Book Reviews

The odds are that you don’t have a copy of the Jewish War by Josephus in your book collection. You may never have heard of it.  It was written around [...]

  Sonja Livingston’s mother led an irregular life, giving birth to seven children, often without a husband, but she still attended Corpus Christi Catholic Church with her kids, striding up [...]

In 1962, John Steinbeck was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the committee that chose him described his novel The Grapes of Wrath as “a great work” [...]

I know the title of Edward L. Greenstein’s Job, just published by Yale University Press, indicates that it’s a new translation of the biblical book composed about 2,600 years ago. [...]

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 [...]