Part 2 of two parts. Here’s the first part. Like the rest of the world, Atlantic Monthly Press and Northwestern University historian Carl Smith weren’t planning on Covid-19. But that’s the reality they faced when Smith’s Chicago’s...
Part 1 of two parts Carl Smith’s Chicago’s Great Fire, published in August by Atlantic Monthly Press, is an important book of Chicago history, a rousing crackerjack work that’s highly readable and deeply researched. As I noted in my earlier...
Betty Lovejoy and her younger sisters Emily and Annie Ruth, all successful black women, have come together in Mulberry, Georgia, to bury their mother, known by the family nickname as Mudear. But it’s far from a lovefest. As with any group of...
Devastation is devastation, whether brought about by fire or pandemic. The Great Chicago Fire occurred nearly a century and a half ago, but the experience of living through that cataclysm has many parallels with Chicago in the year of...
He tossed his sin stone By Patrick T. Reardon He tossed his sin stone into Lake Deuteronomy, set fire to his crops and headed for Egypt City. He divorced his ring finger with an axe, slew his cattle where they stood and set...
“Visceral” is one of those no-nonsense words. It goes right to the gut. You can look at art, look at the world, with your intellect. But, if you turn a visceral eye, you are short-circuiting reason and operating on...
Jesus and the people of Judea lived under the heel of the Roman army and of Tiberius, the emperor, which is a fancy name for dictator. The Zealots were the political movement of the time, working to foment a rebellion against the occupying...
In its odd way, John Brunner’s 1984 novel The Tides of Time is an adventure story. It’s also a thriller and a mystery that propels the reader along in search of answers. It opens in an April in the near future as Gene and Stacy are trying to...
It takes some hubris to rewrite the Christian gospels, but maybe not that much. A lot of people have done it. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John seem pretty straight-forward inasmuch as they’re telling stories that the authors...
I’m having a difficult time deciding what, dear reader, to tell you first. Let’s put it this way: The streets of Paris, London, Vienna and Berlin in the 1700s and 1800s were very different from the streets you move along here in Chicago. ...
After By Patrick T. Reardon . After clangor parade, after wailing trombones, teletype drums, clockwork drum majors and majorettes, after cymbal clamor of arena-full horde, pent-up for release, for rebound off rafters — where he watches — after...
Back in the ‘80s, during a holiday get-together, one of the family elders, who was known for sweeping declarations, made a sweeping declaration: “You can’t be a Republican,” she said, “and be a good Catholic.” From couch to couch, we looked at...
It was nearly 40 years ago that I first read James Agee’s autobiographical novel A Death in the Family. Since then, I have experienced a similarly sudden violent death in my own family. What had been, in my early 30s, an achingly...
There’s much that’s audacious about Roddy Doyle’s new novel Love. There’s the title, first of all. It seems fitting for some sort of Romeo and Juliet story, with or without the tragedy, a tale filled with yearning ache, hot romance and easy...
One of my favorite poems in Haki R. Madhubuti’s new, career-spanning collection Taught by Women: Poems as Resistance Language is “Big Momma,” originally published in 1970. Back a half century ago, Madhubuti was still known as Don L. Lee, and, at...
Publication of my new book The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago is set for Thanksgiving Day. But you can get an early glimpse of what the book has to say by joining an online event, hosted by City Lit Bookstore, on Thursday...
Midway through Terry Pratchett’s 1997 novel Jingo, a conversation takes place between Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson and Corporal Delphine Angua von Überwald. He is a 6’6” dwarf (by adoption) who’s the second-in-command of the Ankh-Morpork...
Marriage Song Patrick T. Reardon . We exult at the joining of young lives. We dance the dance of joy. . This is a time of merriment. This is a time of wonder. Who will argue at a time like this? Who will find fault? . Fear is exiled. ...
The shoot-out that ends Elmore Leonard’s 1977 novel The Hunted is just like those in the westerns he was still writing back in those days. Three heavily armed bad guys, getting ready to kill an upright guy who is protecting a young woman and an...
After nearly 60 years, Gislebertus: Sculptor of Autun by Denis Grivot and George Zarnecki remains the best book on the astonishingly vivid, highly original art of the medieval French master. The large-scale Grivot-Zarnecki work, published in 1961...
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