Book review: “Saving Ruby King” by Catherine Adel West
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 [...]
Book review: “Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning” by John William Reps
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 [...]
Book review: “Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century” by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph
Dorothy Day — that radical of 20th century radicals, that voice of conscience in the face of a self-centered, self-indulgent, greedy American culture, that embracer of the neediest, [...]
Chicago history: Seven Chicago Books by Non-Chicago Authors
When you’re looking for a good novel about Chicago, you’re most likely to turn to those writers identified as Chicago writers, such as Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March) [...]
Chicago history: The ten best books about Chicago — and a clunker
There are many very good and even great books about Chicago, and, based on my half century of writing about Chicago, here are the ten that, at the moment, I [...]
Book review: “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair, adapted and illustrated by Kristina Gehrmann, translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger
Kristina Gehrmann’s graphic novel version of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle is suitably gritty and oppressive, but probably not ugly enough. I’m not sure it would be possible [...]
Essay: Lighting a candle of sweet kindness
My friend Mark and his wife Cathy were coming home on a mid-March Saturday from the sad burden of the funeral of their 42-year-old daughter Margaret. Margaret, a wife and [...]
Book review: “Chicago Catolico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican” by Deborah E. Kanter
Friends called Johnny Hernandez “Slugger,” he was such a good baseball player. In the fall of 1946, the thirteen-year-old, a recent graduate of St. Francis of Assisi elementary school on [...]
Book review: “Binga: The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s First Black Banker” by Don Hayner
A hallmark of the black nationalism movement in the 1960s was the idea of African-Americans patronizing African-American businesses. This approach with its pull-ourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps subtext has been a prominent tenet [...]
Book Review: “The Music of Her Rivers: Poems” By Renny Golden
The Pueblo boy with “thick hair…the color of a night river” is called Wolf. He appears several times in the first half of Renny Golden’s The Music of Her [...]
