Essay: A Time to Die
It may seem odd today, but, at one point, a half century ago, the top-selling popular song in America was made up of lyrics from the Bible — specifically, from [...]
Book review: “The Great Time Machine Hoax” by Keith Laumer
Well, Keith Laumer is trying to be wacky here in The Great Time Machine Hoax, but the laughs are pretty tepid. So’s the imagination. Oh, the 1964 novel is interesting [...]
Lives of Great Religious Books: Princeton University Press
For outsiders, religions are often mysterious. Yet, down the centuries, the great books of faith have played major roles in shaping the world of believers and non-believers alike, influencing politics, [...]
Book review: “ ‘The Koran’ in English: A Biography” by Bruce B. Lawrence
For Muslims, the Qur’an is the Word of God, given directly to Muhammad at the start of the 7th century AD by the Archangel Michael in oral messages in Arabic [...]
Book review: “Botticelli — Images of Love and Spring” by Frank Zollner
It’s difficult to know how 15th century Italians experienced the paintings of Sandro Botticelli. What did they see, for instance, when they looked at La Primavera, the artist’s giant 70-square-foot [...]
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 [...]