Book Reviews

Wee Mad Arthur, terribly short and terribly powerful, is a funny character in Terry Pratchett’s fantasy Discworld which is a planet flat as a pancake and, so, pretty much by [...]

Two sisters, both around thirty, sit uneasily across from each other in a restaurant — Sarah, wife, mother, seamstress, and Glennie, an obstetrician-gynecologist married to her career. Six years ago, [...]

What, no sociopaths? Well, A Coyote’s in the House is, after all, a book for children. But, above all, it is a novel by Elmore Leonard who specializes in stories [...]

As someone who didn’t know many of the details of the battles and wars between Israel and the Palestinian people over the past century and more, I came to Rashid [...]

Yoga is devil-worship — that’s what some American Christian leaders say, such as Mark Driscoll, an evangelical pastor who, in a 2010 sermon, told his congregation: “Yoga is demonic.  If [...]

What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve ‘What Ifs’ of History, published in 2004, is, as its subtitle suggests, a serious work of counterfactual speculation. Which isn’t to say [...]

    Chicago's Modern Mayors, edited by Dick Simpson and Betty O'Shaughnessy, covers a forty-year period during which Chicago, its people and its region went through great changes under a [...]

Ed McBain’s 1954 novel Killer’s Wedge, the eighth book in his 87th Precinct series, opens with a short poetic rhapsody to autumn in the city: Outside the grilled windows of [...]

In the opening scene of Robert van Gulik’s 1967 Judge Dee mystery Necklace and Calabash, the judge is on his way to a quick fishing vacation in Rivertown but has [...]

I’m not sure if Anne Kraatz’s 2006 Solstiss: The Seduction of Lace was a book commissioned by the Solstiss company. In 1989, Kraatz wrote the delightfully erudite Lace: History and [...]