About a third of the way into Elmore Leonard’s Cuba Libre, Victor Fuentes, a secret revolutionary, asks Amelia Brown to pass along information about the rich planter who pays her bills and enjoys her company. This is Cuba, early 1898, in the days after the explosion of USS Maine battleship in Havana harbor, setting the…

In the handful of years after the Civil War, Illinoisans went crazy for baseball, a game that was then spelled as two words “base ball.”  But, by 1868, an editor of the Cairo Democrat was writing that “the mania has passed away, vanished like a summer cloud.” Those few years were a moment in time…

Dick Simpson is one of those rare political scientists who has also been a politician.  He knows how the sausage is made, even if there is much he doesn’t like about the process.  As he writes at the start of Democracy’s Rebirth: The View from Chicago: I bring to this book not only fifty years…

Maybe it was funnier and more interesting back in 1986 — Paradise, I mean, the thin, wispy novel by Donald Barthelme. Or maybe Barthelme just had a harder time sustaining fiction for a full book.  He was known, after all, mainly for the scores of short stories he published, many of which were extremely short,…

If Homer’s epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey were movies, they’d come with a content warning: Graphic Violence. After all, the one is all about the bloody and gruesome hand-to-hand combat before the walls of Troy, and the other is capped by not one but two massacres, the slaying by Odysseus of more than…

Nobody knows anything about Homer except what’s in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and, even there, it gets dicey, as James I. Porter details in his challenging and provocative book Homer: The Very Idea, newly available in paperback from the University of Chicago Press. It’s a convenient shorthand to speak of the author of those…

Frederick Busch’s 1990 novel Harry and Catherine is a love story about fear. Harry Miller and Catherine Hollander had been together in Vermont when young — Harry, a New York City reporter, flying up for visits, a male presence in the house for her two little boys, Randy and Bobby, after their father Dell had…

It is astonishing to turn to pages 102-103 in Mario Ruspoli’s The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographs and find the curving wall and mural in the Hall of Bulls, also called the Rotunda. Part of this is the way the photograph is laid out over a page and a half, with the fold separating…

Major-General James Wolfe, commander of the English forces at the Plains of Abraham on the morning of September 13, 1759, had already been shot twice in the battle against the French forces outside the walls of Quebec — once in the wrist and once in the groin.  Roch Carrier writes about what happened next: Despite…

Modern folklore says that the Inuits (Eskimos) have more than fifty words for snow and ice, but, apparently, the fact is there are only about half that many. In his 2005 Discworld novel Thud!, Terry Pratchett has a great number of meanings to the one word of the title. They are: The sound a heavy…