Book review: “A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps” by Jeremy Black
The 1897 image on pages 110-111 of Jeremy Black’s A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps is a striking bird’s-eye view of Chicago, looking out across the downtown to [...]
Essay: Rejoice. I say it again: Rejoice
“Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be apparent to all. The Lord is near.” That’s St. Paul writing to the Philippians. [...]
Book review: “The Avian Hourglass” by Lindsey Drager
The young woman and Sulien, an older man from another part of the world, are talking about birds and their movements together. “It’s just amazing to me how they moved, [...]
Book review: “You Suck: A Love Story” by Christopher Moore
It’s a few days before Christmas in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, and Chet is a long-haired obese cat. How obese? Well, his human, a homeless guy “dirty beyond age [...]
Book review: “The Queen of Steeplechase Park” by David Ciminello
David Ciminello’s 2024 novel The Queen of Steeplechase Park is a wild and wacky foul-mouthed fantasy about free-spirit Belladonna Marie Donato and her circle of boundary-breaking friends in the tight, [...]
Poem: “Table”
Table By Patrick T. Reardon Let the sparrow take a chair at the Juneteeth table with Elijah, with Godot, with the lost tribes and the communion of saints and [...]
Book review: “For Gaza’s Children: Black, Brown and Jewish Writers and Poets Speak Out,” edited by Marc Lamont Hill, Haki Madhubuti and Keith Gilyard
For Gaza's Children is a scream of protest against the oppression of Palestinians by those who have suffered oppression themselves. It is a cry from the heart against the destruction, [...]
Book review: “Friends and Lovers: My China in Tang Poetry Volume III” by Susan Wan Dolling
Bai Juyi and his best friend Yuan Zhen, Chinese poets twelve hundred years ago, promoted a revival of folk culture, known as the New Music Bureau Movement. The Music Bureau [...]
Book review: “Chicago” by David Mamet
On the title page of David Mamet’s 2018 book, it says: Chicago: A Novel. It would have been more accurate to say: Chicago: A Myth. The book, well-written and well-paced, [...]
Book review: “The Magnificat: The Prayer of Mary” by Sidney Callahan
It wasn’t happenstance, I think, that Sidney Callahan’s The Magnificat: The Prayer of Mary and Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin [...]