Book Reviews

The novels that Elmore Leonard published in the final decade of his life were often all but plotless. That’s not to say that things didn’t happen, but there was a [...]

 Bill Walker was once described by a top art historian as the most accomplished contemporary artist working in the classical mural tradition, spanning from Giotto in 14th century Italy to Diego [...]

Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign tackles an important subject in American history — the strike by Memphis sanitation workers in early 1967, the [...]

Frederick Buechner’s 1997 novel On the Road with the Archangel is a wry, tender and knowing look at humans being humans. Which is to say, at the quirkiness at the [...]

    Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon is one of those great works of literature that demands re-reading.  Once through isn’t enough. There is just too much going [...]

  “Long John” Wentworth, Chicago’s 6 foot-6-inch mayor, wanted to be Abraham Lincoln’s political boss. But Lincoln wasn’t biting. In late April, 1860, the Illinois Republican wrote to a political [...]

Like Odysseus, the Ift warrior Ayyar spends much of Victory on Janus in long, eventful journeying. For 48 pages — nearly 20 percent — of Andre Norton’s 1966 science fiction [...]

Naill Renfro has the Green Sick and has been exiled into the great, dark forest.  He awakens from a fever dream and drags himself to a nearby pool for a [...]

Adam Levin’s 2010 novel The Instructions is nothing if not ambitious. Weighing in at 1,030 pages, it deals deeply with the interior lives of pre-teens, the hair-splitting debates of Torah [...]

There is a temptation to start off this review with a pun, but no dice.  I know that I’m nowhere near as good at it as Terry Pratchett, as he [...]