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...
Part 2 of two parts. Here’s the first part. Like the rest of the world, Atlantic Monthly Press and Northwestern University historian Carl Smith weren’t planning on Covid-19. But that’s the reality they faced when Smith’s Chicago’s...
Part 1 of two parts Carl Smith’s Chicago’s Great Fire, published in August by Atlantic Monthly Press, is an important book of Chicago history, a rousing crackerjack work that’s highly readable and deeply researched. As I noted in my earlier...
Betty Lovejoy and her younger sisters Emily and Annie Ruth, all successful black women, have come together in Mulberry, Georgia, to bury their mother, known by the family nickname as Mudear. But it’s far from a lovefest. As with any group of...
Devastation is devastation, whether brought about by fire or pandemic. The Great Chicago Fire occurred nearly a century and a half ago, but the experience of living through that cataclysm has many parallels with Chicago in the year of...
He tossed his sin stone By Patrick T. Reardon He tossed his sin stone into Lake Deuteronomy, set fire to his crops and headed for Egypt City. He divorced his ring finger with an axe, slew his cattle where they stood and set...
“Visceral” is one of those no-nonsense words. It goes right to the gut. You can look at art, look at the world, with your intellect. But, if you turn a visceral eye, you are short-circuiting reason and operating on...
Jesus and the people of Judea lived under the heel of the Roman army and of Tiberius, the emperor, which is a fancy name for dictator. The Zealots were the political movement of the time, working to foment a rebellion against the occupying...
In its odd way, John Brunner’s 1984 novel The Tides of Time is an adventure story. It’s also a thriller and a mystery that propels the reader along in search of answers. It opens in an April in the near future as Gene and Stacy are trying to...
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