I have a bone to pick with people who want to talk about “young adult” books.  To me, this has more to do with the need of a bookstore, say, or a library to categorize and organize volumes, and less to do with the books themselves and their audience. Kidnapped, published in 1886 by Robert…

“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 it in grade school,” I said.  “It’s different reading it now.  Back then, it was all about Communism.  Now, it’s about….well, everything.” Animal Farm was…

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 disaster that seems other-worldly in its strangeness. As Adam Higginbotham details in his Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster,…

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 a long silence, stands there “shivering like a terrified horse.” Quite an image, not the usual stuff of murder mysteries.  But Nicholas Blake isn’t the…

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 she belonged, she thought back to that childhood. But to her mother she was not a person in her own right, not Peretur Paladr Hir;…

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 or both of the major parties. Two of the Democratic gatherings were especially history-making: the nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and the chaos…

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 of Minnesota Press) is that fast food is “a fundamentally anti-Black enterprise.” Indeed, her title details in a handful of words what Kwate found in…

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 Emily Wilson. Mandelbaum’s translation, published 33 years ago in a beautiful edition by the University of California Press, with 12 moodily jagged engravings by Marialuisa…

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 bills and enjoys her company. This is Cuba, early 1898, in the days after the explosion of USS Maine battleship in Havana harbor, setting the…

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 of the Cairo Democrat was writing that “the mania has passed away, vanished like a summer cloud.” Those few years were a moment in time…