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...
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