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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Pa By Patrick T. Reardon . Drive Chronicles Avenue straight out of downtown for three miles to the railroad bridge, empty as a Roman ruin, turn right toward the spray-paint [...]
In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, the Nac Mac Feegles are six-inch-tall, red-haired, blue-skinned fairies who — nearly all of them male — drink, fight, steal and swear in something like a [...]
