Essay: The endless ripples of a book recommendation
About five years ago, I read two books that knocked my socks off — the exquisitely evocative Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and that massive, epic, beautiful whale of [...]
About five years ago, I read two books that knocked my socks off — the exquisitely evocative Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and that massive, epic, beautiful whale of [...]
The paperback novel Come Murder Me by James Kieran was published in March, 1951, and Kieran died ten months later at the age of 50. It was a Gold [...]
The Book of Ruth is hardly a book, just four chapters, totaling a bit over 2,600 words. Nonetheless, the story is, writes Illana Pardes, “the most elaborate tale of a [...]
Wee Mad Arthur, terribly short and terribly powerful, is a funny character in Terry Pratchett’s fantasy Discworld which is a planet flat as a pancake and, so, pretty much by [...]
Two sisters, both around thirty, sit uneasily across from each other in a restaurant — Sarah, wife, mother, seamstress, and Glennie, an obstetrician-gynecologist married to her career. Six years ago, [...]
What, no sociopaths? Well, A Coyote’s in the House is, after all, a book for children. But, above all, it is a novel by Elmore Leonard who specializes in stories [...]
As someone who didn’t know many of the details of the battles and wars between Israel and the Palestinian people over the past century and more, I came to Rashid [...]
Yoga is devil-worship — that’s what some American Christian leaders say, such as Mark Driscoll, an evangelical pastor who, in a 2010 sermon, told his congregation: “Yoga is demonic. If [...]
What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve ‘What Ifs’ of History, published in 2004, is, as its subtitle suggests, a serious work of counterfactual speculation. Which isn’t to say [...]
Chicago's Modern Mayors, edited by Dick Simpson and Betty O'Shaughnessy, covers a forty-year period during which Chicago, its people and its region went through great changes under a [...]