Michael O'Donnell | Reader, Writer

Contact Michael

     

    This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

    Search site

    Reviews and Essays

    The Road to Stardom

    December 2, 2024  | 

    Josh Brolin is a postmodern cowboy. Masculine but too vulnerable to be macho, at ease on a motorcycle or on horseback, he looks best with dust in the grooves of his skin. Some of his scars are self-inflicted. “I have made life harder than it’s needed to be,” the actor concedes in his memoir

    Read Here Read at Source

    The Call of the Climb

    November 27, 2024  | 

    Modern mountaineering is a quest for niche glory. The Earth’s highest peaks have been climbed and reclimbed so many times now that elite alpinists must distinguish themselves with obscure prizes: ascend faster, or by a harder route,

    Read Here Read at Source

    A Faculty for Espionage

    October 25, 2024  | 

    The U.S. entered World War II with an intelligence deficit. Its allies and enemies had long-established clandestine operations, some of them dating back centuries. But the Americans had no dedicated spy service and relied

    Read Here Read at Source

    Echos of an Imperial Composer

    August 23, 2024  | 

    Was Tchaikovsky a tempest or a drudge? The great Russian composer of iconic works like “The Nutcracker” and the “1812 Overture” is generally thought to have lived a life of melodrama. An alcoholic and an insomniac, he endured a catastrophic marriage and suffered

    Read Here Read at Source

    Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

    July 6, 2024  | 

    In an extraordinary gesture of trust, the American president left Washington, D.C., on September 9, 1943, and handed the British prime minister his keys. “Winston, please treat the White House as your home.

    Read Here Read at Source

    Sharp Bookmark

    May 15, 2024  | 

    Is Salman Rushdie an artist or a symbol? Can he be one but not the other? Or perhaps it’s an all-or-nothing affair and he is both or else neither. Ever since Rushdie, the author of 13 novels, was violently attacked onstage

    Read Here Read at Source

    Paul Auster’s Voice

    May 8, 2024  | 

    Paul Auster died on April 30 after being the voice in my ear for a month. I had only recently finished his massive novel 4321, using an approach I learned from my wife to preserve momentum on very long books.

    Read Here Read at Source

    Great Lakes Odyssey

    April 5, 2024  | 

    In a time of pessimism and uncertainty, storytellers have recently turned to the future to predict a grim world that yet retains flickers of light. HBO’s recent series “The Last of Us” explored the familiar terrain of the zombie apocalypse through the bond between

    Read Here Read at Source

    The Killing of an IRA Man

    April 1, 2024  | 

    The political conflict in Northern Ireland that not so long ago involved a cycle of terror and reprisal has given way to a series of dry bureaucratic spats. The regional parliamentary assembly in Belfast recently reconvened

    Read Here Read at Source

    Emptying the Bookshelves

    December 22, 2023  | 

    “We’re going through Dad’s bookshelves and wondered if you’d like us to save some things for you?” This innocent question, posed by phone in the fortnight between my father’s death and his memorial service

    Read Here Read at Source

    Plains Writing

    November 30, 2023  | 

    The American West is a great setting for a story, but a hard place to live. That is the theme of new biographies of Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry, 20th-century novelists who abandoned a life

    Read Here Read at Source

    Writing in Reverse

    November 20, 2023  | 

    Hilary Mantel wrote with a novelist’s flair and a historian’s mind. Her fiction overflows with the busy detritus of life: this plate of fruit, that whispered threat, children at play, a plucked string. The accretion of detail

    Read Here Read at Source

  • Review Archives

  • © 2024 Michael O'Donnell. All rights reserved.

    Website designed by Muhr Design.