Book Reviews

John Keegan opens The Face of Battle, his groundbreaking 1976 book on war, with an examination of generations of military historians and finds them wanting. For instance, he quotes at [...]

At any number of points in Saint Francis of Assisi, the book’s writers make the point that the thirteenth-century Italian mystic and friar has been many things to many people [...]

The 1897 image on pages 110-111 of Jeremy Black’s A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps is a striking bird’s-eye view of Chicago, looking out across the downtown to [...]

The young woman and Sulien, an older man from another part of the world, are talking about birds and their movements together. “It’s just amazing to me how they moved, [...]

It’s a few days before Christmas in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, and Chet is a long-haired obese cat. How obese?  Well, his human, a homeless guy “dirty beyond age [...]

David Ciminello’s 2024 novel The Queen of Steeplechase Park is a wild and wacky foul-mouthed fantasy about free-spirit Belladonna Marie Donato and her circle of boundary-breaking friends in the tight, [...]

For Gaza's Children is a scream of protest against the oppression of Palestinians by those who have suffered oppression themselves. It is a cry from the heart against the destruction, [...]

Bai Juyi and his best friend Yuan Zhen, Chinese poets twelve hundred years ago, promoted a revival of folk culture, known as the New Music Bureau Movement. The Music Bureau [...]

On the title page of David Mamet’s 2018 book, it says: Chicago: A Novel.  It would have been more accurate to say: Chicago: A Myth. The book, well-written and well-paced, [...]

It wasn’t happenstance, I think, that Sidney Callahan’s The Magnificat: The Prayer of Mary and Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin [...]