Book review: “Galactic Derelict” by Andre Norton
Galactic Derelict, published in 1959, is the second in a series of Andre Norton novels that began a year earlier with Time Traders. After stumbling onto a long-lost alien technology [...]
Signing (and selling) books on Sunday morning at the Printers Row Lit Fest
I nabbed the coveted 10 am-noon slot on Sunday, June 11, at the Printers Row Lit Fest in the South Loop, and I'll be signing and selling copies of the Pulitzer [...]
Like politics, all faith is local
There is a common phrase in American democracy asserting that “All politics is local.” It’s most often attributed to Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, the masterful Massachusetts Democratic Congressman who, from 1977 [...]
Book review: “The Book of Joan” by Lidia Yuknavitch
In her new novel The Book of Joan, Lidia Yuknavitch creates a central character Joan of Dirt who shares some parallels with the fifteenth-century French heroine and Roman Catholic saint [...]
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 [...]