Publication of my new book The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago is set for Thanksgiving Day. If you’d like to preorder the book, you can do so through many independent bookstores. Here are a few: City Lit, where I will be...
As the title of his 2011 book indicates, Laurence Bergreen has a tight focus to his storytelling in Columbus: The Four Voyages. He provides very little about the first 41 years of the Genoese explorer’s life, those decades that formed him and...
Two poems about McDonald’s at 56th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan By Patrick T. Reardon Three hundred and sixteen days later The man is preaching to a table of Bible study men and women in the McDonald’s on 56th Street at...
It’s the mid-1970s, central London, and four people in their 60s, two men and two men, have been working together for two or three years in a small office doing a clerkish job of some sort. Their building which also houses the organization for...
In the dark night and under the icy water, Cordelia Gray, lungs bursting, is swimming for her life. She knows that the sea is death if she cannot find the surface somewhere out from where she is and up above her. And, then,…she saw the...
Haven Kimmel’s 2001 memoir A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana is a rollickingly funny entertainment about the childhood of a strange child in a strange family in the strangely tiny hamlet — 300 people — of Mooreland. To...
If Emily Dickinson had had a sense of humor, she might have written “A Girl Named Zippy.” And if she’d been born in 1965 in Indiana. That’s when and where Haven Kimmel arrived on the planet and spent her childhood in the...
The lost tribes, part 4 By Patrick T. Reardon . We are lost in Viagra’d beds, in sticky, spilled orange sidewalk pop, in black sidewalk gum, in sidewalk blood, in blood cough, in closing time at McDonald’s. We are lost under the weight of...
It is a telling irony that Lucy Parsons — one of the most famous African-American women in Chicago’s history — pretended she wasn’t black. Not only that. According to historian Jacqueline Jones, Parsons did little or nothing to help black...
Elizabeth Wetmore’s Valentine, set in rural West Texas in 1976, is a novel of relentless and brutally raw outrage, a fury-filled howl of women caught in a life and a world in which they are abused, ignored, patronized, debased, abandoned...
For students of westerns — or writing of any sort — the first forty pages of Elmore Leonard’s Last Stand at Saber River are a masterful exhibition of how to ratchet up tension with each story-twist to an almost excruciating crescendo...
Terry Pratchett — who died in 2015 at the age of 66 from Alzheimer’s — played for keeps. His 41 Discworld fantasy novels are the height of playfulness. He plays with language, he plays with characters, he plays with descriptions...
There is the maddening mystery at the heart of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock — the disappearance of three teen girls and a teacher during a school trip to the rugged, drastic, looming monolith Hanging Rock in a remote...
Reading Neil Harris’s Chicago Apartments: A Century and Beyond of Lakefront Luxury, the newly published and expanded second edition of his 2004 book, it’s clear that the relatively modest building at 2800 North Pine Grove Avenue is one of...
In the first two sentences of Anna Dowdall’s 2017 novel After the Winter, I learned that Sally Ryder had had a very unexpected letter and then had gotten grim news from a recent story in the Montreal Comet. I was hooked. Maybe it’s just...
It is one of those random moments in life. Cate, running late, drives into Neale’s alley, puts on her blinkers and turns off the car, just as the announcer is saying, “New song by Neko Case, Right after the Weather—” That radio is...
When I picked up Jane Leavy’s 2018 book The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, I was a highly motivated reader. I deeply enjoyed her 2002 biography Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, and I liked even more her 2010 biography...
Near the end of Christopher Moore’s new novel Shakespeare for Squirrels, Pocket the Fool — he of two earlier books, Fool (2009) and Serpent of Venice (2014) — is caught in a pickle. But isn’t this what happens to all of Moore’s Beta-male...
Dark Piper, one of Andre Norton’s best novels, tells of the twisting-turning odyssey taken by teenager Vere Collis and nine younger companions across and under their planet’s landscape, an expedition from normal life to a fight for...
In her introduction to The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth and Power, Deirdre Mask tells about house-hunting with her husband in the Tottenham neighborhood of London. They found a place they...
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