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

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

Book Reviews, Chicago HistoryMarch 30, 20210Comments

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, 20210Comments

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, 20210Comments

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, 20210Comments

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…

Book review: “Chicago Protests: A Joyful Revolution” by Vashon Jordan Jr.

Book Reviews, Chicago HistoryDecember 15, 20200Comments

Joy is being free to say: “Look at me! Listen to me!” Joy is being free to join with others to say: “Look at me! Listen to me!” Joy is rejecting invisibility in American society, rejecting violence and racism and injustice. It’s joining together with many others on many days in the summer of 2020…

Q&A: Covid and the Blaze — Carl Smith and the Great Chicago Fire, Part 2

Chicago HistoryDecember 3, 20200Comments

Part 2 of two parts. Here's the first part. Like the rest of the world, Atlantic Monthly Press and Northwestern University historian Carl Smith weren’t planning on Covid-19. But that’s the reality they faced when Smith’s Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City was published as planned in August.…

Q&A: Letting Events Talk — Carl Smith and the Great Chicago Fire, Part 1

Chicago HistoryDecember 1, 20200Comments

Part 1 of two parts Carl Smith’s Chicago’s Great Fire, published in August by Atlantic Monthly Press, is an important book of Chicago history, a rousing crackerjack work that’s highly readable and deeply researched. As I noted in my earlier review, it opens with a stirring, moment-by-moment account of the 1871 city-leveling blaze that raged…

Book review: “Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City” by Carl Smith

Book Reviews, Chicago HistoryNovember 23, 20200Comments

Devastation is devastation, whether brought about by fire or pandemic. The Great Chicago Fire occurred nearly a century and a half ago, but the experience of living through that cataclysm has many parallels with Chicago in the year of Covid-19. It was probably late last year that Northwestern University historian Carl Smith and his…

Book review: “Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical” by Jacqueline Jones

Book Reviews, Chicago HistorySeptember 15, 20203Comments

It is a telling irony that Lucy Parsons — one of the most famous African-American women in Chicago’s history — pretended she wasn’t black. Not only that. According to historian Jacqueline Jones, Parsons did little or nothing to help black Chicagoans despite her 70-year career as a labor activist, anarchist and would-be revolutionary in the…

“The Loop” on the radio

Chicago History, The Loop --- bookJuly 22, 20200Comments

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 at WCGOradio and streaming at WCGO.com. Also, it can be heard…