Book Reviews

In April, 2014, right after Terry Pratchett’s 40th Discworld novel Raising Steam was published in the U.S., I read it and reviewed it on my website.  And loved it. Now, [...]

Seven years after Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize, she published Twilight Sleep which tells the same story from a different perspective. In both novels, the [...]

Les Savage Jr.’s 1958 novel Beyond Wind River begins: Just outside of town Frank Ives caught up with the wagon carrying the dead man. The dead man is Peter Thayne, [...]

The meeting in the port city of Guayaquil in what is now Ecuador on July 26, 1822, was a striking moment in world history although, in import, it was little [...]

After the 87th Precinct detectives took the killer downstairs to the detention cells, they sat in the squadroom, quiet and thoughtful. “Why do you suppose he put on the dead [...]

The 1902 plan to revamp and expand the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was the product of a commission of prominent Americans, three of whom had worked closely to produce [...]

As P.G. Konody notes in his 1907 book The Brothers van Eyck (Bell’s Miniature Series of Painters), very little is known about Hubert Van Eyck and much more about his [...]

Amid the many scenes of violence, sin and pain that Gustave Dore created to illustrate a mid-nineteenth century Bible, the image of Jephthah’s daughter dancing out to meet her victorious [...]

I wanted to like Cooler by the Lake by Larry Heinemann.  It is so saturated in Chicago.  Yet, it doesn’t hang together.  It is a string of sometimes witty, sometimes [...]

Science fiction can get complicated for authors who focus on the near-term future, as Robert A. Heinlein does in The Door into Summer. Consider this timeline: Heinlein writes the book [...]