Book review: “The Defiant Agents” by Andre Norton
What’s striking about Andre Norton’s 1962 novel The Defiant Agents is how political and moral it is. Norton was a writer of adventure novels, cranking out an average of about [...]
Book review: “Bite Me: A Love Story” by Christopher Moore
If you’ve read the first two books in Christopher Moore’s (so far) trilogy of comic novels about vampires — Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story (1995) and You Suck: A Love [...]
Book review: “Joan of Arc: A Self-Portrait,” compiled by Willard Trask
As Willard Trask notes in the Foreword to his 1936 book Joan of Arc: A Self-Portrait, we know the Catholic saint and liberator of France today — 600 years after [...]
Book review: “The “Dead Sea Scrolls”: A Biography” by John J. Collins
The discovery of 2,000-year-old Biblical and other religious scrolls in a cave near Jericho, just west of the Dead Sea, in 1947, caused a sensation. The excitement only grew as [...]
Book preview: Pat Reardon reading his work-in-progress about the Loop on July 21 in Forest Park
Happy 120th birthday to Chicago’s Elevated Loop — the city’s savior! Savior? Yeah, really. The Elevated Loop is a big reason why, during the great social and demographic changes of [...]
Book review: “Che — A Revolutionary Life” by Jon Lee Anderson
Nikolai Metutsov was an important guy in the Kremlin. He was an aide to Party Secretary Yuri Adropov (who later ruled the Soviet Union as General Secretary), and he was [...]
The Loop: How the “golden circle” of elevated tracks gave shape and power to Chicago’s downtown, united Chicagoans and saved the city.
Happy 120th birthday to Chicago’s Elevated Loop — the city’s savior! Savior? Yeah, really. The Elevated Loop is a big reason why, during the great social and demographic changes of [...]
Poem: “Present Tense”
(I) He plots movement, holds forces, makes strategy, wants high ground when the time comes. (II) You make a date. You place an order. You sit. You wait for [...]
Poem: “Theodore Roosevelt”
I smell the dust of the ranch and the smoke of the hill still as I sit here and listen to congressmen. I feel the bruise of [...]
Book review: “Children of Saigo” by Glenn Jeffers
The term “graphic novel” calls forth comparisons with novels in general. The two forms, after all, are about stories told on paper between covers of some sort. A better description, [...]