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...
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...
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...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.” ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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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