Book review: “The Homesman” by Glendon Swarthout
Midway through Glendon Swarthout’s 1988 novel, The Homesman, Mary Bee Cuddy wakes up and, from her bedroll by the frame wagon, hears the good-for-nothing cull Briggs, the claim-jumper she saved [...]
Book review: “City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History,” edited by Kathleen A. Brosnan, Ann Durkin Keating and William C. Barnett
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 [...]
Book review: “City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit” by Elmore Leonard
I can’t think of another Elmore Leonard book that has a subtitle like his 1980 City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. That’s also a pretty portentous, if not to say [...]
Book review: “A Complicated Kindness” by Miriam Toews
Sixteen-year-old Nomi opens her story by telling the reader that she lives with her father, Ray Nickel, in “that low brick bungalow” out on Highway 12. Her audience is someone [...]
Essay: The Sights and Sounds of Baseball, Fans Optional
Some guy on ESPN the other day was complaining again about men who bring a mitt to Major League Baseball games, and I just don’t get it. Maybe that’s because [...]
Book review: “Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue” by James Purdy
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 [...]
Book review: “The Cloud Walker” by Edmund Cooper
I first read Edmund Cooper’s novel The Cloud Walker in my 20s, shortly after it was published in 1973. And I enjoyed it. Reading it now, nearly half a century [...]
Book review: “City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934” by Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck
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 [...]
Book review: “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” by Toni Morrison
In a recent edition of the New York Review of Books, Irish writer Fintan O’Toole writes that the core of Trumpism is his message to followers that they are the [...]
Book review: “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America” by Colin Woodard
I’m of two minds about Colin Woodard’s 2011 American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. On the one hand, it provides an interesting and, [...]