Book review: “Tenth of December” by George Saunders
In a diary he’s been keeping, a 40-year-old husband and father of three writes about winning $10,000 with a lottery ticket, and, since he expects these jottings to be read [...]
Chicago history: Turn-of-the-century Chicago in Willa Cather’s “Lucy Gayheart”
Much of the first half of Willa Cather’s novel Lucy Gayheart is set in the first few months of 1902 in downtown Chicago. Written in 1935, the book is an [...]
Book review: “Lucy Gayheart” by Willa Cather
Willa Cather was a writer of frontier novels in which Nature — the landscape, the weather, the seasons — is a major character, frequently set in contrast with the big [...]
Book review: “Redwall” by Brian Jacques
In the menagerie of literature, fantasy is a curious animal. By its nature, fantasy is supposed to bend reality — but not too much. Fantasy only works if its tethered [...]
Book review: “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal” by Christopher Moore
As Biff notes at the beginning of Christopher Moore’s comic 2002 novel Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, his friend’s name was Joshua. Jesus, he explains, is [...]
Book review: “Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door” by Barbara Mahany
There are many paragraphs in Barbara Mahany’s Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door, that could be scanned as poetry, such as this one: Blessed be the golden [...]
Six Poverty Books
In the past couple weeks, I’ve posted reviews of six books about people living in poverty, published between 1890 and 1986 — nearly a century’s worth. Below are the books [...]
Book review: Poverty books — 1985 — “The American Millstone: An examination of the nation’s permanent underclass” by the staff of the Chicago Tribune
In the late summer of 1985, Jim Gallagher, one of my editors at the Chicago Tribune, came to my desk and told me to put everything on hold. Instead of [...]
Book review: Poverty books — 1936 — “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” by James Agee with photos by Walker Evans
There are many ways to approach Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the majestic, mystical and often maddening book that James Agee and Walker Evans published in 1941. I'm going [...]
Book review: Poverty books — 1929-1930 — “Down and Out in Paris and London” by George Orwell
Midway through Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell is making a point: The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing [...]