Poem: Arrival of Godot
Arrival of Godot By Patrick T. Reardon Comfort, yes, comfort, New Jerusalem. Your penance is at its end. Your guilt expiated. Gather, you, Mayor and City Council, in noon-sun Daley Plaza. [...]
Book Review: “Democracy’s Rebirth: The View from Chicago” by Dick Simpson
A half a century ago, as a new political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Dick Simpson won election to the Chicago City Council for the [...]
Essay: Defending “unregulated” little free libraries
Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th) thinks the little free libraries along many Chicago sidewalks are bad — very bad. They are “unregulated”! And they’re “popular”! And many of them are planted [...]
Book review: “Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition” by Mark Walczynski
The expedition of discovery that Louis Jolliet, a merchant-explorer, and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, undertook with five other men in 1673 was a pivotal moment in the history of [...]
Essay: Printers Row – A Celebration of Community
Near the end of last Saturday at this year’s Printers Row Lit Fest, an 80-year-old Italian painter from the North Shore told me she’s going to have a huge party [...]
Book review: “Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986: How Technology, Politics, Finance, and Race Reshaped the City” by Thomas Leslie
Thomas Leslie’s Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 is an impressive and important book that will take its place with those works providing the deepest insights into what makes Chicago, Chicago. Books such [...]
Book Review: “Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win: Five Decades of Resistance in Chicago’s Uptown Community” by Helen Shiller
Helen Shiller — a longtime radical activist and the new alderman in Chicago’s 46th ward — turned 40 on November 24, 1987. Two days later, she went to City Hall [...]
Chicago history: Rediscovering the art of the much-demonized Chicago wheeler-dealer Charles Tyson Yerkes
In the fall of 2003, Sebastian Smee, the art critic of the Daily Telegraph in London, described a mid-19th century painting by British artist J. M. W. Turner as “an [...]
Book review: “City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America” By Donald L. Miller
For a quarter of a century, I’ve used Donald L. Miller’s City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, one of the most popular books [...]
Interview: Sparrows, Hutches and Growing into an Ending, Sandra Cisneros Discusses Her New Novella
As Sandra Cisneros’s new gem-like novella Martita, I Remember You opens, Corina is using a scraper and a blowtorch to strip generations of varnish off a dining room hutch in [...]
