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...
Surrender, premeditate nothing, want nothing, neither discern nor dissect nor stare, but rather shift, dodge, lose focus, and — slowing down — consider the only material that presents itself, in its disorder and even in its order. * At the start...
There is a beautiful embrace of complexity, a wonderful delight in ambiguity and amazements, to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s 2007 book of history, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. It is the book of a historian about the history of women that...
Christopher Moore is a writer of joyfully goofy and ribald novels about such things as vampires, demons, San Francisco, a Native-American trickster and the comic aspects of Shakespeare’s tragedies, such as the randy fool in King Lear. Yet, as...
Let me tell you By Patrick T. Reardon . Plug Nickel and Red Cent met on museum steps and, inside, mysticked with blue innocent Della Robbia, rhythmed the light-shine white of beyond, above, bright, orisoned warm-milk fired clay, like flesh...
I want to teach Emma who is two By Patrick T. Reardon . I want to teach Emma who is two to look out this window at the chaos of yellow and green on the mid-autumn tree — not so chaotic when, from the ground, she can see the tree trunk, solid...
Five songs By Patrick T. Reardon . He restyled the opening words of Genesis as a country-western song, let there be light and all that, fruitful and multiply — drinking, trucks and death would come later. . For a heavy metal band, he composed a...
Published in 1970, The City Dwellers by Charles Platt is based on the belief that cities were going to hell in a handbasket. One of Platt’s earliest published fiction books, The City Dwellers is a collection of four short stories which are...
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