Book review: “Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story” by Christopher Moore
The key scene in Christopher Moore’s 1995 comic novel Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, comes at the end of the first of three sections. In the aftermath of making love [...]
Book review: “Called Out: A novel of base ball and America in 1908” by Floyd Sullivan
August Herrmann, president of the Cincinnati Reds, arrived early for a meeting in the New York office of the National League, and he made himself at home. He sat down [...]
Chicago history: The guerilla mural that was The Wall of Respect
The community-based outdoor mural movement, now international in scope, began half a century ago when a collective of African-American artists created "The Wall of Respect" on the side of a [...]
Chicago History: Johnny Lindquist update
In response to my op-ed piece in Sunday’s Tribune, I received a number of questions about Johnny Lindquist’s parents. Here’s what I have found out: His biological father Jimmy Lindquist, [...]
Book review: “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood
The Women’s Prayvaganzas are for group weddings which is to say arranged marriages. In this one, there are twenty Angels — that’s a military designation for men who are soldiers [...]
Book review: “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin
For twenty-one days in 1959, John Howard Griffin, a white journalist and novelist from Texas, moved through the Deep South as black man. Under a doctor’s care, he took drugs [...]
Book review: “The Time Traders” by Andre Norton
Andre Norton was a woman (Alice May Norton), writing as a man in a field dominated by men whose readers were generally teenage boys and young adult men. She knew [...]
Book review: “The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words – 1000 BC – 1492 AD” by Simon Schama
There is a lot that Simon Schama wants to say in The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words: 1000 BC–1492 AD, the first of a three-volume history. And maybe [...]
Book review: “Joan of Arc and Spirituality,” edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler
Joan of Arc was a mystic and a saint with a sense of humor. George H. Tavard — the great Catholic theologian and one of the first to take a [...]
Book review: “Motherprayer: Lessons in Loving” by Barbara Mahany
Kids go to school and learn things like geometry and the Magna Carta and chromosomes and similes and square roots and Franklin D. Roosevelt, but none of their textbooks has [...]