Nearly four decades ago, historian Gary Wills explained how Abraham Lincoln used his Gettysburg Address to redefine — rededicate — the United States by enshrining the Declaration of Independence as the core statement of the nation, instead of the...
Philip Jose Farmer’s 1975 novel Venus on the Half-Shell was based on a gimmick, so it’s not surprising that it’s filled with gimmicks, most of which, to my mind, seem rooted in a high school sophomore’s sense of humor. There are those, I’m sure...
The Hebrew Bible is big on prophets and big on sin. There are four major prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. And a dozen minor prophets who wrote shorter books of only a few chapters or, in the case of Obadiah, just 600...
This essay originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune on 3.15.21. Well, Pope Francis, I disagree. I respect much of what you’ve done in the papacy, Holy Father, but this statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued Monday...
I’m a stranger here myself. The Little Black Dress by Andre Leon Talley with photographs by Adam Kuehl is the elegant and lavish catalogue of an exhibition at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), September 28, 2012 – January 31...
Midway through Glendon Swarthout’s 1988 novel, The Homesman, Mary Bee Cuddy wakes up and, from her bedroll by the frame wagon, hears the good-for-nothing cull Briggs, the claim-jumper she saved from hanging, shouting, “Whooeee!” There, by the...
A little more than a century ago, in one of the world’s largest cities, Chicagoans lived a lot closer to nature than we do today — as in closer to animals and their smells and their manure and urine. Consider that, in 1918, some 2,000 dairy cows...
I can’t think of another Elmore Leonard book that has a subtitle like his 1980 City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. That’s also a pretty portentous, if not to say pretentious, title. Usually, Elmore’s titles are snappier, such as Get Shorty...
Sixteen-year-old Nomi opens her story by telling the reader that she lives with her father, Ray Nickel, in “that low brick bungalow” out on Highway 12. Her audience is someone who will know the place, someone who lives in or near East...
Some guy on ESPN the other day was complaining again about men who bring a mitt to Major League Baseball games, and I just don’t get it. Maybe that’s because I still bring my first baseman’s glove to the park whenever I go, even though I’m 71...
For a few days, I took an unexpected, disconcerting and enthrallingly odd voyage through an unusual life and a mythic Chicago. It began when I was reading a book about the history of soul music in Chicago, and the author mentioned a 1978 movie...
I first read Edmund Cooper’s novel The Cloud Walker in my 20s, shortly after it was published in 1973. And I enjoyed it. Reading it now, nearly half a century later, I enjoyed it, but maybe with a difference or two The setting of the science...
Between Chicago’s two World’s Fairs in 1893 and 1933-34, very few Native Americans lived in and around Chicago. Indeed, the numbers were so low that, in City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934 (University of Nebraska Press...
In a recent edition of the New York Review of Books, Irish writer Fintan O’Toole writes that the core of Trumpism is his message to followers that they are the real Americans. With regard to the complaint of Trump and his masses of a “stolen...
I’m of two minds about Colin Woodard’s 2011 American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. On the one hand, it provides an interesting and, I think, generally useful framework with which to view the...
Sometimes, a mystery novel, if the writer is ambitious, will have two puzzles to be solved. It’s a complicated gambit for an author since it can leave the reader totally befuddled unless it’s executed very deftly. So how mad does a novelist...
Two witches — Nanny Ogg and Agnes Nitt — don’t like the family of oh-so-courteous vampires who have decided to visit the small nation of Lancre in a mountainous area of Discworld. In their snooping around, they’ve come across the family’s...
In winter night, the boy sits in the dark kitchen of the flat with his grandfather Dzia-Dzia. Upstairs, the pregnant girl Marcy is playing sad Chopin on her piano as Dzia-Dzia follows along, playing an invisible keyboard on the kitchen...
Heron By Patrick T. Reardon . Great blue heron, white in high green, folds on self, forward falls toward water, clear space, wingspan wind-catch, rise in flight. . I am semi-trailer truck in someone else’s tender canoe — steep banks through...
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...
Patrick T Reardon © 2021. All rights reserved.
