Essay: Chicago’s deadly streets in the late 19th and early 20th century
On the evening of March 9, 1903, Maria Stanton wanted to cross Clark Street at Goethe Street, on the edge of Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, the enclave of many of [...]
Book review: “The Children of Men” by P.D. James
There is something of a happy ending to The Children of Men by P.D. James, but that’s only if you don’t think past the final page. On the plus side, [...]
Book review: “A Dirty Job” by Christopher Moore
A Dirty Job is a book about death. And it’s hilarious. It’s Christopher Moore, after all. As with all really funny books, there’s a deeper meaning to the laughs in [...]
The ten best books about Chicago: a list
There are many very good and even great books about Chicago, and here are the 10 that I think are the best: Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon Chicago: Growth of [...]
Essay: Chicago’s Trail of Tears
In London during the summer of 1835, demonstration trains began giving free rides along a newly completed section of the London and Greenwich Railway, the first railway of any sort [...]
Book review: “Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence” by Marietta Cambareri
Six hundred years ago in Italy, Luca Della Robbia created an artistic technique that permitted him to fashion what might be called three-dimensional paintings or brightly colored sculpture. It was [...]
Book review: “Rodin” by Raphael Masson and Veronique Mattiussi
I have a key question about Rodin by Raphael Masson and Veronique Mattiussi, but, first, I need to commend the Musee Rodin and the publisher Flammarion for selecting the relatively [...]
Book Review: “Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters.” edited by Mary McFeely and William S. McFeely
There is a famous photograph of Ulysses S. Grant, sitting on the porch of his home in upstate New York on an obviously very cold day in 1885, writing his [...]
Book review: “Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939” by Adam Hochschild
In the book world, there is developing a subgenre of history-writing that takes an event or a place in world history and examines it from the perspectives and perceptions of [...]
Essay: Chicago’s hangmen reformers
Donald Trump’s loose talk in early August about the Second Amendment got a lot of people worrying that he was not so subtly calling for armed violence,or even assassination. This [...]