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...
For Thomas R. Nevin, the key insight into the short life and rich spirituality of Thérèse of Lisieux is to be found in a conversation in January, 1897, eight months before her death from tuberculosis. Thérèse, a Discalced Carmelite, known...
The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, established in Westminster Abbey a century ago, was the first of a multitude of such memorials in countries across the globe. This never-identified warrior represents every individual military...
Norwood, the first novel by Charles Portis, is a wry, sweet, kindly novel that follows Norwood Pratt, ex-GI and decent enough car repairman, on a meandering, low-stress odyssey across the U.S. from Camp Pendleton, outside San Diego, to his...
It makes a lot of sense to establish June 19 — Juneteenth, the celebration of the emancipation of the final group of black slaves in 1865 — as a national holiday. Maybe the most important reason is that it commemorates an event in...
The first interview about my upcoming book — The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago (SIU Press, November) — will be Sunday at 1:15 pm with Playtime book show hosts Bill Turck and Kerri Kendall. You can tune in online on Facebook...
In the closing pages of Catherine Adel West’s Saving Ruby King, two men and two women can hear police sirens approaching, drawn by reports of a gunshot in the house where they stand. Usually, in a novel like this — a book about family dysfunction...
I’ve started to think of it as The After. I mean that time when it will be safe for me and the rest of the world to do all the stuff we used to do before Covid-19 showed up and ruined the party. The time after we’ve lived through...
The advertisement in the Vienna newspaper on February 2, 1771, was the sort of plea that has been repeated in one medium or another since earliest human times. Three days before, “a Bolognese puppy, a white male all over and having blue...
Alleluia steeples By Patrick T. Reardon Give me two mule-loads of mud flooded with the Lord God, the water in which I washed, plunged seven times, gagged, splashed, amok, spluttered, my flesh like the flesh of a child...
David Slavitt’s novel The Hussar is the story of Lieutenant Stefan F———, a young Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer in 1866, new to his regiment and to military life, who, in his bungling callowness, falls into a situation in which he is...
The top of the homepage at my website — patricktreardon.com — now has a link to pre-order my upcoming book The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago from Amazon.com. Of course, you can just click here. Or go to my...
The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple is a richly researched, engagingly told and brutally direct indictment of the British stock company that systematically raped the...
If you want to know Chicago, you gotta know the grid. If I tell you I live at 6220 North Paulina Street, you know that my two-flat is 62 blocks north of Madison Street, or just under eight miles, the rule of thumb being eight blocks to a...
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