Book review: “Raising Steam” by Terry Pratchett
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, [...]
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 [...]