Book review: “A Taste for Death” by P.D. James
As soon as I finished the 1986 mystery A Taste for Death, I went online to find out if Inspector Kate Miskin would appear in any of P.D. James’s later [...]
Essay: Reporting History —How to look at Chicago and, well, at all of humanity as a reporter, historian and poet.
I was asked by the Chicago Literary Club, a very old social organization in the city — now in its 149th season — to give the Arthur Baer Fellowship Address [...]
Book Review: “Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win: Five Decades of Resistance in Chicago’s Uptown Community” by Helen Shiller
Helen Shiller — a longtime radical activist and the new alderman in Chicago’s 46th ward — turned 40 on November 24, 1987. Two days later, she went to City Hall [...]
Book review: “The Book of Mormon: A Biography” by Paul C. Gutjahr
In U.S. history, the Mormons — more formally known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — stand alone as the most successful, American-grown religion. Not only did [...]
Book review: “The Untouchable” by John Banville
The claustrophobic story told by Victor Maskell — a gay, aristocratic Irishman, Cambridge Marxist, international Poussin expert, Russian spy and Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, nicknamed Boots by the Queen [...]
Book review: “Eye of the Monster” by Andre Norton
Andre Norton’s short 1962 novel Eye of the Monster is a disturbing story in which the native race of a world called Ishkur, pejoratively nicknamed Crocs, are brutal, foul-smelling and [...]
Book review: “William Shakespeare: A Handbook — A Narrative, Interpretive Account of Shakespeare’s Life as a Playwright and actor and of His Works in Drama and Poetry” by Thomas Marc Parrott
Much is not known about William Shakespeare, as Thomas Marc Parrott acknowledges in his agile, erudite and very helpful 1934 book William Shakespeare: A Handbook. But the man’s plays and [...]
Book review: “Shakespeare” by Germaine Greer
William Shakespeare’s plays and poetry have been the touchstone of English and world literature for more than four centuries ago. But the man behind them, known in his time as [...]
Book review: “An Angel in Sodom: Henry Gerber and the Birth of the Gay Rights Movement” by Jim Elledge
As a title, An Angel in Sodom is evocative and a bit ambiguous. The subtitle of Jim Elledge’s book is much more direct: Henry Gerber and the Birth of the [...]
Book review: Where There’s Smoke by Stewart Sterling
Near the end of Stewart Sterling’s 1946 novel Where There’s Smoke, Ben Pedley rips the dress off a sultry songstress named Leila Lownes and then throws his body on her. [...]