Living in the moment
This essay initially appeared in the March, 2014 edition of Reality magazine in Ireland. One of the great boons of our era is the ongoing effort at creating better, clearer [...]
Book review: “Empire of the Bay: the Company of Adventurers That Seized a Continent” by Peter C. Newman
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 [...]
Chicago’s “summer winter”
A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times on March 6, 2014 Snow has no respect for the calendar, so the snowfall season for the National Weather [...]
Book review: “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton
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 [...]
Book review: “The Mother’s Recompense” by Edith Wharton
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 [...]
The joy of snow-shoveling
This essay originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune on January 3, 2014. I sing the joy of snow-shoveling. I rejoice in the movement of arms and back, legs and shoulders. [...]
When the world starts afresh
This essay originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune on December 30, 2013. The coming of the new year brings lots of parties. And it’s a time when many people sit [...]
Poem: “….ad altare Dei”
I offer the purple sash and the white surplice. I offer the cold mornings when snow crunched and the church was dark and silent and an old man came down [...]
Book review: “Michelangelo” by Stefanie Penck, translated by David Aston
There are hundreds of books about Michelangelo, many running to several hundred pages. I own several of them. Stefanie Penck’s Michelangelo, published in 2005 by Prestel, has only 95 pages [...]
Book review: “Tres Riches Heures: Behind the Gothic Masterpiece” by Lillian Schacherl, translated by Fiona Elliott
It would be difficult to think of a collection of artworks that could challenge the Tres Riches Heures in terms of sumptuous color and elegance. And all within a single [...]