Honoring veterans — of all sorts
Striding purposely around a bend of a park path recently in Washington, D.C., Jim Chianakas suddenly saw before him the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. "There it is," he said. "Wow!" Beside [...]
Book review: “Clarence Darrow: Atttorney for the Damned” by John A. Farrell
Finishing "Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned" by John A. Farrell, I was surprised to find myself underwhelmed by the book. No question, it's a good solid effort. Farrell has [...]
Fully American: The election of JFK and the place of Catholics in the U.S.
When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, I thought he would be canonized. St. JFK? It seems silly now. Now that all the stories of Kennedy's womanizing have [...]
Book review: “The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution” by Mark Roseman
About midway through "The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution" by Mark Roseman, I got to wondering how writers like Roseman do it. I mean, writers who spend a good [...]
Book review: “Snuff” by Terry Pratchett
On Discworld, goblins live on — are beat up on, are exploited on, are starved on, die on — the edges. They stink. They steal chickens. They eat their young. [...]
Erasing Comiskey Park from the Face of the Earth
This essay will be a chapter in a book about Comiskey Park, edited by Floyd Sullivan, to be published probably in 2013 It's a frigid weekend in March, and I've [...]
Book review: “Frank Lloyd Wright” by Ada Louise Huxtable
Sometime, apparently in the mid-1890s, Daniel Burnham set up a meeting with Frank Lloyd Wright to present him with an extraordinary offer. At the time, Burnham was basking in acclaim [...]
Thinking the thinkable
Recently, I sat down and wrote out a plan for my funeral service. A couple days later, I wrote about it in the Chicago Tribune. You can find it here: [...]
Book review: “Continent” by Jim Crace
There is a vague, marshy border between poetry and prose. Marshy, as in rich with life, rich with the intermingling of earth and water and sunlight, crawling things, buzzing, flitting, [...]
“Father Bernardin”
During a career as a news reporter that spanned nearly 40 years, I interviewed my share of high-ranking officials. When I was part of a small group of journalists to [...]