Book review: “The Beautiful Boy” by Germaine Greer
With its photo of the hair-blown actor Bjorn Andresen on the dust jacket and its striking, in-your-face, black-and-white photographs of penises at the beginning and end of the book, Germaine [...]
Poem: When
. When By Patrick T. Reardon When I sit and when I stand. When clots of fog cover the restless river. When tick tocks. When I die and when I [...]
Book review: “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens
Many bestselling American novels are comfortable reads. They offer central characters who are attractive and admirable. They provide a story that carries the reader along and leaves the reader with [...]
Book review: “Mr. Majestyk” by Elmore Leonard
As far as I can tell, Mr. Majestyk is the only one of Elmore Leonard’s many novels that was originally a movie. It started life as a Leonard screenplay [...]
Book review: “Chicago Protests: A Joyful Revolution” by Vashon Jordan Jr.
Joy is being free to say: “Look at me! Listen to me!” Joy is being free to join with others to say: “Look at me! Listen to me!” Joy is [...]
Book review: “Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway” by Despina Stratigakos
In Hitler's Northern Utopia (Princeton University Press, 313 pages, $29.95), historian Despina Stratigakos deeply mines World War II records and subsequent research to thoroughly detail for the first time the [...]
Book review: “The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century” by Joel F. Harrington
Meister Frantz Schmidt executed 394 people during the course of a nearly half century as an executioner, mostly in the important German city of Nuremburg. In addition, he tortured, flogged [...]
Q&A: Covid and the Blaze — Carl Smith and the Great Chicago Fire, Part 2
Part 2 of two parts. Here's the first part. Like the rest of the world, Atlantic Monthly Press and Northwestern University historian Carl Smith weren’t planning on Covid-19. But that’s [...]
Q&A: Letting Events Talk — Carl Smith and the Great Chicago Fire, Part 1
Part 1 of two parts Carl Smith’s Chicago’s Great Fire, published in August by Atlantic Monthly Press, is an important book of Chicago history, a rousing crackerjack work that’s highly [...]
Book review: “Ugly Ways” by Tina McElroy Ansa
Betty Lovejoy and her younger sisters Emily and Annie Ruth, all successful black women, have come together in Mulberry, Georgia, to bury their mother, known by the family nickname as [...]