Book Reviews

  He tossed his sin stone   By Patrick T. Reardon   He tossed his sin stone into Lake Deuteronomy, set fire to his crops and headed for Egypt City. [...]

“Visceral” is one of those no-nonsense words.  It goes right to the gut.  You can look at art, look at the world, with your intellect.  But, if you turn a [...]

In its odd way, John Brunner’s 1984 novel The Tides of Time is an adventure story. It’s also a thriller and a mystery that propels the reader along in search [...]

It takes some hubris to rewrite the Christian gospels, but maybe not that much.  A lot of people have done it. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John seem [...]

It was nearly 40 years ago that I first read James Agee’s autobiographical novel A Death in the Family.    Since then, I have experienced a similarly sudden violent death [...]

There’s much that’s audacious about Roddy Doyle’s new novel Love. There’s the title, first of all.  It seems fitting for some sort of Romeo and Juliet story, with or without [...]

One of my favorite poems in Haki R. Madhubuti’s new, career-spanning collection Taught by Women: Poems as Resistance Language is “Big Momma,” originally published in 1970. Back a half century [...]

Midway through Terry Pratchett’s 1997 novel Jingo, a conversation takes place between Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson and Corporal Delphine Angua von Überwald.  He is a 6’6” dwarf (by adoption) who’s the [...]

The shoot-out that ends Elmore Leonard’s 1977 novel The Hunted is just like those in the westerns he was still writing back in those days. Three heavily armed bad guys, [...]

After nearly 60 years, Gislebertus: Sculptor of Autun by Denis Grivot and George Zarnecki remains the best book on the astonishingly vivid, highly original art of the medieval French master. [...]