The ten best books about Chicago: a list
There are many very good and even great books about Chicago, and here are the 10 that I think are the best: Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon Chicago: Growth of [...]
Essay: Chicago’s Trail of Tears
In London during the summer of 1835, demonstration trains began giving free rides along a newly completed section of the London and Greenwich Railway, the first railway of any sort [...]
Book review: “Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence” by Marietta Cambareri
Six hundred years ago in Italy, Luca Della Robbia created an artistic technique that permitted him to fashion what might be called three-dimensional paintings or brightly colored sculpture. It was [...]
Book review: “Rodin” by Raphael Masson and Veronique Mattiussi
I have a key question about Rodin by Raphael Masson and Veronique Mattiussi, but, first, I need to commend the Musee Rodin and the publisher Flammarion for selecting the relatively [...]
Book Review: “Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters.” edited by Mary McFeely and William S. McFeely
There is a famous photograph of Ulysses S. Grant, sitting on the porch of his home in upstate New York on an obviously very cold day in 1885, writing his [...]
Book review: “Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939” by Adam Hochschild
In the book world, there is developing a subgenre of history-writing that takes an event or a place in world history and examines it from the perspectives and perceptions of [...]
Essay: Chicago’s hangmen reformers
Donald Trump’s loose talk in early August about the Second Amendment got a lot of people worrying that he was not so subtly calling for armed violence,or even assassination. This [...]
Book review: “Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers” by Adam Mack
Historians have always focused on the facts of the past — What happened? They have also studied the reasons behind those facts — Why did it happen? Above all, they [...]
Book review: “Dialogues with Silence: Prayers and Drawings” by Thomas Merton, edited by Jonathan Montaldo
Lessons from Thomas Merton in the pages of the 2001 collection of his writings, Dialogues with Silence: Prayers and Drawings, edited by Jonathan Montaldo: Merton experiences prayer as something [...]
Book review: “Pennant Race” by Jim Brosnan
It’s midway through the 1961 major league baseball season, and Jim Brosnan, a right-handed relief pitcher of the Cincinnati Reds, is talking with Joey Jay, the staff ace, about when [...]