Book review: “Swag” by Elmore Leonard
Frank Ryan has his 10 rules, and Stick — Ernest Stickley Jr. — buys into them. The result is very lucrative. Ryan’s Rules was the original title of Elmore Leonard’s [...]
Book review: “Two Years’ Vacation” by Jules Verne
On the night of March 9, 1860, a storm-driven schooner with only 15 boys aboard, ages 8 to 14, crashes into the shore of an unknown island. And so begins [...]
Book review: “Fargo Burns” by Kos Kostmayer
Rarely in literature does there appear someone as vitally alive as Fargo Burns, a character whose chaotically self-destructive actions and courting of danger and fragmenting psyche co-exist with — and, [...]
Book review: “Dark Black” by Sam Weller
One of the opening paragraphs of Sam Weller’s short story “All the Summer Before Us” is this: “We were eighteen, me and Dave and Bill; childhood friends on the cusp [...]
Book review: “Treasures of Westminster Abbey” by Tony Trowles
On September 9, 2017, I wandered over to Westminster Abbey because I was in London for the first time seeing the sights and I knew it was chockful of a [...]
Book review: “Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975” by Susan S. Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino
Pauline Saliga, executive director of the Society of Architectural Historians, echoes Etta James to say “at last” to the arrival of Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975 (the Monacelli [...]
Book review: “The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma” by Barry Werth
When you long for something, when you dream about finding something, you’re hoping. The word “hope” in this sense doesn’t appear in The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma [...]
Book review: “The Didache: Text, Translation, Analysis, and Commentary” by Aaron Milavec
Christian beliefs, theology and history are rooted in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John as well as the Acts of the Apostles, the twenty Epistles and the Book [...]
Book review: “Cop Hater” by Ed McBain
In my early 20s, I read a lot of Ed McBain 87th Precinct books. There was a detective who had a white streak through his hair from an old wound, [...]
Book review: “BUtterfield 8” by John O’Hara
Some random thoughts about John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8, published in 1935: Unmentionables O’Hara seems to go out of his way to mention everything that, in polite society of 1930s America, [...]
