hades where he encounters many of his former comrades from the Trojan War, including Achilles who asks him: “How could you endure to come down here to Hades’ place, where the senseless dead men...
Daniel Okrent’s newly published The Guarded Gate is about immigration. But, much more, its subject is racism. Not black/white racism although that does rear its ugly head in Okrent’s rigorously researched, niftily written and maddening book. No...
As a world leader, Empress Dowager Cixi hasn’t had good press, nothing like, say, Queen Elizabeth I or Queen Victoria. In terms of historical reputation, those women had their gender working against them but somehow found ways to be loved or, at...
I’m hoping for a 2020 that’s OK. That’s all. I’m not looking for an excellent year. Or a super-duper year. Or the Best. Year. Ever. Just an OK year. Which is what I’ll probably get. And what you’ll probably get, too. OK is OK We live in...
The best books of 2019 Moby Dick by Herman Melville Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DuBois Job: A New Translation by Edward L. Greenstein...
Job Oedipus Lear (David Achilles Othello) By Patrick T. Reardon Dung dark lone. (Lust flow betrayal) Bible Greek bard. King launches daughters to death. Leper badgers for answers Deity. Womb-returner holds, unseen, his eyes...
Mostly Harmless — the 5th and sort-of final installment in the series of books by Douglas Adams that he started with A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — is mostly OK. I mean, for me, the book, published in 1992, was mildly interesting. Its arid...
Lamentations Road By Patrick T. Reardon Lamentations Road runs past Judge Westcott’s mansion, out to Weed Hollow where a dead mule rots, a pestilence of flies, while I rock in the sun, another broken part of the machine. The Adolphus Smythe...
![[[[Secret book review: “P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever: All the letters that misbehave and make words nearly impossible to pronounce” by Raj Haldar and Chris Carpenter]]]](https://patricktreardon.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Haldar.Pterodactyle.banner-1140x337.jpg)
Emma, this book review is for you, but don’t tell your Mom and Dad. They’d probably get all worried that a book like P is for Pterodactyl will ruin your spelling. I mean, really! You know — or, at least, you will very soon — that when you see a...
Make By Patrick T. Reardon In summer, the father grilled hot dogs with his white t-shirt off, skin burning. In fall, he tolled novenas. After snow melt, the whitened bones of a gnawed bird, chaos of feathers. Can you taste the beckoning? In...
The odds are that you don’t have a copy of the Jewish War by Josephus in your book collection. You may never have heard of it. It was written around 75 A.D. as a work of history by a Romanized Jew, but it has been employed in various ways over...
Sonja Livingston’s mother led an irregular life, giving birth to seven children, often without a husband, but she still attended Corpus Christi Catholic Church with her kids, striding up when it was time to receive communion. Sonja...
In 1962, John Steinbeck was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the committee that chose him described his novel The Grapes of Wrath as “a great work” and cited it as one of the main reasons for the honor. A few years later...
Picture this: The monthly meeting of a faith-sharing group of a bunch of guys who got to know each other at the local Catholic parish and have been gathering, almost always in this living room on the second floor of a Chicago condo building, for...
I know the title of Edward L. Greenstein’s Job, just published by Yale University Press, indicates that it’s a new translation of the biblical book composed about 2,600 years ago. But it’s not just “a” new translation. Not by a long shot...
The country duo Big & Rich (Big Kenny and John Rich) can be pretty goofy, but, on their 2014 album Gravity, they included a heartfelt song with the startling title “Thank God for Pain.” The song, written by Rich along with Vicky McGehee and...
The fate of Billy the Kid By Patrick T. Reardon Limerick sour hen, consort of thick-palm, bellied Patrick, cock of blind alley, Catherine grudged open to twitch the moment in soiled New York night. In two hundred seventy five...
A couple months ago, I fell in love with a younger woman, a much younger woman. A girl, really. Well, actually, a baby. She was born a little after four o’clock on a Monday afternoon, and, although I’d known she was on her way, I was astonished...
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