Book review: “Posse from Hell” by Clair Huffaker
Clair Huffaker’s 1958 western Posse from Hell is a book of stereotypes twisted out of shape. It takes, for example, the good guy/bad guy dichotomy and shatters it into a [...]
Book review: “And All Through the House” by Ed McBain, illustrated by Victor Juhasz
And, at the 87th precinct house, in the moments after midnight on Christmas morning, a suspect in the squad’s lock-up, like all the others there, heard the cry of a [...]
Poem: “Goddess”
Goddess By Patrick T. Reardon . The Mexican goddess enfleshed in McDonald’s with a wide smile under her wide mountain nose and her children, all girls under eight, alert to [...]
Poem: “Canticle”
Canticle By Patrick T. Reardon . Water-splashed forehead. Product of times. Cheek slapped, new name, chrism. Child of century. Sign of. . Communion of saints. Myrrh burial. Finger ringed. Deathly [...]
Book review: “A Taste for Death” by P.D. James
As soon as I finished the 1986 mystery A Taste for Death, I went online to find out if Inspector Kate Miskin would appear in any of P.D. James’s later [...]
Essay: Reporting History —How to look at Chicago and, well, at all of humanity as a reporter, historian and poet.
I was asked by the Chicago Literary Club, a very old social organization in the city — now in its 149th season — to give the Arthur Baer Fellowship Address [...]
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 [...]
Book review: “The Book of Mormon: A Biography” by Paul C. Gutjahr
In U.S. history, the Mormons — more formally known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — stand alone as the most successful, American-grown religion. Not only did [...]
Book review: “The Untouchable” by John Banville
The claustrophobic story told by Victor Maskell — a gay, aristocratic Irishman, Cambridge Marxist, international Poussin expert, Russian spy and Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, nicknamed Boots by the Queen [...]
Book review: “Eye of the Monster” by Andre Norton
Andre Norton’s short 1962 novel Eye of the Monster is a disturbing story in which the native race of a world called Ishkur, pejoratively nicknamed Crocs, are brutal, foul-smelling and [...]