Elizabeth Taylor

The life of Sam Zell at times seems so epic in scale that it could only be compressed within the wide-screen format of a Hollywood movie. So it seems fitting...

Many of the books we remember as favorites were those we found as young readers. These were coming-of-age stories that seemed familiar and foreign at the same time. There has...

The Jane Austen Book Club By Karen Joy Fowler Marian Wood/Putnam, 288 pages, $23.95 Whether you favor "Pride and Prejudice" over "Mansfield Park"--or have never even heard of Emma or...

Explorer Jacques Marquette wrote in 1674 that a swath of land along Lake Michigan's southwestern edge, then home to the Potawatomi Indians, "was of no value." One could hardly imagine...

Childhood and Other Neighborhoods By Stuart Dybek University of Chicago Press, 201 pages, $16 paper This astonishing collection of stories told from the points of view of children and teenagers...

How do we decide what is significant enough to merit a cover story? If we aspire to provoke debate, what are the responsible bounds of taste? With so much sadness...

Truth & Beauty: A Friendship By Ann Patchett HarperCollins, 257 pages, $23.95 As a novelist ("Bel Canto," "The Patron Saint of Liars," "Taft," "The Magician's Assistant"), Ann Patchett imagines worlds...

On May 1, 2003, the headline read: "At age 12, it's off to medical school: After facing the demands of college as 9-year-old, prodigy prepares to attend University of Chicago."...

Chicago, baseball. The quintessential American city, the quintessential American pursuit. Hand in glove is a tempting analogy, but not quite right. Chicago and baseball nourish one another and blend like...

As the family story goes, when Pat Reardon was a small child, before he entered St. Thomas Aquinas School in the Austin neighborhood in which he grew up, his grandfather...