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...
It takes some hubris to rewrite the Christian gospels, but maybe not that much. A lot of people have done it. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John seem pretty straight-forward inasmuch as they’re telling stories that the authors...
I’m having a difficult time deciding what, dear reader, to tell you first. Let’s put it this way: The streets of Paris, London, Vienna and Berlin in the 1700s and 1800s were very different from the streets you move along here in Chicago. ...
After By Patrick T. Reardon . After clangor parade, after wailing trombones, teletype drums, clockwork drum majors and majorettes, after cymbal clamor of arena-full horde, pent-up for release, for rebound off rafters — where he watches — after...
Back in the ‘80s, during a holiday get-together, one of the family elders, who was known for sweeping declarations, made a sweeping declaration: “You can’t be a Republican,” she said, “and be a good Catholic.” From couch to couch, we looked at...
It was nearly 40 years ago that I first read James Agee’s autobiographical novel A Death in the Family. Since then, I have experienced a similarly sudden violent death in my own family. What had been, in my early 30s, an achingly...
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