It’s clear that John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella Of Mice and Men was written to be read as a parable. But a parable for what? I mean, what’s the lesson it is teaching? It’s not about euthanasia. It’s not about intellectual...
Stephanie Gangi’s Carry the Dog is an overwrought potboiler of the old school, packed to the brim with modern-day hot-button issues. It’s a lot like the 1966 Jacqueline Susann novel The Valley of the Dolls which Bea Segar, the central character...
The Art of the City: Rome, Florence, Venice is made up of four essays that German polymath Georg Simmel wrote between 1898 and 1907, translated by Will Stone and published by Pushkin Press. It’s a small, 89-page volume that includes Stone’s...
Concrete and other measures of a neighborhood By Patrick T. Reardon . Let me tell you about my neighborhood. Like any neighborhood. Like yours. . In the curb, in the cement: “David 11/29/86.” Our son, the date the city of Chicago workers poured...
Thomas Berger’s 1983 novel The Feud is a screwball comedy which features two killings, a natural death after a fistfight, a botched suicide, a car bomb and a hardware store burned to the ground. The Feud is an entertainment populated by a cast of...
Chemistry Patrick T. Reardon . The 1904 book is chemistry formulas for mixing drinks, and, paging through, I wonder, if the bartender blueprint for Whiskey Daisy No. 3 calls for one wine glass of whiskey, does No. 2 use half a wine glass or two...
Timothy Taylor raises many questions in his 2002 book The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death, and, like any good anthropologist, he doesn’t provide clear-cut answers. How could he? The fact is, when you’re trying to dope out what life...
First parents Patrick T. Reardon . Eve and Adam, the Bible’s Barbie and Ken, lived in the Garden, a Dreamhouse of empty echoing outdoor rooms, an insipid Paradise, except for that tree from a brother’s G.I. Joe jungle survival set, out of place...
Early on in Cat Chaser, I realized that the 1982 novel just didn’t have Elmore Leonard’s usual pizzazz and punch. For one thing, George Moran, a rundown motel owner-operator and the former husband of a rich Florida woman, and Mary Delaney...
When Mary Curtin, a Boston nanny in the late 1950s, gets the telegram MOTHER DYING, she thinks, I’d be too late. She’ll never admit that she doesn’t know what she’d have done next if her employer hadn’t come into the corridor then and asked what...
I ordered Ed Hulse’s The Art of Pulp Fiction: An Illustrated History of Vintage Paperbacks and started reading it soon after it arrived. The text is a lively discussion of how pulp paperbacks came to be and how they evolved up to the 1970s. ...
Jane Ward’s In the Aftermath is an earnest, even affecting examination of the strong waves of guilt, sadness and anger among family and friends that follow the suicide of a loved one. David Herron’s walk to death in the waves of the...
Detective Cotton Hawes gets off on the wrong foot when he’s transferred from the cushy, affluent 30th precinct to the rough and tumble 87th. He knocks on a door and nearly gets Detective Steve Carella killed. Of course, it wasn’t just any...
In the final pages, the Discworld does not end, and everything comes down to a copper doing his job and to what is described as “the peculiar mathematics of heroism.” The plot of Terry Pratchett’s 2001 The Last Hero, the 27th of his Discworld...
In 1937, Agatha Christie published Death on the Nile in which her detective Hercule Poirot has to solve a whole bunch of puzzling murders while on a river steamer cruise. A year earlier, in The Arabian Nights Murder, John Dickson Carr trotted out...
Madam Frout, headmistress of the Frout Academy and pioneer of the Frout Method of Learning Through Fun, is pretty dopey in an over-educated way. As Terry Pratchett explains in his 2001 Discworld novel Thief of Time: Madam Frout wasn’t very...
In a real way, Jennifer T. Roberts’ Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction is a 112-page blurb for the great Greek historian’s Histories. Written around 430 BC, The Histories — which, in Greek, means Enquiries — tells the story of the Greek-Persian...
Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, liked to spend money on herself and on her friends, such as Ma Rainey, a blues mentor, who got into trouble one evening with the Chicago police because of a wild party with a bunch of young women. Rainey, like...
Land mark By Patrick T. Reardon . I can take you to the cement in front of the school by the alley and have you put your finger into the mark there, the permanent lines of hopscotch, and you will see generations of children bouncing on a single...
For more than 2,400 years, The Histories by Herodotus has been a foundation block of Western civilization, the first work of history in Western literature. Written in classical Greek and completed around 430 BC, it is an account of the recent...
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