Book review: “The Cloud Walker” by Edmund Cooper
I first read Edmund Cooper’s novel The Cloud Walker in my 20s, shortly after it was published in 1973. And I enjoyed it. Reading it now, nearly half a century [...]
Book review: “City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934” by Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck
Between Chicago’s two World’s Fairs in 1893 and 1933-34, very few Native Americans lived in and around Chicago. Indeed, the numbers were so low that, in City Indian: Native American [...]
Book review: “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” by Toni Morrison
In a recent edition of the New York Review of Books, Irish writer Fintan O’Toole writes that the core of Trumpism is his message to followers that they are the [...]
Book review: “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America” by Colin Woodard
I’m of two minds about Colin Woodard’s 2011 American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. On the one hand, it provides an interesting and, [...]
Book review: “Bury Your Dead” by Louise Penny
Sometimes, a mystery novel, if the writer is ambitious, will have two puzzles to be solved. It’s a complicated gambit for an author since it can leave the reader totally [...]
Book review: “Carpe Jugulum” by Terry Pratchett
Two witches — Nanny Ogg and Agnes Nitt — don’t like the family of oh-so-courteous vampires who have decided to visit the small nation of Lancre in a mountainous area [...]
Book review: “The Coast of Chicago” by Stuart Dybek
In winter night, the boy sits in the dark kitchen of the flat with his grandfather Dzia-Dzia. Upstairs, the pregnant girl Marcy is playing sad Chopin on her piano as [...]
Essay: Nothing new about America’s cancel culture
The other day, I started reading Jane Austen’s delightfully droll and perceptive 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, and it’s gotten me thinking about the cancel culture. “Cancel culture” is a [...]
Book review: “Storm Front: Dresden Files” by Jim Butcher
Jim Butcher’s 2000 novel Storm Front, the first of the very successful series of Dresden Files novels — 17 so far with more on the horizon — is a rip-snorting, [...]
Book review: “Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization” by Paul Kriwaczek
There is much that is surprising and interesting and fascinating in Paul Kriwaczek’s 2010 book Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization. And much in Kriwaczek’s storytelling that is infuriating. [...]