Thomas Leslie’s Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 is an impressive and important book that will take its place with those works providing the deepest insights into what makes Chicago, Chicago. Books such [...]
For the past two millenniums, Christianity has so influenced Western society that there is an expectation that a spiritual leader, like Jesus, should be without sin. In the Catholic Church, [...]
Why do I read a book? I mean, this particular book or that one. I mean, what triggers the decision to open a book and start reading. Obviously, there are [...]
In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, the Nac Mac Feegles are six-inch-tall, red-haired, blue-skinned fairies who — nearly all of them male — drink, fight, steal and swear in something like a [...]
The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey by Edith Hall, published in 2008, is an expansive and detailed study of the countless ways the ancient Greek epic [...]
The culmination of Vonda N. McIntyre’s 1978 novel Dreamsnake comes in the final pages when the healer woman Snake confronts North, the dark presence of the story. It is a [...]
Toya Wolfe’s debut novel Last Summer on State Street is a harrowing, poignant and visceral evocation of life and death in the Robert Taylor public housing development in its final [...]
There is an awful lot going on in P.D. James’s 1989 novel Devices and Desires — maybe too much. Either way, it’s quite a book. This was her eighth novel [...]
I have a bone to pick with people who want to talk about “young adult” books. To me, this has more to do with the need of a bookstore, say, [...]
“Oh, I read that — in high school, I think,” the waitress said as she saw me with George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm. “Yeah, I might have even read [...]
