When 27-year-old Juliette Kinzie settled with her husband John, the local Indian agent, in the tiny hamlet of Chicago in 1833, it was the home of only about 300 people, [...]
I’ve lived my whole life, I guess, with dangerous women. I just thought they were interesting. I’ve discussed with Sarah, my daughter, the pros and cons of Christopher Hibbert’s [...]
Throughout the 20th century, postcards were an easy, cheap way to keep in touch. Often, they were sent home by tourists, but postcards were also sent to memorialize or comment [...]
The Pueblo boy with “thick hair…the color of a night river” is called Wolf. He appears several times in the first half of Renny Golden’s The Music of Her [...]
We moderns like to think of ourselves as ever-so-savvy, ever-so-smart about what’s really true and what isn’t, about how to best talk and act and think. We like to view [...]
The second half of Andre Norton’s 1969 Uncharted Stars is a fast-paced chase that is one of the best extended sequences in her 200+ books. This is the section that [...]
Some of Andre Norton’s fans consider The Zero Stone, published in 1968, to be one of her best books. I didn’t find it all that compelling although it is distinctive [...]
Shea Serrano’s Basketball (and Other Things): A Collection of Questions Asked, Answered, Illustrated is a bag-of-potato-chips sort of book. No, that’s not quite right. It’s the book equivalent of seven [...]
In the Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus takes a trip to Hades where he encounters many of his former comrades from the Trojan War, including Achilles who asks him: “How could you [...]
Daniel Okrent’s newly published The Guarded Gate is about immigration. But, much more, its subject is racism. Not black/white racism although that does rear its ugly head in Okrent’s rigorously [...]
