Book Reviews

“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 [...]

The nuclear accident on April 26, 1986, at the Chernobyl Power Plant, the worst the world has known, was rooted in human ingenuity, blindness and error and resulted in a [...]

In the final pages of Nicholas Blake’s 1968 mystery The Private Wound, the killer is confronted by an accuser and spills out a detailed and brutal confession and then, in [...]

The girl grew up in a hut in a hidden place among the trees, and, later, after going out in the world and starting to find her way to where [...]

A little more than a year from now, the 2024 Democratic National Convention will be held in Chicago, marking the 27th time that the city has played host to one [...]

Right from her first page, Naa Oyo A. Kwate makes it clear that the point of her book White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation (University [...]

Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey is one of the best English versions of the epic. I liked it a lot, but not as much as the 2007 Odyssey by [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]