Jane Jacobs and the New York City Gay Pride Parade, 2014
555 Hudson Street, New York, the former home of Jane Jacobs On a recent trip to New York City, I went looking for Jane Jacobs and found the Gay [...]
Book review: “The Lowland” by Jhumpa Lahiri
It’s easy enough to miss or disregard several faint Biblical echoes in Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2013 novel The Lowland. After all, this is a very modern story about Indians born in [...]
Me, myself and Jim Brosnan and Anne Hollander
I suspect that Jim Brosnan and Anne Hollander never met. They moved in different circles. They died eight days apart — Brosnan on June 29 at the age of 84, [...]
Book review: “Leonardo da Vinci: A Penguin Life” by Sherwin B. Nuland
The stellar Penguin Lives series, published from 1999 to 2011, was a collective act of courage and chutzpah. Each of the 34 writers in the series dared to tell the [...]
Book review: “The Devil’s Larder” by Jim Crace
Jim Crace’s 2001 book The Devil’s Larder is a collection of 64 very short stories centering on food. There are stories here about strip fondue and about a waiter who [...]
Book review: “A Blink of the Screen” by Terry Pratchett
Is Terry Pratchett a fan of John Barth? I never gave it any thought until I read Pratchett’s 2012 collection of short fiction A Blink of the Screen which contains [...]
The Pelican’s Portrait
Sir Reginald Reginaldson, the son of a Danish merchant, grew up in the well-to-do mercantile community of Houndstooth-upon-Tweed on High Street in London during the second half of the reign [...]
Book review: “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War” by Mark Harris
A book about five Hollywood directors in World War II? Well, OK. It was a book selected by one of my book clubs so I got a copy of Five [...]
Book review: “Chimera” by John Barth
I suspect that anyone writing a review of a John Barth book is tempted to Barth Barth. Which is to say, to try to be as inventive and witty and [...]
The Last Four Miles: Completing Chicago’s Lakefront Parks
Virtually my first freelance job after being laid off by the Chicago Tribune in April, 2009, was to edit (and write portions of) a report for the Friends of the [...]