Book Reviews | Patrick T Reardon | Writer, Essayist, Poet, Chicago Historian

Book review: “The Wild Party” by Joseph Moncure March, with drawings by Art Spiegelman

Book ReviewsFebruary 2, 2023222Views 0Likes 0Comments

Sometime last September, I happened upon a musical called The Wild Party — book, music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa — being performed by the Blank Theatre Company on a small commercial street on the Far North Side of Chicago. It was a fun show, a muscular and frenetic melodrama, set in a 1920s New…

Book review: “The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family” by Joshua Cohen

Book ReviewsJanuary 30, 2023281Views 0Likes 0Comments

Joshua Cohen’s novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with the judges hailing it as “a mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile…

Book review: “The Female Man” by Joanna Russ

Book ReviewsJanuary 26, 2023249Views 0Likes 0Comments

Nearly half a century ago, Joanna Russ published The Female Man, a creative, passionate and prescient science fiction novel, as a commentary on the constrained lives of women in human society. It is a novel filled with bitter humor and spiky insights that focuses on four women, existing in alternate realities, who meet and become…

Book review: “The Guns of Rio Conchos” by Clair Huffaker

Book ReviewsJanuary 24, 2023193Views 0Likes 0Comments

After a stint as an assistant editor in the Time magazine Chicago bureau, Clair Huffaker began his book-writing career, publishing one novelization of a movie (Cowboy) and eight short western novels of his own between 1957 and 1959. That’s a lot of writing or, at least, a lot of publishing in a short amount of…

Book review: “The Wife of Bath: A Biography” by Marion Turner

Book ReviewsJanuary 19, 2023342Views 0Likes 0Comments

Two-thirds of the way through her insightful and thought-provoking new book The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 336 pages, $29.95), English literature scholar Marion Turner is writing about Shakespeare’s Falstaff. The attractively comic knight — a major character in the plays Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and The Merry…

Book review: “Killer’s Payoff” by Ed McBain

Book ReviewsJanuary 17, 2023319Views 0Likes 0Comments

Cotton Hawes, the new guy among the 87th Precinct detectives, sleeps his way through Killer’s Payoff. I don’t mean he’s asleep while the action takes place. He’s in the middle of the action, you might say. That’s because, at virtually every turn in Ed McBain’s 1958 novel, Cotton is falling in love with — and…

Book review: “Closing Arguments” by Frederick Busch

Book ReviewsJanuary 12, 2023242Views 0Likes 0Comments

On the first page of Frederick Busch’s 1991 novel Closing Arguments, Mark Brennan writes that he is telling the reader of the upstate lawyer, the post-traumatic combat stress, the splendid wife, their solitudes and infidelities, their children, his client with her awkward affinities, the sense of impending recognition by which he is haunted. So, right…

Book review: “The Merchant’s Curse” by Antony Barone Kolenc

Book ReviewsJanuary 10, 2023229Views 0Likes 0Comments

Antony Barone Kolenc’s The Merchant’s Curse is a historical mystery with a strong supernatural element, set in 12th-century England and written for children and young teens. Even more, it’s a kind of morality play, designed to teach lessons about faith and right living. This is a book written for a Christian readership from the Catholic…

Book review: “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” by Charles C. Mann

Book Reviews, TempJanuary 5, 2023400Views 0Likes 2Comments

Prior to publishing 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus in 2006, Charles C. Mann had co-authored a few books on science and technology. But he had specialized in writing magazine pieces on scientific subjects for such publications as Fortune, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair, Science, the Atlantic Monthly and Wired. Indeed, at many…

Book review: “The Reformation: A History” by Patrick Collinson

Book ReviewsJanuary 3, 2023297Views 0Likes 0Comments

It’s a rare book of religious history — to say nothing of one about the cantankerous and violent era known as the Reformation — to be called sprightly. Yet, that’s a term that can aptly be applied to Patrick Collinson’s 2004 The Reformation: A History. Which isn’t to say Collinson’s book isn’t also erudite, astute…