Growing up and living female in America is a perilous endeavor. There is the gropy swimming coach, the miscarriages, the catcalls as you ride your bike, the malicious male colleague, [...]
Throughout Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson examines the nature of God’s forgiveness and its contrast with the tendency of humans to demand vengeance or justice. The case of Cain arises several [...]
On the last pages of his landmark book about his concentration camp experiences, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl recalls a prediction from Sigmund Freud about what would happen [...]
In eight of the stories collected in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowski describes life in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. Four others [...]
By chapter 16 of Ed McBain’s 1960 novel See Them Die, the reader has gotten deeply invested in the book’s characters, particularly China, a sweet, beautiful, happy nineteen-year-old, and Jeff, [...]
General readers, beware! Tom Comitta’s new book Patchwork isn’t for you. Patchwork isn’t for someone who wants a novel that tells a story and has characters and settings and scenes. [...]
Ernie Banks and Minnie Minoso are the headliners in Don Zminda’s book Justice Batted Last: Ernie Banks, Minnie Minoso and the Unheralded Players Who Integrated Chicago’s Major League Teams. But [...]
For much of Chicago’s history, its strident boosters with their overblown assertions of the city’s present and, even more, its future greatness have been a subject of ridicule. In 1952, [...]
Kevin Barry’s 2019 novel Night Boat to Tangier is the story of Maurice Hearne and Charles Redmond, two morose, self-absorbed and emotionally fragile Irish gangsters of the small-bore variety. As [...]
Handel’s Messiah: An Oratorio is such a glorious jewel in the treasury of Western music that its story should be grand enough to fill an entire book. But think about [...]
