Historical fiction is dangerous territory for a writer. It's all too easy to make actual people, say, Abraham Lincoln or John Wilkes Booth, into stick figures, and actual events, say, Booth's assassination of Lincoln, into just another thriller or romance novel. Consider "Killing Lincoln" by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard.
A related genre is…
Linda Sunshine plays shortstop for the Chicago Eagles, the first woman to become a major leaguer. Her manager, the star pitcher and some of her other teammates don't like the idea. At all.
Yet, for her — as for them — baseball is more than a living. It's more than a game.
"Ever since…
A little before midnight on the last night of his life Timothy Marr, a linen draper of Radcliffe Highway, set about tidying up the shop, helped by the shop-boy James Gowen.
So begins "The Maul and the Pear Tree" by P.D. James and T.A. Critchley, a thorough account and re-thinking of the notorious Ratcliffe Highway Murders,…
Every once in a while, when I'm in the basement and can see the foundations of our two-flat, or rummage in a closet and notice a crack in the plaster in the corner, or sit at my computer and look at the wallpaper that previous owners put up in the room, I wonder about the…
Chad Harbach's intention in "The Art of Fielding" seems to be to subvert the traditional sports story — boy of great talent hones his craft, reaches heights, stumbles but learns from his errors (sometimes, literally) to become a better player and man.
Here, Henry Skirmshander is a brilliant, if light-hitting, high school shortstop who is spotted…
When she and her husband Joseph were murdered on an isolated stretch of beach, Celice's body fell onto the sand, upending a dune beetle and trapping him in the folds of her black wool jacket.
As the beetle worked his way out from under the fabric, English novelist Jim Crace writes:
He didn't carry with him any…
Reading the last line of Alan Bennett's "The Uncommon Reader," I laughed out loud.
I can't guarantee you will, but I suspect you will find this short 2007 novel funny and surprisingly thoughtful.
It's about Queen Elizabeth II stumbling into a deep passion for books, particularly novels. And about how this new avocation brings into her…
Okay, so I'm a 10-year-old boy at heart.
I found the 2010 movie "How to Train Your Dragon," starring Jay Baruchel as the hapless Hiccup, endlessly droll, inventive, touching and visually inviting. So I got myself a copy of the book upon which the film is based.
Sort of. Kind of.
Cressida Cowell's 2004 book has the…
When Reay Tannahill began working on the book that became "Food in History," she was entering virgin territory. No one before her had attempted to chronicle the relationship of humans and their food from before the dawn of history down to modern times.
The result, published in 1973, was a surprise bestseller. Tannahill came…
I thoroughly enjoyed "Memory Mambo" when I read it in early 1997, shortly after it was published. Fifteen years later, I savored it even more.
Achy Obejas is a friend, and we were co-workers at the Chicago Tribune when she published this book, her first novel.
That personal connection added something to the pleasure of the…