OK, “The Warden” by Anthony Trollope, published in 1855, is one of the classics of English literature. Over the past century and a half, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of readers have enjoyed Trollope’s humorous...
Edgar Pangborn’s science-fiction novel “The Company of Glory” was initially serialized in three parts in Galaxy magazine in the latter half of 1974. It was published in 1975. Pangborn died on February 1, 1976, at the age of...
There are times when Jean Lacouture draws a picture of a particular Jesuit that takes your breath away. Consider his description of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the 20th century scientist-theologian who was silenced for much of his professional...
“Driving Mr. Yogi” by Harvey Araton is a fun book for a Yankee fan. I suspect it wouldn’t be much of a read for anyone...
A eulogy by Patrick T. Reardon St. Thomas More Church December 9, 1995 Audrey Joanne Thomas……Audrey Thomas Reardon……69……the mother of 14 children……died Tuesday in her Oak Lawn home. Mrs. Reardon...
I suspect that Charles Dickens was in a pretty foul mood when he wrote “Hard Times” in 1854. He draws stark differences between the “good” people and the “bad” people in this story, and assigns bleak fates to...
Hey, NATO diplomats! I’m know you’re being flooded with lots of official and commercial stuff about Chicago: Where views of the city are most beautiful. Where dinners are most tasty. Where to find the “real Chicago.”...
The subtitle of Robert K. Massie’s “Catherine the Great” is “Portrait of a Woman.” But that’s too limiting. This 574-page biography is the portrait of a person — one who happens to have been a woman and...
It seemed like a good idea at the time, I guess. I mean, my two-year-old daughter’s decision to grab a long, exceedingly sharp butcher’s knife from the dishwasher and run the entire length of the house with it in her hand — and leap...
As spy novels go, “The Berlin Ending” by E. Howard Hunt, published 38 years ago, is okay. For readers looking for an addictive page-turner, it will probably be on the slow side. Hunt, who died in 2007, had actually been in the CIA and...
“Stories We Keep” is a small book, only 64 pages. And it’s even shorter if you’re a reader like me who isn’t very hip to yoga or interested in recipes involving yams. Nonetheless, its five short stories are...
Well, Thomas Mallon’s “Watergate” is certainly a readable novel. It’s an amazement, really, that he’s been able to take the tottering heap of jagged historical events, involving scores of politicians and suchlike...
Historical fiction is dangerous territory for a writer. It’s all too easy to make actual people, say, Abraham Lincoln or John Wilkes Booth, into stick figures, and actual events, say, Booth’s assassination of Lincoln, into just...
The new baseball season is upon us, and hope springs eternal across the major leagues as 30 teams and more than 700 players vie for a chance at the World Series. But I have one question: How come all of those players are men? I mean, I...
The Bible is filled with people acting like people — such as Sarah playing the nosy snoop in Genesis. She and Abraham are an aged childless couple. Outside their tent, Abraham is entertaining a visitor, and Sarah can’t help but eavesdrop...
Linda Sunshine plays shortstop for the Chicago Eagles, the first woman to become a major leaguer. Her manager, the star pitcher and some of her other teammates don’t like the idea. At all. Yet, for her — as for them — baseball is more than...
We talk about the “patience of Job,” and that makes him seem like a meek and mild fellow who heroically and stoically endures waves of misfortune from God and the devil. Don’t buy it. Job is a whiner, a complainer. “Is not...
A little before midnight on the last night of his life Timothy Marr, a linen draper of Radcliffe Highway, set about tidying up the shop, helped by the shop-boy James Gowen. So begins “The Maul and the Pear Tree” by P.D. James and T.A...
Half a century ago, phone numbers had prefixes as well as numbers (such as ESterbrook 9-3392), and the Roman Catholic Mass was in Latin. “Dominus vobiscum,” the priest would say. “Et cum spiritu tuo,” the altar boys would...
Every once in a while, when I’m in the basement and can see the foundations of our two-flat, or rummage in a closet and notice a crack in the plaster in the corner, or sit at my computer and look at the wallpaper that previous owners put up...
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