Book review: “Eric” by Terry Pratchett
Thirteen-year-old Eric Thursley conjures up demons. Except, in this case, his first successful conjuration, he gets the hapless wizard Rincewind. The result — detailed in Terry Pratchett’s ninth Discworld [...]
Six Feminist Books
When I use the term “feminist book” here, I’m referring to strong, muscular books written by strong, muscular writers who happen to be women. To me, these books [...]
Book review: “Plague Ship” by Andre Norton
Andre Norton’s 1956 Plague Ship is a rip-snortingly inventive yarn that’s one of her better novels, a combination of medical mystery, anthropological adventure and space gallop. And it features [...]
Book review: “Sargasso of Space” by Andre Norton
The traders of the Solar Queen have set a trap for some hardened criminals who are hiding on the planet Limbo. One of the bad guys gets out of [...]
Essay: God Is the Ocean in Which We All Swim
I have gotten to a point that I can’t go along any more with Michelangelo’s God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Great art, but, gee, God as [...]
Book review: “Soul Seeing: Light, Love, Forgiveness” by Michael Leach and Friends
Brian Doyle’s essay “The Day I Stood Shimmering in Shame” begins this way: Committed a sin yesterday, in the hallway, at noon. I roared at my son, I grabbed [...]
Book review: “Through the Bookstore Window” by Bill Petrocelli
I picked up Bill Petrocelli’s Through the Bookstore Window in the midst of reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I wasn’t looking for a break, but I had already [...]
Book review: “Barons of the Sea…And Their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship” by Steven Ujifusa
Steven Ujifusa’s Barons of the Sea ends with a quote from Captain Charlie Porter Low, a man who had run away to sea and spent his life as [...]
Poem: We are all Elijah on the mountain
The still, small voice is still an itch in the corner of the skull, a catch of breath, a comma, a hesitancy, a heartbeat, a hush, a [...]
Book review: “The Talmud: A Biography” by Barry Scott Wimpfheimer
In 1997, near the end of the long-running television comedy Seinfeld, Larry Charles said that, when he and the other writers would sit down to produce a script, it was [...]