Essay: Labor Day and a walk with everyone else
The American culture celebrates the rich and powerful. Just look at the news and notice how much is about entertainers and politicians and millionaires and billionaires. On Labor Day, though, [...]
Book review: “Ed Marciniak’s City and Church: A Voice of Conscience” by Charles Shanabruch
In late 1972, Ed Marciniak, a perennial social critic and justice activist, became president of the Institute of Urban Life, a small program affiliated with Loyola University Chicago. He had [...]
Book review: “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang” By Kate Wilhelm
Kate Wilhelm envisions a community of clones as a really dysfunctional family. Wait, that’s not quite right. In her 1976 science-fiction novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, she envisions [...]
Essay: God Hides like Two-year-old Emma
When I used to come to the door at my granddaughter Emma’s house, she’d hide, usually behind the legs of her mother or father, peeping out on one side or [...]
Book review: “Tishomingo Blues” by Elmore Leonard
A book means something different to an author than it does to a reader. Actually, each reader has a personal experience of the book, different in small and large ways [...]
Book review: “Haiti: The Aftershocks of History” by Laurent Dubois
In the final pages of his adroit and illuminating 2012 book Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, Laurent Dubois brings Ricardo Seitenfus onto the stage. In December, 2010, Seitenfus — a [...]
Book review: “The Days of Glory” by Brian M. Stableford
William M. Stableford’s 1971 transposition of Homer’s Iliad into The Days of Glory is a clever piece of science fiction, especially for a guy who was then in his early [...]
Book review: “Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986: How Technology, Politics, Finance, and Race Reshaped the City” by Thomas Leslie
Thomas Leslie’s Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 is an impressive and important book that will take its place with those works providing the deepest insights into what makes Chicago, Chicago. Books such [...]
Book review: “Jacob: Unexpected Patriarch” by Yair Zakovitch
For the past two millenniums, Christianity has so influenced Western society that there is an expectation that a spiritual leader, like Jesus, should be without sin. In the Catholic Church, [...]
Book review: “The Uffizi” by Margherita Lenzini and Emma Micheletti
Why do I read a book? I mean, this particular book or that one. I mean, what triggers the decision to open a book and start reading. Obviously, there are [...]