Book review: “Rum Punch” by Elmore Leonard
What a difference 14 years makes! That’s the amount of time between the publication of Elmore Leonard’s novel The Switch (1978) and the appearance of his Rum Punch (1992), both [...]
What a difference 14 years makes! That’s the amount of time between the publication of Elmore Leonard’s novel The Switch (1978) and the appearance of his Rum Punch (1992), both [...]
The Deputy Director of the Unit, a secret laboratory/factory for geniuses, opens the door to Tom Betterton’s quarters and says, “Ah, Betterton — here we are at last! Your wife!” [...]
A first visit to the Uffizi Patrick T. Reardon Looking for Theopista who is called a saint, painted by Lippi who is called by Browning a brothel-john in [...]
Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) is both mythic and intimate, and so, too, are the woodcuts that Barry Moser has created for the centennial edition from [...]
One of the many fascinating things about a city like Chicago is how the lives of millions of strangers are, unknowingly, intertwined. Barry Pearce gets at this in a savvy [...]
Poor soul Patrick T. Reardon Poor soul, old soul, sign of the window. Sign of lost soul, track of lost tribe. The woman’s flowers bloom [...]
The Procession to Calvary, also called Christ Carrying the Cross, is the second-largest painting that Pieter Bruegel the Elder is known to have produced. Created in 1564, the work measures [...]
Goodness and kindness are ideas that, usually, are widely embraced. We live, however, in an age when meanness, ridicule, deprecation, disparagement, selfishness and the infliction of pain are promoted from [...]
The Hill Patrick T. Reardon Reign and tremble, the earth moves to the sound of the terrible name. Judgment is given, righteous answers to unasked questions on [...]
The past is a strange, yet familiar place, and history isn’t a cudgel with which to pound opponents into submission. That’s true of any history. And it’s especially important when [...]