Fort Dearborn on the south bank of the Chicago RiverWhat happened two centuries ago on Aug. 15, 1812, on the Lake Michigan shore near what is now 18th Street has long been called the Fort Dearborn Massacre. But it wasn’t a massacre. It was a...
Back in the 1990s, I saw a movie, set in a big city, that focused on a small group of people who wore very distinctive uniforms. This group wasn’t carrying out its mission very well. The members of the group were portrayed in the film...
I found “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell to be quick and entertaining to read — and ultimately dissatisfying. Part of it has to do with Gladwell’s glibness. And part with the sense he conveys of having discovered some inner...
Midway through “The Giant O’Brien,” I was more than a little lost. I couldn’t quite figure out how to take Hilary Mantel’s tale of the 18th-century Irish giant Charles O’Brien who comes to London to exhibit his massiveness and make his fortune —...
Perhaps the best way to write about Paul Fussell’s 1975 masterpiece “The Great War and Modern Memory” would be to simply list willy-nilly some of the myriad insights, observations, facts, quotations and other interesting stuff that Fussell...
Now, let’s take these characters and make a novel! Ooops! I’m afraid I’m jumping the gun a bit here. I should tell you first what I’m talking about — “Imagined Lives,” a wonderful hybrid of a book newly published by the National Portrait...
Hello, newly minted college graduate. How are you liking real life? Scary, right? Especially for a young adult. Gone are the days when a parent could make a decision for you. And you’ve got some big decisions to make. To start...
The North wasn’t the Promised Land. Or was it? The North didn’t have Jim Crow laws written into the books to keep African-Americans down. But it did have James Crow, a term for the attitudes of white Northerners and their unions and government...
Initially, I wondered if, in 1953, Robert Heinlein had had the still-very-new state of Israel in mind when he published “Revolt in 2100,” a collection of two short stories and a novella. That’s because the novella “ ‘If This Goes On…,’ ” which...
“The Bear,” which was included in William Faulkner’s collection of seven fiction pieces in “Go Down, Moses” in 1942, has been called a short story. It’s also been labeled a novella. At 40,000 words or so, it is...
Rembrandt had been dead for half a century when Arnold Houbraken wrote in one of the earliest biographies of the painter: And as to his female nudes, the noblest subject for the artist’s brush, the representation of which earned the fullest...
Near the end of “The Long Earth,” after a long quest, the three central characters come face to face with an entity that one describes as “a destroyer of worlds. An eater of souls.” Or, as another more bluntly puts it...
In 2009, Thomas Pynchon published a (for him) short 369-page mystery novel “Inherent Vice” about a hippie private investigator trying to puzzle out a host of intricate and seemingly inter-related crimes, deaths, “deaths,” disappearances...
Good morning residents, colleagues, family, and friends! Michael Whitmore said the three Rs of a successful urban teacher are resiliency, responsiveness, and reflectiveness. Residents, now that we have completed our residency, I know that we all...
The Lord croons melodious tunes. Praise God. The Lord whistles cool breezes. Praise God. The Lord laughs deep from the belly. Praise God. The Lord knows humor as a faithful friend. Praise God. Garden dirt is under the Lord’s fingernails...
Success, in the form of “Stranger in a Strange Land” (1961), went to Robert A. Heinlein’s head. He discovered a callow audience enthralled with his pop psychology and jejune philosophical rantings on free love, non-conformity...
Two hundred and one years ago, when New York comprised the small southern tip of Manhattan Island, three commissioners laid out the future of the city as a grid. It was an act of chutzpah...
“American Characters: Selections from the National Portrait Gallery, Accompanied by Literary Portraits” by R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis is the sort of photo-art book that you don’t read from cover to cover. Except, it turns...
This abridged history of the St. Gertrude Roman Catholic parish in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago was read at Pentecost mass on May 27, 2012. The full history is to be published later this year. Eileen Quinlan and the other parishioners...
Earlier this year, Cardinal Francis George turned 75 and submitted his letter of resignation to Pope Benedict XIV as archbishop of Chicago. As George said in an interview with the Tribune, it was “formula almost.” A requirement under...
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