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...
With its photo of the hair-blown actor Bjorn Andresen on the dust jacket and its striking, in-your-face, black-and-white photographs of penises at the beginning and end of the book, Germaine Greer’s The Beautiful Boy is designed to be unsettling...
. When By Patrick T. Reardon When I sit and when I stand. When clots of fog cover the restless river. When tick tocks. When I die and when I am. (When inert bullet left and channeled his brain and spilled onto rain-snow concrete and grass, gray...
Many bestselling American novels are comfortable reads. They offer central characters who are attractive and admirable. They provide a story that carries the reader along and leaves the reader with a good feeling at the end. ...
As far as I can tell, Mr. Majestyk is the only one of Elmore Leonard’s many novels that was originally a movie. It started life as a Leonard screenplay that was made into the 1974 film Mr. Majestyk, starring granite-faced Charles...
Joy is being free to say: “Look at me! Listen to me!” Joy is being free to join with others to say: “Look at me! Listen to me!” Joy is rejecting invisibility in American society, rejecting violence and racism and injustice. It’s...
In Hitler’s Northern Utopia (Princeton University Press, 313 pages, $29.95), historian Despina Stratigakos deeply mines World War II records and subsequent research to thoroughly detail for the first time the full extent of German plans for...
Meister Frantz Schmidt executed 394 people during the course of a nearly half century as an executioner, mostly in the important German city of Nuremburg. In addition, he tortured, flogged and disfigured hundreds more in punishments ordered...
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