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 […]
Patrick T. Reardon is a Chicago historian, essayist, poet and writer who was a Chicago Tribune reporter for 32 years. He is the author of nine books including The Loop: The ‘L’ Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago (SIU Press).
Review: Everything You Never Knew about Chicago and Nature, City of Lake and Prairie
City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History edited by Kathleen A. Brosnan, Ann Durkin Keating, and William C. Barnett University of Pittsburgh Press A little more than a century […]
Review: Flashes of Wry: Fast Funny Women, edited by Gina Barreca
Note: Gina Barreca, the editor of Fast Funny Women, and Chicagoan Nicole Hollander will read from the collection of 75 essays of flash nonfiction in a Zoom event at 7 […]
Review: Native Americans Having Their Own Say, City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934
City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893–1934 by Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck University of Nebraska Press Between Chicago’s two World’s Fairs in 1893 and 1933–34, […]
Review: Modernist Homes in Midcentury Chicago, Modern in the Middle, by Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino
Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929–75 By Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino with a foreword by Pauline Saliga The Monacelli Press Pauline Saliga, executive director of the Society of […]
Review: Decent People Facing Strangeness, Dark Black, by Sam Weller
Dark Black by Sam Weller Hat & Beard Press One of the opening paragraphs of Sam Weller’s short story “All the Summer Before Us” is this: “We were eighteen, me […]
Viewpoint: The Joy of Protest—Chicago Protests: A Joyful Revolution by Vashon Jordan Jr.
Chicago Protests: A Joyful Revolution by Vashon Jordan Jr. Self-published Joy is being free to say: “Look at me! Listen to me!” Joy is being free to join with others […]
Q&A: COVID-19 and the Blaze—Carl Smith and the Great Chicago Fire, Part 2
Part 2 of Two Parts. Read Part 1 here. Like the rest of the world, Atlantic Monthly Press and Northwestern University historian Carl Smith weren’t planning on COVID-19. But that’s […]
Q&A: Letting Events Talk — Carl Smith and the Great Chicago Fire, Part 1
Part 1 of Two Parts. Carl Smith’s Chicago’s Great Fire, published in August by Atlantic Monthly Press, is an important book of Chicago history, and a rousing crackerjack work that’s […]
Review: A Long-Ago Blaze That Echoes the Pandemic, Chicago’s Great Fire, by Carl Smith
Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City by Carl Smith Atlantic Monthly Press Devastation is devastation, whether brought about by fire or pandemic. The Great […]
Review: “They Saved My Life”—Taught by Women: Poems as Resistance Language, New and Selected, by Haki R. Madhubuti
Taught by Women: Poems as Resistance Language, New and Selected by Haki R. Madhubuti Third World Press One of my favorite poems in Haki R. Madhubuti’s new, career-spanning collection Taught […]
Review: The Joy and Bother of City Streets, The Streets of Europe: The Sights, Sounds, and Smells That Shaped Its Great Cities, by Brian Ladd
The Streets of Europe: The Sights, Sounds, and Smells That Shaped Its Great Cities By Brian Ladd University of Chicago Press, 320 pages, $30 I’m having a difficult time deciding […]