Book Reviews

Havelock Vetinari, not yet Patrician — in fact, still a student in the Assassin’s Guild — is a lot better at the work of “inhuming” targets than his teachers realize.  [...]

Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes, completed during the first decade of the 14th century, are one of the treasures of Western civilization. And Giuseppe Basile’s Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, published [...]

And when he finally gets to heaven, after spending 30 years meandering the Universe and then racing a comet, Captain Elias Stormfield of San Francisco (size 13 halo) finds out [...]

Space Prison by Tom Godwin is a crackerjack novel that richly fulfills the modest boast on its cover: “A Science-Fiction Adventure.” In fact, I wonder if the book would have [...]

In the 1850s, Swedish writer Fredricka Bremer visited to Chicago and, to say the least, was not impressed. Ben Wilson notes in his sweeping and astute Metropolis: A History of [...]

Philip K. Dick performs a clever feat of literary dipsy-doodle at the end of his 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, and he throws into question the reality [...]

In his introduction to Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come, T. J. Clark makes it clear that the subtext of the book has to do with the [...]

Drew Gilpin Faust’s 2008 book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is an extraordinary achievement that answers a needed but previously unasked question: How did Americans [...]

The metaphor Thich Nhat Hanh uses to describe Buddha’s teaching is that of a raft.  It is, he writes, only a raft to help you cross the river, a finger [...]

Over the years, I’ve written about Scrooge and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol several times. In 2014, I published an op-ed piece for the Chicago Tribune, titled “Was he Scrooge [...]