The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee was a difficult book for me to read, as I suspect it will be for most people. That’s not because it’s a bad book, but because it is such a thorough, courageous look at a disease — well, a family...
It’s been more than 60 years since A. J. Liebling skewered Chicago in three caustic pieces in the New Yorker, soon after collected into a short book of 30,000 words or so, Chicago: The Second City. Of course, “caustic” was Liebling’s specialty...
The authors of novels about rich Americans face a greater challenge than those who write about the other 90 percent. If your characters are poor, working-class, middle-class and even upper middle-class, they have built-in struggles that help the...
I’m going to give a copy of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War to my 30-year-old nephew Kelly for Christmas. (Shhh! Don’t tell him.) But I don’t think he’s going to respond to the book in the way I did. A couple Christmases ago, Kelly gave me Ender’s...
Reading Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief was a truly disconcerting experience. Other writers have sought to re-tell the four gospels in a single narrative — Norman Mailer, for instance, with The Gospel According to the Son (1997), Charles...
I am pretty much an illiterate about the science of space travel. When talk turns to apogees and pounds-per-second and all that stuff, a fog descends on my brain. Still, from my low (and foggy) rung on the ladder of understanding, I am able to...
The other day, I got an email from my parish which began: “Dear Ministry Leaders…” I laughed. In the past, I’d chaired the adult education committee and the parish council. But, in recent years, the only thing I’ve been in charge of has been...
In 1990, renowned English art critic and novelist John Berger began an exchange of letters and cards with his daughter Katya Berger Andreadakis, a film critic. Details of Titian paintings “Penitent Magdalene,” “Saint John the...
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