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 [...]
Book review: “Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City” by Carl Smith
Devastation is devastation, whether brought about by fire or pandemic. The Great Chicago Fire occurred nearly a century and a half ago, but the experience of living through that [...]
Poem: “He tossed his sin stone”
He tossed his sin stone By Patrick T. Reardon He tossed his sin stone into Lake Deuteronomy, set fire to his crops and headed for Egypt City. [...]
Book review: “Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye” by Linda Nochlin
“Visceral” is one of those no-nonsense words. It goes right to the gut. You can look at art, look at the world, with your intellect. But, if you turn a [...]