Five years ago today, I was laid off by the Chicago Tribune. I had company. More than 50 other editorial employees were let go the same week I was shown the door. And another 70 or so had been sent packing during the previous nine months. For...
Terry Pratchett’s 40th Discworld novel Raising Steam, a wonderfully witty and thoughtful book, seems to have been a very personal novel for him to write. For one thing, Pratchett seems to be in love with locomotives and railroading, the latest...
No question, the guy on the cover of Umberto Eco’s 2007 book On Ugliness is truly ugly. And, in this sixteenth-century painting by Quentin Matsys, Ill-Matched Lovers, his ugliness is heightened by his pretty wife or girlfriend. She looks...
This review initially appeared in the Printers Row section of the Chicago Tribune. on March 8, 2014. Storms at sea play a key role in the tale of John Jacob Astor’s attempt to establish a pivotal trading center on the unsettled, little-known...
Until now, I had never read Ray Bradbury’s 1953 science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. But, of course, I had read dozens of other books and seen scores of movies that were the book’s offspring. To name just one, 2010’s The Book of Eli, starring...
On March 20 — just as I was finishing Still Dreaming, the surprisingly readable memoir that U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez wrote with the help of Doug Scofield — the Chicago Tribune reported that the two men were under investigation by the House Ethics...
This essay initially appeared in the March, 2014 edition of Reality magazine in Ireland. One of the great boons of our era is the ongoing effort at creating better, clearer and more accurate translations of the Bible. But, sometimes, you just...
The map of North America today — with much of the United States-Canadian border lying along the 49th parallel — might easily have been very different. American “manifest destiny” didn’t have to stop where it did but could have turned northward in...
A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times on March 6, 2014 Snow has no respect for the calendar, so the snowfall season for the National Weather Service starts on July 1 and ends on June 30. So far this season...
Why does Newland Archer leave? Why, on the final page of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, does Archer walk away from a chance to visit Ellen Olenska, the love of his life, for the first time in 25 years? She’s just up a few flights of stairs...
There is a moment, fairly early in Edith Wharton’s 1923 novel The Mother’s Recompense, when the central character Kate Clephane exclaims to herself, “I am rewarded!” I cringed when I read that — because of the peculiar nature of the word “reward”...
This essay originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune on January 3, 2014. I sing the joy of snow-shoveling. I rejoice in the movement of arms and back, legs and shoulders. I exult in the wonder of the cold white beauty. Okay, okay, I know...
This essay originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune on December 30, 2013. The coming of the new year brings lots of parties. And it’s a time when many people sit down and resolve to turn over a new leaf — be kinder, drink less, stop smoking...
I offer the purple sash and the white surplice. I offer the cold mornings when snow crunched and the church was dark and silent and an old man came down the aisle. I offer the cruets, and the words at the foot of the altar, and the priest, heavy...
There are hundreds of books about Michelangelo, many running to several hundred pages. I own several of them. Stefanie Penck’s Michelangelo, published in 2005 by Prestel, has only 95 pages of text and images, yet it’s a rich addition to the...
It would be difficult to think of a collection of artworks that could challenge the Tres Riches Heures in terms of sumptuous color and elegance. And all within a single binding! Tres Riches Heures is a book of hours — a lavishly illustrated...
There is something breath-taking in the hopes, dreams and faith of young Flannery O’Connor. What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh, Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. But then God can do that —...
A century ago, Masters in Art was a series of monthly monographs offered for the annual subscription price of $1.50. Single copies were 15 cents. The Lucca and Andrea della Robbia issue that I have was published in September, 1901. My copy...
Was Jesus breast-fed? That’s a question that Anthony Le Donne asks near the end of his reasonable and provocative new book The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals (Oneworld). And, if it’s the sort of question that unsettles you or...
It’s too bad, really, that Abraham Lincoln has been accorded sainthood. Not that we call him Saint Abe or put a halo around his image, but Americans do just about everything else to turn our 16th President into a plaster statue up on a pedestal...
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