Book Review: “Hawk” by Vivian Ayers
When Hawk was in the process of becoming a hawk, a man walked by and looked up into the tree and yelled, “What you need is to go get your-self [...]
Book review: “The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism” by Ross King
In the summer of 1874, Edouard Manet visited the home of Claude Monet in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil, and, as Ross King recounts, he began painting The Monet Family [...]
Book review: “’Til Death” by Ed McBain
On what should be the happiest day of his life — the day of his marriage to Angela Carella — the shy and affable Tommy Giordano is the target of [...]
Book review: “Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary” by Marina Warner
Ten or twelve years ago, here in Chicago, I was on an archdiocesan committee and was duly invited to an afternoon Christmas reception at the Cardinal’s mansion. There was a [...]
Book review: “ ‘Comfort to the Enemy’ and other Carl Webster Stories” by Elmore Leonard
In his eighties, Elmore Leonard apparently decided to write whatever he felt like writing. His last six books, published between 2005 and his death in 2013 at 87, were pretty [...]
Book review: “Write Cut Rewrite: The Cutting Room Floor of Modern Literature” by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon
Everyone, I suppose, has a sense of the what-if of history. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to Ford’s Theater that night and had avoided assassination? What if I had [...]
Book Review: “Democracy’s Rebirth: The View from Chicago” by Dick Simpson
A half a century ago, as a new political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Dick Simpson won election to the Chicago City Council for the [...]
Book review: “Elsewhere: An Elegy” by Faisal Mohyuddin
In his poem “The Hourglass. The Pebble. The Throne of God,” Faisal Mohyuddin ponders “the lightless language of elegy.” His father is dead, and he is grieving. And he wonders [...]
Book review: “The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City” by Kevin Baker
The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City is Kevin Baker’s love letter to the city and the sport and the way they have intertwined for [...]
“The Eiger Sanction” by Trevanian
Some thoughts on re-reading Trevanian’s The Eiger Sanction nearly half a century after I first read it: The thriller The Eiger Sanction was published in 1972 and quickly became [...]