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...
Two-thirds of the way through Raymond Chandler’s novel Playback, Philip Marlowe is having a conversation with Henry Clarendon IV, an aged, wealthy man who spends his days sitting in a hotel lobby, watching the other guests and anyone else who...
Published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folks by W. E. B. Du Bois is an important book of American literature, a significant work in the development of the field of sociology and a foundational text for the study of race relations in the United...
The perfect act outside of Brady’s Tavern By Patrick T. Reardon Stop, short the physical. Yes, you know the noxic feel in the deep and up throat and out, and the thick wet stink up your nose, even though it is his feel, his nose, fellow...
Two dead men. Long ago, the first tried to kill the second with a horrible torture but was killed by an act of a god. The second lived a long, fruitful and productive live and, then, in the normal course of things, died. Now, the second finds the...
On the last page of Elmore Leonard’s 1983 novel La Brava, his title character, Joe La Brava, is told by former screen siren Jean Shaw, “It’s not the movies, Joe.” There are ironies upon ironies in that statement that the reader, by that point, is...
On one of the final pages of his 1995 study Edward Hopper: Portraits of America, Wieland Schmied emphasizes the starkness, bleakness and harshness of light in Hopper’s paintings, especially those featuring human figures. He contrasts Hopper with...
Lady Eleanor, a young ruler in the county of Dorset in southern England, is quiet and thoughtful, sitting alone in Corfe Castle with her seneschal, John Faulkner. Just hours earlier, she pulled the cord on a cannon to start a battle with...
Bethlehem By Patrick T. Reardon Motel sign, blinking, blinking, blinking: “Jesus Christ slept here.” Put up a theme park with dioramas and interactive learning centers and miniature railroad circuits and, as one of the...
Towers loom By Patrick T. Reardon Loop towers loom behind their gleam, and I can take you to the parking lot just off Dearborn Street where the Mayor and reporters went down into unflooded freight tunnels (although that lot is...
The other day, I was at the First Communion of my great niece Maeve, and I was again struck, as I often am, by the holiness of beauty. Maeve is a beautiful eight-year-old — of course, aren’t all eight-year-olds beautiful? and holy? — and she was...
In 1955, early in his struggle for civil rights, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. likened the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to the destruction of the Egyptian army in the biblical book of Exodus: “The Red Sea opened, and freedom...
Many readers are likely to dismiss Robert Alter’s The Art of Bible Translation as inside-baseball for Bible scholars. After all, the Bible is the Bible, right? Well, not really. The Bible means different things to different...
Emmeline Pankhurst was a prim, proper, middle-class Victorian Englishwoman who, on a day in early July, 1914, a few days before her 56th birthday, was rearrested by authorities for her work promoting the campaign to bring the vote to British...
The cover of Christian Flesh by Paul J. Griffiths is a warning that this book of moral theology is not for the faint of heart. It is a detail from Caravaggio’s 1601-1602 painting The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, and it shows the heads of the...
Sylvia Kedge, the young physically impaired woman who was the secretary of murder victim Maurice Seton, has just had an emotional melt-down, and one of the policemen is pushing her wheelchair down a path as detective Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland...
About midway through Nicholas Orme’s fascinating Medieval Children — a history of what it was like to be a child in Europe in medieval times leading up to the Enlightenment — he notes that an engraving from 1659 shows a boy playing with small...
Well, OK. Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, published in 1967, has sold millions of copies over the past half century. But it’s not the book she submitted to her publisher. That book had an extra, 18th chapter which, upon the publisher’s...
To my mind, the most masterful touch in Joan Lindsay’s very well-crafted novel Picnic at Hanging Rock is the disappearance of the self-contained, seemingly logic-driven mathematics teacher Greta McCraw. Sure, the main focus of the story is on the...
Tom Wolfe published The Right Stuff in 1979, a full 52 years after Charles Lindbergh, the first celebrity flyboy, shocked and captivated the nation with his aerial deering-do, crossing the Atlantic all alone in his single-engine Spirit of St...
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