Book review: “The Pelican Brief” by John Grisham
As I was finishing John Grisham’s 1992 gripping legal thriller The Pelican Brief, I found myself warmly enjoying its reminder of how wonderful newspapering used to be. The novel starts [...]
Book review: “The Osterman Weekend” by Robert Ludlum
Robert Ludlum had a knack for writing successful and very popular thrillers, producing 27 books with a total of somewhere between 300 million and 500 million copies in print. That [...]
Book review: “Monstrous Regiment” by Terry Pratchett
Some background: More than four centuries ago, during the Protestant Reformation, Scottish reformer John Knox published, while exiled in Switzerland, a small 20,000-word book that has kept his name alive [...]
Book Review: “Hard Times” by Charles Dickens
I suspect that Charles Dickens was in a pretty foul mood when he wrote "Hard Times" in 1854. He draws stark differences between the "good" people and the "bad" people [...]
Book review: “Everyman” by Philip Roth
Philip Roth’s short novel Everyman, published in 2006 when the author was 73, is a bleak, blunt meditation on aging, the deterioration of the human body and the imminence of [...]
Poem: Odyssey
Odyssey By Patrick T. Reardon . Face of God, name of God, child death in every home, Egyptian, Israelite, Canaanite — let people go — sea split, walled water, tabernacle [...]
Book review: “The Cave at Altamira” by Pedro A. Saura Ramos, with essays by Matilde Muzquiz Perez-Seoane, Federico Bernaldo de Quiros, Jose Antonio Lasheras Corruchaga and Antonio Beltran.
The Cave at Altamira, published in 1998 by Harry N. Abrams, is a celebration by scholars from several fields of the artistic wonders of a meandering cave near the small [...]
Poem: Bourbon Street, New Orleans, the night before the Chicago Bears won the 1986 Super Bowl, 46-10
Bourbon Street, New Orleans, the night before the Chicago Bears won the 1986 Super Bowl, 46-10 By Patrick T. Reardon . George could not suppress his animal glee, eyes filled [...]
Chicago history: Rediscovering the art of the much-demonized Chicago wheeler-dealer Charles Tyson Yerkes
In the fall of 2003, Sebastian Smee, the art critic of the Daily Telegraph in London, described a mid-19th century painting by British artist J. M. W. Turner as “an [...]
Book review: “Luther’s Jews: A Journey into Anti-Semitism” by Thomas Kaufmann
Historian Lyndal Roper published her biography Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet in 2016, but, even as it was going to press, she knew that there was more she had to [...]