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Book review: “Rogue Male” by Geoffrey Household

Book review: “Rogue Male” by Geoffrey Household

February 10, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

Published on January 1, 1939, Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male crackles with tension and action, heightened by an unusual point of view — the perspective of a hunted man. Normally, a hunted human being is too preoccupied and frantic to take the...

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Book review: “Yankee Greats: 100 Classic Baseball Cards” by Bob Woods

Book review: “Yankee Greats: 100 Classic Baseball Cards” by Bob Woods

February 8, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

Maybe I’m not as good of a Yankee fan as I’d thought.  Or maybe it’s something about baseball cards. Truth is, Bob Woods’ Yankee Greats: 100 Classic Baseball Cards, lushly illustrated with slightly larger than life images of cards for a lot...

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Book review: “This Is Happiness” by Niall Williams

Book review: “This Is Happiness” by Niall Williams

February 4, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

Ours is an era in which novels, both high-brow and middle-brow, tend to stress the hardships and trauma of modern living.  Recent bestsellers, for instance, tell stories about an abandoned swamp girl, a botched bank robbery with hostages, an...

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Essay: The Angel in the Back Pew

Essay: The Angel in the Back Pew

February 2, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

“Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”  The voices of dozens of big-name African-American entertainers sang for joy in the song that came on when I started my car.  It was the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful...

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Book review: “And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie

Book review: “And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie

January 31, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

It was their first night on the small Soldier Island, and the group of eight guests had just dined on an excellent supper, served by Rogers the butler and prepared by his wife Ethel. Their host U.N. Owen was not expected until the next day. This...

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Book review: “Seven Ways from Sundown” by Clair Huffaker

Book review: “Seven Ways from Sundown” by Clair Huffaker

January 28, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

Seven Smith’s girlfriend Joy asks him about Jim Flood.  “You speak of him with affection, yet he’s done such terrible things.” What kind of guy is he? Seven, a 21-year-old Texas Ranger, once a greenhorn but now a veteran, isn’t sure how to...

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Book review: “A High Wind in Jamaica, or The Innocent Voyage” by Richard Hughes

Book review: “A High Wind in Jamaica, or The Innocent Voyage” by Richard Hughes

January 26, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

For one reason or another, I’ve owned a copy of the Richard Hughes novel A High Wind in Jamaica, for about 40 years, but it wasn’t until the past week that I read it. The book, originally called The Innocent Voyage, was published in 1929, but my...

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Book review: “The Black Tower” by P.D. James

Book review: “The Black Tower” by P.D. James

January 24, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

As P.D. James’s 1975 mystery The Black Tower opens, Police Commander Adam Dalgliesh has just learned that the doctors made a mistake.  He’s not going to die of acute leukemia.  He just had a case of what they’ve decided was atypical...

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Book review: “Night Watch” by Terry Pratchett

Book review: “Night Watch” by Terry Pratchett

January 21, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

Havelock Vetinari, not yet Patrician — in fact, still a student in the Assassin’s Guild — is a lot better at the work of “inhuming” targets than his teachers realize.  This is back thirty-plus years ago. His rich and conniving aunt, Lady...

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Book review: “Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes” by Giuseppe Basile

Book review: “Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes” by Giuseppe Basile

January 19, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes, completed during the first decade of the 14th century, are one of the treasures of Western civilization. And Giuseppe Basile’s Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, published in 1993, is itself a treasure — a lavish...

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Book review: “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” by Mark Twain

Book review: “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” by Mark Twain

January 17, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

And when he finally gets to heaven, after spending 30 years meandering the Universe and then racing a comet, Captain Elias Stormfield of San Francisco (size 13 halo) finds out that a lot of his preconceived notions and a lot of what generations...

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Book review: “Space Prison” by Tom Godwin

Book review: “Space Prison” by Tom Godwin

January 14, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

Space Prison by Tom Godwin is a crackerjack novel that richly fulfills the modest boast on its cover: “A Science-Fiction Adventure.” In fact, I wonder if the book would have done better in terms of sale and had more staying power in terms of...

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Book review: “Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention” by Ben Wilson

Book review: “Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention” by Ben Wilson

January 12, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

In the 1850s, Swedish writer Fredricka Bremer visited to Chicago and, to say the least, was not impressed. Ben Wilson notes in his sweeping and astute Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention that boosters promoted...

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Book review: “The Man in the High Castle” by Philip K. Dick

Book review: “The Man in the High Castle” by Philip K. Dick

January 10, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

Philip K. Dick performs a clever feat of literary dipsy-doodle at the end of his 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, and he throws into question the reality of the world in which his reader lives. I won’t get into how he does this so as not to...

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Book review: “Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come” by T. J. Clark

Book review: “Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come” by T. J. Clark

January 7, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

In his introduction to Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come, T. J. Clark makes it clear that the subtext of the book has to do with the efforts in the past and of today to impose a heaven on earth. The key word there is “impose.” ...

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Book review: “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” by Drew Gilpin Faust

Book review: “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” by Drew Gilpin Faust

January 5, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

Drew Gilpin Faust’s 2008 book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is an extraordinary achievement that answers a needed but previously unasked question: How did Americans deal — culturally, materially and, above all...

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Book review: “Being Peace” by Thich Nhat Hanh

Book review: “Being Peace” by Thich Nhat Hanh

January 3, 2022 Patrick T Reardon

The metaphor Thich Nhat Hanh uses to describe Buddha’s teaching is that of a raft.  It is, he writes, only a raft to help you cross the river, a finger pointing to the moon. Don’t mistake the finger for the moon.  The raft is not the...

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Book review: “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens

Book review: “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens

December 23, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

Over the years, I’ve written about Scrooge and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol several times. In 2014, I published an op-ed piece for the Chicago Tribune, titled “Was he Scrooge or St. Scrooge? You decide.”  A year later, I had an essay in...

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Book review: “Glitz” by Elmore Leonard

Book review: “Glitz” by Elmore Leonard

December 21, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

Toward the end of Elmore Leonard’s 1985 crime novel Glitz, Miami Police Lt. Vincent Mora, rehabbing after being shot in a mugging while carrying groceries, is in a comp-ed suite at the Atlantic City hotel-casino Spade’s Boardwalk. Nancy Donovan...

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Book review: “Sacred City” by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Book review: “Sacred City” by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

December 16, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

The Teddy in Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.’s new short story collection Sacred City has a way of telling a tale that starts here and ends up there after a lot of twists and turns. Such as in a paragraph, midway through his story “Lamb,” when he is...

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