Chicago History | Patrick T Reardon | Writer, Essayist, Poet, Chicago Historian

Book Review: “Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win: Five Decades of Resistance in Chicago’s Uptown Community” by Helen Shiller

Book Reviews, Chicago HistoryDecember 7, 2022339Views 0Likes 0Comments

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 for an 11 a.m. meeting with the man who was something of a mentor to her, Harold Washington, the city’s first Black mayor. And she…

Chicago history: Rediscovering the art of the much-demonized Chicago wheeler-dealer Charles Tyson Yerkes

Articles, Chicago History, Essays, Journal of the Illinois State Historical SocietySeptember 9, 2022410Views 0Likes 0Comments

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 almost unbelievable vision of swirling blue, orange and white light thrusting through fog.” His colleague, Rachel Campbell-Johnston of The Times of London, wrote that the…

Book review: “City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America” By Donald L. Miller

Book Reviews, Chicago HistoryMarch 17, 2022243Views 0Likes 4Comments

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 of Chicago history, as an important resource for my writing. Published in 1996 by Simon & Shuster, City of the Century is a lively, entertaining…

Interview: Sparrows, Hutches and Growing into an Ending, Sandra Cisneros Discusses Her New Novella

Book Reviews, Chicago HistorySeptember 23, 2021198Views 0Likes 0Comments

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 the three-flat that she and her husband own near a Chicago expressway. “The varnish peels off in stubborn ribbons, a practice in patience.” Cisneros was…

Book review: “Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power” by Aaron Cohen

Book Reviews, Chicago HistoryMay 18, 2021258Views 0Likes 0Comments

One of the pleasures of reading Aaron Cohen’s 2019 Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power is its walk down memory lane of the great Chicago-based soul music created over the course of a quarter century, beginning in the late 1950s. If you were alive and in town then — or actually…

Book review: “City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History,” edited by Kathleen A. Brosnan, Ann Durkin Keating and William C. Barnett

Book Reviews, Chicago HistoryApril 13, 2021157Views 0Likes 0Comments

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 were being milked each morning in the city.…

Book review: “Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue” by James Purdy

Book Reviews, Chicago HistoryMarch 30, 2021265Views 0Likes 0Comments

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 called Stony Island about a fictional band on the South Side…

Book review: “City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934” by Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck

Book Reviews, Chicago HistoryMarch 23, 2021206Views 0Likes 0Comments

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, 268 pages, $30), historians Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck are able to list each…

Book review: “The Coast of Chicago” by Stuart Dybek

Book Reviews, Chicago HistoryMarch 4, 2021376Views 0Likes 0Comments

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 table. “Michael, come in here by the heater, or if you’re going to stay in…

Book review: “Cop Hater” by Ed McBain

Book Reviews, Chicago HistoryJanuary 7, 2021321Views 0Likes 0Comments

In my early 20s, I read a lot of Ed McBain 87th Precinct books. There was a detective who had a white streak through his hair from an old wound, and I remember one of my journalistic colleagues at the time, a Vietnam vet, had a white streak in his hair. Things like that stick…