Ernie Banks and Minnie Minoso are the headliners in Don Zminda’s book Justice Batted Last: Ernie Banks, Minnie Minoso and the Unheralded Players Who Integrated Chicago’s Major League Teams. But [...]
Day of the dead By Patrick T. Reardon Lucy in black on the arm of Child, telling him emergency love stories. One-Cent in the choir loft, singing each [...]
For much of Chicago’s history, its strident boosters with their overblown assertions of the city’s present and, even more, its future greatness have been a subject of ridicule. In 1952, [...]
Kevin Barry’s 2019 novel Night Boat to Tangier is the story of Maurice Hearne and Charles Redmond, two morose, self-absorbed and emotionally fragile Irish gangsters of the small-bore variety. As [...]
Handel’s Messiah: An Oratorio is such a glorious jewel in the treasury of Western music that its story should be grand enough to fill an entire book. But think about [...]
Laundromat By Patrick T. Reardon marshall-williams-pYpZIOj-KKs-unsplash Old children carry sacks. They carry money. They know how it goes. They chew gum. They do not protest. [...]
Wesley Gannley and Miss Finchley are bit players in Ed McBain’s The Heckler, published in 1960 as the twelfth novel in his series of police procedurals focusing on the 87th [...]
None shall be missing By Patrick T. Reardon Lucy is a depth of purple in shrouded statue time. Stations of the Cross. Stations of the railroad. Keep [...]
It’s one of those wonderfully goofy moments that happen in an Elmore Leonard novel. Jack Ryan is in the middle of what he thinks is a breezy, spontaneous spot of [...]
One of the many things I liked about Annie Dillard’s 1989 nonfiction book The Writing Life is her discussion of how writers choose what they write, how they should choose. [...]
