Essay: Love and giving thanks
It all comes back to love. Gratitude does, like everything else that is good in the world. Thomas Merton writes that gratitude “takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is [...]
Book review: “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro is a sad, bleak book about a man who finds near the end of his life that he has wasted it. On [...]
Book review: “Hombre” by Elmore Leonard
I'm not sure how Elmore Leonard's Hombre, published in 1961, reads for a young person today. It seems to me that there is something universal to it that would make [...]
Book review: “Sorrow Road” by Julia Keller
Sorrow Road is Julia Keller’s fifth novel set in fictional Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, and centered on the county prosecutor Belfa Elkins. If you want to get a sense of [...]
Essay: Us and God
There is no Us and Them. There’s only Us and God. That’s one of the lessons of the Bible. Another is that God shows us the way to live, and [...]
Book review: “A Simple Blues with a Few Intangibles” by George Wallace
Reading George Wallace’s collection of 48 poems A Simple Blues with a Few Intangibles is a kaleidoscopic, whirligig experience. It is a rushing, often breathless torrent of images, allusions, emotions, [...]
Book review: “A Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter M. Miller Jr.
Science fiction seems to be about the future, and, a lot of times, it is. Writers will grapple with the nuts and bolts of how a spacecraft might be constructed [...]
Essay: The serendipity of a used bookstore
What do Virginia Woolf, Robert Heinlein, C. S. Lewis and Douglas Coupland have in common? For me, it's a used bookstore in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, where I stopped during a [...]
Book review: “The Stupidest Angel” by Christopher Moore
Christopher Moore’s 2005 novel The Stupidest Angel tells the story of one extremely clueless — albeit extremely powerful — angel who visits the California coastal community of Pine Cove to [...]
Book review: “The Long Season” by Jim Brosnan
Jim Brosnan's books about two years in his life as a baseball player --- The Long Season, published in 1960) and Pennant Race (1962) --- were the first and last [...]