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

Book review: “Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation” by Virgil Elizondo

TempMarch 2, 2023348Views 1Like 0Comments

The appearance of Mary, the mother of Jesus, to Aztec peasant Juan Diego in December, 1531, on the hill of Tepeyac outside of Mexico City, is different from and more important than any of her other reported apparitions over the centuries. That’s one of Virgil Elizondo’s assertions in Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation. He…

Poem: Cost

Poems, TempFebruary 16, 2023398Views 0Likes 0Comments

Cost By Patrick T. Reardon Cost me voice box. Cost me black holes, greedy tunnels, another atom existence. Cost acne and lumps, lost cost. Cluster jazz. . Cost inhale, exhale. An earthly dirtied dollar, sliced grass blade, squirrel carcass flat as a poem for reading on the asphalt street in front of the two-flat at 435…

Rick Kogan: “Puddin’ is as beautiful, moving and stunning a book as I can remember reading, and it’s unique.”

News, TempFebruary 3, 2023411Views 0Likes 0Comments

During his weekly radio show on WGN on Sunday, January 22, Chicago journalism legend Rick Kogan had high praise for Patrick T. Reardon’s Puddin’: The Autobiography of a Baby, a Memoir in Prose Poems (Third World Press): “I have never read a book like Puddin’, and I’ve read tens of thousands of them….It is unique. …

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

Book Reviews, TempJanuary 5, 2023940Views 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: “Death of an Expert Witness” by P.D. James

TempJune 2, 2022785Views 0Likes 0Comments

Early in her writing career, critics often chided P. D. James for what they said were slow-moving plots in her mysteries. In a way, they were right, but they missed the point. Any readers who came to a P.D. James novel looking for fast action — or, indeed, much action at all — were going…

Book review: “But Come Ye Back” by Beth Lordan

Book Reviews, TempNovember 15, 2021249Views 0Likes 0Comments

When Mary Curtin, a Boston nanny in the late 1950s, gets the telegram MOTHER DYING, she thinks, I’d be too late. She’ll never admit that she doesn’t know what she’d have done next if her employer hadn’t come into the corridor then and asked what was wrong. But she doesn’t have to know that, because…

Book review: “The Streets of Europe: The Sights, Sounds and Smells That Shaped Its Great Cities” by Brian Ladd

TempNovember 5, 2020247Views 0Likes 0Comments

I’m having a difficult time deciding what, dear reader, to tell you first. Let’s put it this way: The streets of Paris, London, Vienna and Berlin in the 1700s and 1800s were very different from the streets you move along here in Chicago. And they were also very much the same. That’s what I come…

Book review: “Thérèse of Lisieux: God’s Gentle Warrior” by Thomas R. Nevin

TempAugust 7, 2020286Views 0Likes 2Comments

For Thomas R. Nevin, the key insight into the short life and rich spirituality of Thérèse of Lisieux is to be found in a conversation in January, 1897, eight months before her death from tuberculosis. Thérèse, a Discalced Carmelite, known in her French convent as Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, was designated…