Historian Andrea Wulf packs a lot into 337 pages in her 2015 book The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, and much of it will be surprising and [...]
The day before the 1996 Democratic National Convention By Patrick T. Reardon They were famous and short, the two of them and the folkie others, guitarless, skittering and kittering [...]
Chicago-born Mary Fleming’s Civilisation Francaise is a novel of layers, like an onion, layers slowly peeled away for the reader to learn the stories of the book’s two central characters, [...]
Mount of Olives Patrick T. Reardon On the dark Mount of Olives, in a rain-jeweled copse above the garden, I removed my breastplate. I unwound my belt. My robe [...]
Noir fiction, like film noir, deals with bad guys doing bad things, often to each other. So why do we care? James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity — serialized in 1936 [...]
John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner is one of the saddest novels ever published. It’s sad not because it is maudlin, but because it isn’t. Williams writes of William Stoner with [...]
D.R. Sherman’s Old Mali and the Boy, published in 1964, is a complex and poignant fable about love, set in northern India in the first half of the twentieth century. [...]
American thrillers tend to be strictly for entertainment. Oh, yes, there may be a subtext message to the reader that, if you don’t do something about something — such as [...]
Herman Wouk’s short science-fiction allegory The “Lomokome” Papers was written in 1949, just four years after the United States dropped two atom bombs on Japan, ushering in the nuclear era. [...]
