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Essay: Nothing new about America’s cancel culture

Essay: Nothing new about America’s cancel culture

February 25, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

The other day, I started reading Jane Austen’s delightfully droll and perceptive 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, and it’s gotten me thinking about the cancel culture. “Cancel culture” is a fairly new term predominately used by conservatives to...

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Book review: “Storm Front: Dresden Files” by Jim Butcher

Book review: “Storm Front: Dresden Files” by Jim Butcher

February 23, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

Jim Butcher’s 2000 novel Storm Front, the first of the very successful series of Dresden Files novels — 17 so far with more on the horizon — is a rip-snorting, crackerjack, page-turner of urban fantasy. It features Harry Blackstone Copperfield...

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After reading “State of Relax” by Eileen Myles

After reading “State of Relax” by Eileen Myles

February 18, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

After reading “State of Relax” by Eileen Myles By Patrick T. Reardon . “Cows kissing goats” — Bible-immersed — I see lions bedding with lambs.  . Calliope of poem, lustful, subtle — nation un-uniting itself and sighing...

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Book review: “Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization” by Paul Kriwaczek

Book review: “Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization” by Paul Kriwaczek

February 16, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

There is much that is surprising and interesting and fascinating in Paul Kriwaczek’s 2010 book Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization.  And much in Kriwaczek’s storytelling that is infuriating. It is astonishing that the...

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Book review: “Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?” by Tom Holt

Book review: “Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?” by Tom Holt

February 12, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

Actually, Beowulf isn’t a character in Tom Holt’s 1988 comic novel Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? (although that is, of course, a fun title).  He’s not even mentioned until a few pages from the end. One of the dozen of his Norse contemporaries who...

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Book review: “Dread Companion” by Andre Norton

Book review: “Dread Companion” by Andre Norton

February 10, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

Andre Norton’s 1970 novel Dread Companion opens with Kilda c’ Rhyn detailing for the reader the mystery at the heart of her story. She was 16 when she landed on Dylan as the servant/nanny of a rich family. That was in the year 2421 After...

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Book review: “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen

Book review: “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen

February 8, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

For me, the high point of my reading of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice came near the end of the 1813 novel when Elizabeth Bennett receives a letter from her aunt, Mrs. Gardiner. But, before I get to that, let’s go about a hundred pages earlier...

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Book review: “Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art” by Diana Seave Greenwald

Book review: “Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art” by Diana Seave Greenwald

February 5, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

At the Chicago Tribune where I worked for 32 years, the story of Bill Recktenwald and the parking meters was legendary — and instructive. From 1984 to early 1987, Chicago suffered a huge loss in parking meter revenue — 42 percent — and city...

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Book review: “The Bravados” by Frank O’Rourke

Book review: “The Bravados” by Frank O’Rourke

February 3, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

In 1958, Gregory Peck starred as the revenge-driven Jim Douglass in the brooding and beautiful western The Bravados.    The movie was based on a novel of the same name, published the year before by Frank O’Rourke, and, as is the nature...

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Book review: “Swag” by Elmore Leonard

Book review: “Swag” by Elmore Leonard

February 1, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

Frank Ryan has his 10 rules, and Stick — Ernest Stickley Jr. — buys into them.  The result is very lucrative. Ryan’s Rules was the original title of Elmore Leonard’s 1976 novel, called Swag in all of its later editions.  And the rules...

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Book review: “Two Years’ Vacation” by Jules Verne

Book review: “Two Years’ Vacation” by Jules Verne

January 29, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

On the night of March 9, 1860, a storm-driven schooner with only 15 boys aboard, ages 8 to 14, crashes into the shore of an unknown island.  And so begins Jules Verne’s Two Years’ Vacation, also known as Adrift in the Pacific, a novel...

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Book review: “Fargo Burns” by Kos Kostmayer

Book review: “Fargo Burns” by Kos Kostmayer

January 27, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

Rarely in literature does there appear someone as vitally alive as Fargo Burns, a character whose chaotically self-destructive actions and courting of danger and fragmenting psyche co-exist with — and, in a strange, odd way, complement — a...

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Book review: “Dark Black” by Sam Weller

Book review: “Dark Black” by Sam Weller

January 25, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

One of the opening paragraphs of Sam Weller’s short story “All the Summer Before Us” is this: “We were eighteen, me and Dave and Bill; childhood friends on the cusp of adulthood.  On a silent country road we had discovered an old concrete...

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Book review: “Treasures of Westminster Abbey” by Tony Trowles

Book review: “Treasures of Westminster Abbey” by Tony Trowles

January 21, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

On September 9, 2017, I wandered over to Westminster Abbey because I was in London for the first time seeing the sights and I knew it was chockful of a lot of historical stuff. When I got inside, it was a magical place. For one thing, this...

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Book review: “Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975” by Susan S. Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino

Book review: “Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975” by Susan S. Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino

January 19, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

Pauline Saliga, executive director of the Society of Architectural Historians, echoes Etta James to say “at last” to the arrival of Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975 (the Monacelli Pres, $60, 343 pages). But this comment in her...

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Book review: “The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma” by Barry Werth

Book review: “The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma” by Barry Werth

January 14, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

When you long for something, when you dream about finding something, you’re hoping. The word “hope” in this sense doesn’t appear in The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma by Barry Werth until about two-thirds of the way through the book...

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Book review: “The Didache: Text, Translation, Analysis, and Commentary” by Aaron Milavec

Book review: “The Didache: Text, Translation, Analysis, and Commentary” by Aaron Milavec

January 12, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

Christian beliefs, theology and history are rooted in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John as well as the Acts of the Apostles, the twenty Epistles and the Book of Revelation — the New Testament. The earliest Gospel is Mark, written around...

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Book review: “Cop Hater” by Ed McBain

Book review: “Cop Hater” by Ed McBain

January 7, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

In my early 20s, I read a lot of Ed McBain 87th Precinct books.  There was a detective who had a white streak through his hair from an old wound, and I remember one of my journalistic colleagues at the time, a Vietnam vet, had a white streak...

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Book review: “BUtterfield 8” by John O’Hara

Book review: “BUtterfield 8” by John O’Hara

January 4, 2021 Patrick T Reardon

Some random thoughts about John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8, published in 1935: Unmentionables O’Hara seems to go out of his way to mention everything that, in polite society of 1930s America, was considered unmentionable.  These unmentionables...

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Book review: “The Last Continent” by Terry Pratchett

Book review: “The Last Continent” by Terry Pratchett

December 31, 2020 Patrick T Reardon

Rincewind, the not very good wizard (or “Wizzard,” as his pointy hat says), is fleeing from gaol on the continent of XXXX, a place that’s pretty much unknown to the rest of Discworld because of its distance from all other land and because of the...

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