The past is a strange, yet familiar place, and history isn’t a cudgel with which to pound opponents into submission. That’s true of any history. And it’s especially important when [...]
It’s not really a surprise that Sigmund Freud would get mad at Carl Jung after what Geoff did to the rug in Freud’s office while Jung was seeing a client [...]
Martin Cruz Smith’s 1981 bestseller Gorky Park is a baroque murder mystery with international reverberations, gruesome details upon gruesome details, betrayals and betrayals, lust and love, weasel-like mammals and weasel-like [...]
We live in an age that, pretty much, denies sin, particularly sin as it was viewed a century ago, a violation of God‘s law, especially dealing with sex. Still, the [...]
At the heart of most crime novels are bad guys who are trying to victimize good guys. But not when Elmore Leonard is the writer. The bad guys — the [...]
Simone Lerrante is seventy-years-old, and, as she has all her life, she is ruminating at this moment in the year 2000 as she looks at the panes of the large [...]
It’s flippant and inelegant to say that, for seventeen hundred years, Arius has been the bogeyman of Christian theology. But it’s true. As Rowan Williams notes — with greater literary [...]
On the cattle drive to Wichita for the train to Chicago, Frank Harris goes out looking for strays and finds a new-born calf beside a dead cow. He tosses the [...]
The eight-year-old inside me perked up early in my reading of Leaf Town Forever when two friends are hired by Lucinda at the Treasure Shop to search for treasures, such [...]
Think of Vance Randolph’s Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales as a kind of grass-roots version of the 14th century Decameron. In fact, Randolph might have had that [...]
