On the surface, Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses is about two highly controversial verses that may or may not have been in Qur’an. Certainly, that’s what got Rushdie in trouble at the time with Ayatollah Ruhollah...
The scribbled telegram text, sent by messenger from the top of Mount Everest, was bleak — but also a bit odd. Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement All well News of failure was not unexpected from...
Lamentation By Patrick T. Reardon Let Israel now say, let Aaron now say, give thanks, mercy endures, mystery forever his majesty. Bulleted chaste gazelle, backyard cement, clot-blood hosed onto yellow winter grass...
When you’re looking for a good novel about Chicago, you’re most likely to turn to those writers identified as Chicago writers, such as Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March) and Sara Paretsky (Indemnity Only) and Richard Wright (Native Son)...
There are many very good and even great books about Chicago, and, based on my half century of writing about Chicago, here are the ten that, at the moment, I think are the best — and, after this list, there’s one that’s a real clunker: The...
Blessed, a poem for a pandemic By Patrick T. Reardon Blessed are the dead and the dying. Blessed, the mourn-filled good-byes to loves behind glass, behind walls. Blessed, neighborhoods of pain, grief communities...
Kristina Gehrmann’s graphic novel version of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle is suitably gritty and oppressive, but probably not ugly enough. I’m not sure it would be possible for this kind of illustrative work to capture the...
Here is the sad reality at the center of Leo Steinberg’s 2001 book Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper: Of Leonardo’s Last Supper we have only an after-image….[O]f the original surface — of its color and atmosphere, its breath of sfumato, its...
My friend Mark and his wife Cathy were coming home on a mid-March Saturday from the sad burden of the funeral of their 42-year-old daughter Margaret. Margaret, a wife and the mother of three children, 5 and younger, had died of breast cancer a...
Cathy gave me a haircut today on the back porch. In our 37 years of marriage, that hasn’t happened before, but we’re not leaving the house for haircuts or much anything else, and I was getting pretty shaggy, and, well, we made do. (I hope...
The afternoon was cold, dark and rainy at Calvary Cemetery. Maybe that’s why I ended up in my short walk there, focusing on the textures of things, such as this sideview of one of several angels adorning a tombstone. I liked...
None of my own by Patrick T. Reardon I packed books in boxes and notes in boxes and pens and rulers and pads of paper and photos in frames and maps and small things without any category that reminded me of a person I’d met or...
David R. Slavitt’s 2001 The Book of Lamentations: A Meditation and Translation is a post-Holocaust reading of the short biblical work inconsolably grieving the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BC and the Babylonian exile of...
I found God in the pain of my brother’s suicide. I don’t want to tell this story again — of my brother David, wracked with pain, dragging himself out his back door at 3 a.m. with rain-snow falling, to end his life with a gun. David and I...
In 1972, when P.D. James published An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, she’d been a novelist for just a decade. Her first four books were centered on Adam Dalgleish, a tightly constrained, deep-feeling police detective who is also a modestly...
Building ornamentation caught my eye today, and one little city emblem: Patrick T. Reardon 4.16.20 ...
Saint Teresa of Avila was a woman of 16th century Spain, a nun mystic experienced in the bliss and pain of religious ecstasy but also nun living under the power of male clergy and hierarchy who were wont to mistrust women and mysticism. One of...
Ecclesiastes Road By Patrick T. Reardon See and see: Each time passes. Journey is taken. River runs. Green brittles. Tall withers. Sun is blind. Blood dries to grit. Clock locks. I line my dashboard with communion of saints...
One of the guys from basketball at the Levy Senior Center in Evanston is recovering, apparently well, from the coronavirus. But he’s been stuck in a motel for weeks. So, at noon today, a bunch of us formed a cavalcade to drive past as he...
The girl walks down to the lake to the spot where she and her father fish. A goose and gander and five goslings are there, making a home for the summer for themselves. The girl is ten. As she approaches the water, she startles the geese. The...
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