The Bible is so reverenced in Western civilization that it’s easy to miss all the layers of comedy at work. Indeed, Charles Baudelaire complained, “Holy Books never laugh, to whatever [...]
Two-thirds of the way through his history of the Democratic political machine in Chicago, Clout City, Dominic A. Pacyga gives a handful of examples of the requests that came to [...]
Early on in Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, From the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way, Maxim Samson writes, “Every landscape tells a story—the challenge is [...]
The fresco called The Aldobrandini Wedding is eight feet long and three feet high, and it was created by a Roman artist two thousand years ago, early in the first [...]
Published sixty-six years ago, Andre Norton’s 63-page novella Voodoo Planet is both caught in the racial attitudes of its time and free of them. And it’s a strange tale for [...]
What a difference 14 years makes! That’s the amount of time between the publication of Elmore Leonard’s novel The Switch (1978) and the appearance of his Rum Punch (1992), both [...]
The Deputy Director of the Unit, a secret laboratory/factory for geniuses, opens the door to Tom Betterton’s quarters and says, “Ah, Betterton — here we are at last! Your wife!” [...]
Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) is both mythic and intimate, and so, too, are the woodcuts that Barry Moser has created for the centennial edition from [...]
One of the many fascinating things about a city like Chicago is how the lives of millions of strangers are, unknowingly, intertwined. Barry Pearce gets at this in a savvy [...]
The Procession to Calvary, also called Christ Carrying the Cross, is the second-largest painting that Pieter Bruegel the Elder is known to have produced. Created in 1564, the work measures [...]
