The small boy moves through deep snow down dark streets alone to the boulevard through the cold to the lights of the churchfront past thick wood doors inside to warmth and candles and colors and incense and mystery. An usher coughs. The belt of a...
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson is a curiously lumbering thriller. It starts slowly and ends slowly. In between, the novel has more than its share of often bizarre twists and turns. Yet, the shock value of these is...
I get a lot of books for Christmas or my birthday, but the writings I’ve most treasured have been the autobiographies that my wife, Cathy, and our kids David and Sarah have written for me at my request. For instance, when Sarah was 9, she...
There are many ways to approach “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” the majestic, mystical and often maddening book that James Agee and Walker Evans published in 1941. I’m going to look at it here through the lens of journalism —...
Published November 25, 2011 in the National Catholic Reporter Friends of mine get angry with the Catholic Church hierarchy, and, Lord knows, there’s enough reason for that. To err is human, as the poet says. And, as the clergy pedophile...
You’d never know from reading “Killing Lincoln” that Bill O’Reilly is a conservative political commentator. O’Reilly, the host of The O’Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel, doesn’t use this story of the...
Andre Norton’s “No Night Without Stars” landed in bookstores in 1975. That was 23 years after her book “Star Man’s Son,” better known as “Daybreak — 2250 A.D.,” appeared in print. In 2003, Baen...
As “Tinkers” opens, George is dying. Paul Harding makes this clear with his first sentence: “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.” By the end of this short, intense, sharply observed...
Striding purposely around a bend of a park path recently in Washington, D.C., Jim Chianakas suddenly saw before him the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. “There it is,” he said. “Wow!” Beside Chianakas, 85, of Princeville, Ill....
Finishing “Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned” by John A. Farrell, I was surprised to find myself underwhelmed by the book. No question, it’s a good solid effort. Farrell has done a yeoman’s job of tracking down...
When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, I thought he would be canonized. St. JFK? It seems silly now. Now that all the stories of Kennedy’s womanizing have become public knowledge. Now that the glow of his presidency has...
About midway through “The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution” by Mark Roseman, I got to wondering how writers like Roseman do it. I mean, writers who spend a good chunk of their lives — or, for some, their entire careers...
On Discworld, goblins live on — are beat up on, are exploited on, are starved on, die on — the edges. They stink. They steal chickens. They eat their young. And their religion is based on the reverent storage of earwax, fingernail clippings...
This essay will be a chapter in a book about Comiskey Park, edited by Floyd Sullivan, to be published probably in 2013 It’s a frigid weekend in March, and I’ve taken my kids to play in the park – Comiskey Park. On the infield grass...
Sometime, apparently in the mid-1890s, Daniel Burnham set up a meeting with Frank Lloyd Wright to present him with an extraordinary offer. At the time, Burnham was basking in acclaim as the manager of Chicago’s wildly successful 1893...
Recently, I sat down and wrote out a plan for my funeral service. A couple days later, I wrote about it in the Chicago Tribune. You can find it here...
There is a vague, marshy border between poetry and prose. Marshy, as in rich with life, rich with the intermingling of earth and water and sunlight, crawling things, buzzing, flitting, sounds moist and dry on the breeze. This is where you find...
During a career as a news reporter that spanned nearly 40 years, I interviewed my share of high-ranking officials. When I was part of a small group of journalists to meet with President Jimmy Carter, I called him “Mr. President.” At a...
For a long time, Eugene Kennedy was certain that Joseph Bernardin, the soft-spoken, bridge-building archbishop of Cincinnati, would become the first American-born Pope. “He was a perfect candidate for it,” says Kennedy, a...
Roger Ebert’s “Life Itself” is a newspaperman’s memoir, which is to say it’s breezy, fact-filled and rather light on emotions. That makes sense, of course. For all his fame as a movie critic on TV, Ebert’s...
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