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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
