Midway through Glendon Swarthout’s 1988 novel, The Homesman, Mary Bee Cuddy wakes up and, from her bedroll by the frame wagon, hears the good-for-nothing cull Briggs, the claim-jumper she saved from hanging, shouting, “Whooeee!” There, by the...
A little more than a century ago, in one of the world’s largest cities, Chicagoans lived a lot closer to nature than we do today — as in closer to animals and their smells and their manure and urine. Consider that, in 1918, some 2,000 dairy cows...
I can’t think of another Elmore Leonard book that has a subtitle like his 1980 City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. That’s also a pretty portentous, if not to say pretentious, title. Usually, Elmore’s titles are snappier, such as Get Shorty...
Sixteen-year-old Nomi opens her story by telling the reader that she lives with her father, Ray Nickel, in “that low brick bungalow” out on Highway 12. Her audience is someone who will know the place, someone who lives in or near East...
Some guy on ESPN the other day was complaining again about men who bring a mitt to Major League Baseball games, and I just don’t get it. Maybe that’s because I still bring my first baseman’s glove to the park whenever I go, even though I’m 71...
For a few days, I took an unexpected, disconcerting and enthrallingly odd voyage through an unusual life and a mythic Chicago. It began when I was reading a book about the history of soul music in Chicago, and the author mentioned a 1978 movie...
I first read Edmund Cooper’s novel The Cloud Walker in my 20s, shortly after it was published in 1973. And I enjoyed it. Reading it now, nearly half a century later, I enjoyed it, but maybe with a difference or two The setting of the science...
Between Chicago’s two World’s Fairs in 1893 and 1933-34, very few Native Americans lived in and around Chicago. Indeed, the numbers were so low that, in City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934 (University of Nebraska Press...
In a recent edition of the New York Review of Books, Irish writer Fintan O’Toole writes that the core of Trumpism is his message to followers that they are the real Americans. With regard to the complaint of Trump and his masses of a “stolen...
I’m of two minds about Colin Woodard’s 2011 American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. On the one hand, it provides an interesting and, I think, generally useful framework with which to view the...
Sometimes, a mystery novel, if the writer is ambitious, will have two puzzles to be solved. It’s a complicated gambit for an author since it can leave the reader totally befuddled unless it’s executed very deftly. So how mad does a novelist...
Two witches — Nanny Ogg and Agnes Nitt — don’t like the family of oh-so-courteous vampires who have decided to visit the small nation of Lancre in a mountainous area of Discworld. In their snooping around, they’ve come across the family’s...
In winter night, the boy sits in the dark kitchen of the flat with his grandfather Dzia-Dzia. Upstairs, the pregnant girl Marcy is playing sad Chopin on her piano as Dzia-Dzia follows along, playing an invisible keyboard on the kitchen...
Heron By Patrick T. Reardon . Great blue heron, white in high green, folds on self, forward falls toward water, clear space, wingspan wind-catch, rise in flight. . I am semi-trailer truck in someone else’s tender canoe — steep banks through...
The other day, I started reading Jane Austen’s delightfully droll and perceptive 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, and it’s gotten me thinking about the cancel culture. “Cancel culture” is a fairly new term predominately used by conservatives to...
Jim Butcher’s 2000 novel Storm Front, the first of the very successful series of Dresden Files novels — 17 so far with more on the horizon — is a rip-snorting, crackerjack, page-turner of urban fantasy. It features Harry Blackstone Copperfield...
After reading “State of Relax” by Eileen Myles By Patrick T. Reardon . “Cows kissing goats” — Bible-immersed — I see lions bedding with lambs. . Calliope of poem, lustful, subtle — nation un-uniting itself and sighing...
There is much that is surprising and interesting and fascinating in Paul Kriwaczek’s 2010 book Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization. And much in Kriwaczek’s storytelling that is infuriating. It is astonishing that the...
Actually, Beowulf isn’t a character in Tom Holt’s 1988 comic novel Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? (although that is, of course, a fun title). He’s not even mentioned until a few pages from the end. One of the dozen of his Norse contemporaries who...
Andre Norton’s 1970 novel Dread Companion opens with Kilda c’ Rhyn detailing for the reader the mystery at the heart of her story. She was 16 when she landed on Dylan as the servant/nanny of a rich family. That was in the year 2421 After...
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