Eight and a half years ago, an elderly friend of mine died, and one of the guys I play basketball with got leukemia. It got me thinking about that thing we always seem to believe is unthinkable — Death. So I sat down and planned my funeral...
I think I’ve always enjoyed walking in cemeteries. That may seem odd, especially during our present national crisis. But walking — well-separated from each other — is one of the few activities that are still available to us as we keep our heads...
July 10, 1981 By Patrick T. Reardon On this porch, on this cool summer day, when the moon is benign in afternoon sky, when birds sing from wire to wire, I have no argument. This may be the milk-and -honey time...
Over the last year, I’ve read two books that knocked my socks off — the exquisitely evocative “Song of Solomon” by Toni Morrison and that massive, epic, beautiful whale of great literature, “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville. I came to...
In recent days, I’ve been doing a lot of walking. I know that this may soon come to a halt if the efforts to combat coronavirus in the United States lead to a mandatory quarantine, keeping me at home, away from everyone else. For now, though, I’m...
For a week or so after I finished reading The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson, the name of Roman Pulanski kept popping into my head at odd moments. I hated that. I hated Wasson’s book for drumming that name...
Family package By Patrick T. Reardon I left my phone on the back seat of a taxi, and, when I borrowed one from a cornrowed woman, gap-toothed, the voice answering was my dead Mother telling me it served me right...
It’s the awkward ones that touch me most — the images of an agitated Mary responding to the arrival of the angel Gabriel with the message that, if she consents, she will become the mother of Jesus, the Mother of God. In her 2018 book Divine...
In Chicago, all public Catholic Masses have been cancelled for duration of the coronavirus emergency. So, starting this past Saturday and Sunday, for the first time ever, all of the churches in the archdiocese are dark, open, if at all, only for...
Eight of Terry Pratchett’s 41 Discworld novels center on the City Watch of Anhk-Morpork. The first was Guards! Guards! (1989), followed by Men at Arms (1993) and, then, by Feet of Clay (1996). The last of the eight was published in 2011, four...
Among Terry Pratchett’s 41 Discworld novels, Men at Arms, published in 1993, is one of the best. That’s saying a lot. Pratchett’s books are always great fun, filled with wit, satire and wise insights into those creatures called human beings, in a...
Friends called Johnny Hernandez “Slugger,” he was such a good baseball player. In the fall of 1946, the thirteen-year-old, a recent graduate of St. Francis of Assisi elementary school on Chicago’s Near West Side, went on a Boys’ Club camping trip...
To be precise, it was the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries that was the major “swerve” of European history — away from the church-dominated, faith-dominated, feudal Middle Ages and, ultimately, toward Modernity, a period that has...
Communion of saints By Patrick T. Reardon Under the red Christmas tree, she arranges a communion of saints. In the DMV line, a communion of saints: two teenagers in love. A communion of saints, electric...
Maybe I should have a disclaimer at the start of this review. I’m afraid this may be unfair to Geraldine McCaughrean and her re-telling of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. My only excuse is that I am using her book to talk about a larger...
I was born in the desert By Patrick T. Reardon (1) In the desert, I was thrice tempted. I was offered two stones to eat and five rushes. Atop the Temple, I was offered my stolid submission. In my heart, I was offered a...
Christopher Hibbert writes in a note at the start of his 1986 book Cities and Civilizations that, in contrast to more scholarly and comprehensive works, he aims simply “to give impressions of the appearance and social life of twenty-one of the...
When Lee Bey writes about Pride Cleaners, he expresses a palpably warm affection for the other worldly structure which has stood on the northwest corner of 79th Street and St. Lawrence Avenue since 1959. Bey notes in Southern Exposure: The...
A hallmark of the black nationalism movement in the 1960s was the idea of African-Americans patronizing African-American businesses. This approach with its pull-ourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps subtext has been a prominent tenet for many...
Reader: This review is going to deal with Mark Twain’s 1885 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and, because of that, it will include a particular term that, today, is highly offensive. If that makes you too uncomfortable, please don’t read...
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