Terry Pratchett’s 40th Discworld novel Raising Steam, a wonderfully witty and thoughtful book, seems to have been a very personal novel for him to write. For one thing, Pratchett seems [...]

No question, the guy on the cover of Umberto Eco’s 2007 book On Ugliness is truly ugly. And, in this sixteenth-century painting by Quentin Matsys, Ill-Matched Lovers, his ugliness is [...]

This review initially appeared in the Printers Row section of the Chicago Tribune. on March 8, 2014. Storms at sea play a key role in the tale of John Jacob [...]

Until now, I had never read Ray Bradbury’s 1953 science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. But, of course, I had read dozens of other books and seen scores of movies that were [...]

On March 20 — just as I was finishing Still Dreaming, the surprisingly readable memoir that U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez wrote with the help of Doug Scofield — the Chicago [...]

The map of North America today — with much of the United States-Canadian border lying along the 49th parallel — might easily have been very different. American “manifest destiny” didn’t [...]

Why does Newland Archer leave? Why, on the final page of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, does Archer walk away from a chance to visit Ellen Olenska, the love [...]

There is a moment, fairly early in Edith Wharton’s 1923 novel The Mother’s Recompense, when the central character Kate Clephane exclaims to herself, “I am rewarded!” I cringed when I [...]