Poem: In those days
In those days Patrick T. Reardon In those days, the self-afflicted were loud like a rat caught in the dark pipe. In those days, the dead buried the [...]
Book review: “The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism” by Ross King
In the summer of 1874, Edouard Manet visited the home of Claude Monet in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil, and, as Ross King recounts, he began painting The Monet Family [...]
Book review: “’Til Death” by Ed McBain
On what should be the happiest day of his life — the day of his marriage to Angela Carella — the shy and affable Tommy Giordano is the target of [...]
Book review: “Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary” by Marina Warner
Ten or twelve years ago, here in Chicago, I was on an archdiocesan committee and was duly invited to an afternoon Christmas reception at the Cardinal’s mansion. There was a [...]
Essay: Pentecost and the fruit of the Spirit
Last month, for Pentecost Sunday, one of the choices for a second reading was from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and its high point, for me, was this sentence near [...]
Poem: Reaching
Reaching By Patrick T. Reardon Each itch outside the sanctuary of Saint Mary of the Flower is rooted in the Florence street stones, each tiny twitch of unrest before [...]
Book review: “ ‘Comfort to the Enemy’ and other Carl Webster Stories” by Elmore Leonard
In his eighties, Elmore Leonard apparently decided to write whatever he felt like writing. His last six books, published between 2005 and his death in 2013 at 87, were pretty [...]
Poem: Arrival of Godot
Arrival of Godot By Patrick T. Reardon Comfort, yes, comfort, New Jerusalem. Your penance is at its end. Your guilt expiated. Gather, you, Mayor and City Council, in noon-sun Daley Plaza. [...]
Book review: “Write Cut Rewrite: The Cutting Room Floor of Modern Literature” by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon
Everyone, I suppose, has a sense of the what-if of history. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to Ford’s Theater that night and had avoided assassination? What if I had [...]
Book Review: “Democracy’s Rebirth: The View from Chicago” by Dick Simpson
A half a century ago, as a new political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Dick Simpson won election to the Chicago City Council for the [...]