Book review: “Forty Lashes Less One” by Elmore Leonard
Halfway through Elmore Leonard’s 1972 novel Forty Lashes Less One, Everett Manly, the fill-in warden at Yuma Territorial Prison in Arizona is trying to get two convicts to find some [...]
Book review: “Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying” by Sallie Tisdale
Back in high school, two years in a row, we had a retreat master who relished the session he did on death. “You will die,” he’d intone in a very [...]
Poem: “vigilante”
vigilante big flake snow covered the grave and the body they had left in their haste and the strawberry vine grew up from his heart over his neck and into [...]
Book review: “The Book of Genesis,” illustrated by R. Crumb
It’s not for nothing that the front cover of The Book of Genesis, illustrated by R. Crumb carries this warning: ADULT SUPERVISION RECOMMENDED FOR MINORS And this note: THE FIRST [...]
Book review: “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland” by Patrick Radden Keefe
I’m at a loss about the newly published Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. As a reader, I find that, [...]
Essay: My lay-off and the golden age of journalism
By Patrick T. Reardon This essay was originally posted on the 5th anniversary of my lay-off, April 23, 2014. Aside from adjusting the first sentence, I haven't changed it. Ten [...]
Essay: Soul Seeing — At 69, I still find grace and God on the basketball court
The video of me playing basketball didn’t exactly go viral, but it did cause a bit of a stir among my Facebook friends. And, later, it got me wondering about [...]
Poem: “Rita”
Rita Locked in her leg braces, she smiles as though the act were a somersault. Patrick T. Reardon 3.25.19 This poem originally appeared in Sparrow magazine in 1977.
Essay: Complaining about just about everything
I want to complain about complaining. Wait, let me rephrase that. I’d like to make some observations about the tendency of modern Americans to find fault with just about anything. [...]
Book review: “Things That Go Trump in the Night: Poems of Treason and Resistance” by Paul Fericano
The final poem in Paul Fericano’s new biting, silly and fittingly sophomoric poetry collection Things That Go Trump in the Night: Poems of Treason and Resistance (Poems-For-All Press, 90 pages, [...]