In the final pages of his adroit and illuminating 2012 book Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, Laurent Dubois brings Ricardo Seitenfus onto the stage. In December, 2010, Seitenfus — a Brazilian law professor and the head of the Organization of American States mission to Haiti in the aftermath of its catastrophic earthquake eleven months earlier…

William M. Stableford’s 1971 transposition of Homer’s Iliad into The Days of Glory is a clever piece of science fiction, especially for a guy who was then in his early 20s. But maybe it was too clever. I’m not sure that, half a century ago, many sci-fi readers would have been tempted to pick up…

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, the veneration of saints can easily turn these figures into paragons of perfection.  And, in the United States, there is a knee-jerk reaction of shock…

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 books we have to read — for a book review, say, or for research or for school or in the course of doing a job. …

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 Scots accent and are a perpetual after-game Manchester United fandom without the football. Yet, they are kind-hearted, totally courageous (since they are technically already dead),…

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 has reverberated through Western civilization. A Classics and drama professor at the University of London, Hall notes how the story of a wandering soldier finding…

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 time long after nuclear war, and life on earth has gone back to the basics of survival for most people.  Mutations are common, and some…

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 days of demolition. Published in mid-2022 in hardcover and reissued recently as a paperback by HarperCollins, the book is being honored on July 15 when…

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 featuring Commander Adam Dalgliesh of the Metropolitan Police of New Scotland Yard, an introspective cop who’s also a noted poet.  However, it might be a…