Psychiatrist Irv Yalom is 83. I call him Irv because that’s what he asks his psychiatric patients to call him. I picture him as a sprightly firecracker of a guy, [...]

Sometimes, a piece of clothing or an aspect of fashion has a very specific meaning. In her 1981 book The Language of Clothes, Alison Lurie notes that British officials, following [...]

For the North, the goal of the Civil War was to reunite the nation. That’s how Abraham Lincoln defined it and why the northern states rallied behind the effort. Yet, [...]

Many of the books of the Bible are like Hollywood musicals. In Fiddler on the Roof, for instance, the narrative unfolds as characters interact, and, every once in a while, [...]

On the cover of the University of Texas Press edition of Billy Lee Brammer’s 1961 novel The Gay Place is a blurb by David Halberstam: There are two classic American [...]

In Terry Pratchett’s 2011 Discworld novel Snuff, Young Sam Vimes has become very interested in poo. Mainly, this is because Young Sam is six. It’s also because the only son [...]

In Sicily in the late 19th century, the Socialists who went out into the rural areas to organize the peasants were hard-headed men. Their aims were economic, and their demands [...]

As I wrote in Sunday’s Printers Row section of the Chicago Tribune, psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom’s new book Creatures of a Day and Other Tales of Psychotherapy deals with the [...]

Back in 1905, Albert Einstein promulgated his relativity theory. One wrinkle had to do with how time would be experienced by someone on Earth as compared with someone else traveling [...]

There are travel books, and then there are travel books. One sort, such as Fodor’s, is jammed with facts about hotels, trains, battlefields, subways, mileage, restaurants, museums, exchange rates, airports, [...]