Essay: An artist is a kind of saint
He hasn’t been canonized, but I think of Michelangelo as a sort of saint. William Shakespeare, too. And Emily Dickinson, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Frank Sinatra, Beethoven, Aretha Franklin and Chaucer. I [...]
Book review: “What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve ‘What Ifs’ of History,” edited by Andrew Roberts
What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve ‘What Ifs’ of History, published in 2004, is, as its subtitle suggests, a serious work of counterfactual speculation. Which isn’t to say [...]
Book review: “Chicago’s Modern Mayors: From Harold Washington to Lori Lightfoot,” edited by Dick Simpson and Betty O’Shaughnessy
Chicago's Modern Mayors, edited by Dick Simpson and Betty O'Shaughnessy, covers a forty-year period during which Chicago, its people and its region went through great changes under a [...]
Book review: “Shadows on the Rock” by Willa Cather
About halfway through Shadows on the Rock, Willa Cather’s 1931 novel, Cecile, the 12-year-old daughter of Quebec apothecary Euclide Auclair, hears the story of a miracle that has happened in [...]
Book review: “Killer’s Wedge” by Ed McBain
Ed McBain’s 1954 novel Killer’s Wedge, the eighth book in his 87th Precinct series, opens with a short poetic rhapsody to autumn in the city: Outside the grilled windows of [...]
Book review: “Necklace and Calabash” by Robert van Gulik
In the opening scene of Robert van Gulik’s 1967 Judge Dee mystery Necklace and Calabash, the judge is on his way to a quick fishing vacation in Rivertown but has [...]
Book review: “Solstiss: The Seduction of Lace” by Anne Kraatz, translated by Molly Stevens
I’m not sure if Anne Kraatz’s 2006 Solstiss: The Seduction of Lace was a book commissioned by the Solstiss company. In 1989, Kraatz wrote the delightfully erudite Lace: History and [...]
Book Review: “Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” by Philip Gefter
There are two major characters in Philip Gefter’s Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” One is the four-actor play Who’s [...]
Book review: “Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Cartography of the Americas”
A strikingly drawn and boldly colored map, attributed to the Jesuit priest and explorer Jean de Brebeuf, is the image used on the cover of Mirela Altic’s Encounters in the [...]
Book review: “A Question of Proof” by Nicholas Blake
In 1935, Nicholas Blake published A Question of Proof, his jocosely told murder mystery and the first of sixteen novels which featured the gentleman detective Nigel Strangeways. Blake also [...]