Happy 120th birthday to Chicago’s Elevated Loop — the city’s savior! Savior? Yeah, really. The Elevated Loop is a big reason why, during the great social and demographic changes of the last hundred years, Chicago didn’t go the way of Cleveland...
Nikolai Metutsov was an important guy in the Kremlin. He was an aide to Party Secretary Yuri Adropov (who later ruled the Soviet Union as General Secretary), and he was responsible for overseeing relations with non-European socialist nations. In...
Happy 120th birthday to Chicago’s Elevated Loop — the city’s savior! Savior? Yeah, really. The Elevated Loop is a big reason why, during the great social and demographic changes of the last hundred years, Chicago didn’t go the way of Cleveland...
(I) He plots movement, holds forces, makes strategy, wants high ground when the time comes. (II) You make a date. You place an order. You sit. You wait for the heavens to open, the bricks to crack. You climb. You avoid the rabid dog. ...
I smell the dust of the ranch and the smoke of the hill still as I sit here and listen to congressmen. I feel the bruise of the bullet, the slam of it, into the folded speech. I see her sometimes in the corners of...
The term “graphic novel” calls forth comparisons with novels in general. The two forms, after all, are about stories told on paper between covers of some sort. A better description, though, would be “movie book.” Think about it. Most of the story...
Junk Type: Typography, Lettering, Badges, Logos is an odd book that’s oddly compelling. True, you might look at it and think that it is of absolutely no interest for you, and you’d be wrong. Pick it up, and I’ll bet you can’t stop paging through...
July 10, 1981 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, the fulcrum, the equator. I may be...
In May, 1864, during the Battle of the Wilderness, when Ulysses S. Grant was new in command of the Northern troops facing the Rebels of Robert E. Lee, an irate General Charles Griffin stormed into Union headquarters. Griffin complained loudly...
Some birds and bugs construct nests by sewing or weaving strands of material together. And some fashion nests out of various kinds of paper-like stuff that they create using their saliva. And some form nests out of mud. And in depressions they...
You Suck: A Love Story, published in 2007, is a sequel to Christopher Moore’s 1995 novel Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story. It was then followed, in 2010, by Bite Me: A Love Story. You may notice a pattern here. The temptation with sequels — it’s...
Galactic Derelict, published in 1959, is the second in a series of Andre Norton novels that began a year earlier with Time Traders. After stumbling onto a long-lost alien technology that permits time travel, two groups of humans — the Reds (i.e....
I nabbed the coveted 10 am-noon slot on Sunday, June 11, at the Printers Row Lit Fest in the South Loop, and I’ll be signing and selling copies of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated poetry collection Requiem for David in tent RR, three tents west...
There is a common phrase in American democracy asserting that “All politics is local.” It’s most often attributed to Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, the masterful Massachusetts Democratic Congressman who, from 1977 to 1987, was Speaker of the U.S. House of...
In her new novel The Book of Joan, Lidia Yuknavitch creates a central character Joan of Dirt who shares some parallels with the fifteenth-century French heroine and Roman Catholic saint Joan of Arc. Both are named Joan and grow up in Domrémy...
The key scene in Christopher Moore’s 1995 comic novel Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, comes at the end of the first of three sections. In the aftermath of making love for the first time, Jody is trying to convince Tommy that she is a vampire...
August Herrmann, president of the Cincinnati Reds, arrived early for a meeting in the New York office of the National League, and he made himself at home. He sat down at a rolltop desk, and, as he chatted with Lenore Caylor of the league staff...
The community-based outdoor mural movement, now international in scope, began half a century ago when a collective of African-American artists created “The Wall of Respect” on the side of a two-story tavern building on Chicago’s...
In response to my op-ed piece in Sunday’s Tribune, I received a number of questions about Johnny Lindquist’s parents. Here’s what I have found out: His biological father Jimmy Lindquist, 57, died in Peoria on March 16, 1999. It appears that he...
The Women’s Prayvaganzas are for group weddings which is to say arranged marriages. In this one, there are twenty Angels — that’s a military designation for men who are soldiers in units such as the Angels of the Apocalypse and the Angels of...
Patrick T Reardon © 2021. All rights reserved.
