Patrick T. Reardon
Review: Maps and Martyrs, Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Cartography of the Americas, by Mirela Altic
A strikingly drawn and boldly colored map, attributed to the Jesuit priest and explorer Jean de Brebeuf, is the image used on the cover of Mirela Altic’s Encounters in the […]
Review: Celebrating Well-Made Books—The Book by Design: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Greatest Invention, edited by P.J.M. Marks and Stephen Parkin
For more than 18 centuries, paper was made with rags—old clothes, sails, and ropes—the same way it had first been fashioned in China. But, by the 19th century, the process of […]
Review: Washington, Daley, and Three Other Mayors, Chicago’s Modern Mayors, edited by Dick Simpson and Betty O’Shaughnessy
Chicago’s Modern Mayors, edited by Dick Simpson and Betty O’Shaughnessy, covers a 40-year period during which Chicago, its people, and its region went through great changes under a succession of […]
Review: Mother Goose for English Majors, The Lamb Cycle: What the Great English Poets Would Have Written about Mary and Her Lamb, by David R. Ewbank, with illustrations by Kate Feiffer
If Shakespeare, instead of Mother Goose, had written “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” perhaps he would have penned a sonnet to take the young girl to task for abandoning “Thy […]
Review: A Second Breezier History of Chicago’s Great Fire, The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul, by Scott W. Berg
As someone who writes books, I felt a pang of empathy for Scott W. Berg when I heard that he’d published in September a new book about the Great Chicago […]
Opinion: A Pre-Obit for the Physical Book
Make no mistake, I love physical books. I love the weighty feel of a book in my hands. I love the aroma of a book when you open it whether a […]
Review: A Feel-Good Novel about Coping Together, Everybody Here Is Kin, by BettyJoyce Nash
BettyJoyce Nash will be at The Book Cellar at 4736 N Lincoln Ave. in Chicago at 7pm on Thursday, October 26, to discuss her new novel Everybody Here is Kin […]
Review: A Sparkling, Gritty, and Compassionate Collection, Dona Cleanwell Leaves Home: Stories, by Ana Castillo
The seven stories in Ana Castillo’s sparkling and new, yet gritty and compassionate collection Dona Cleanwell Leaves Home, share several common themes. Ghosts, for one, including a beautiful naked woman […]
Essay: In Defense of “Unregulated” Little Free Libraries
Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th) thinks the little free libraries along many Chicago sidewalks are bad—very bad. They are “unregulated”! And they’re “popular”! And many of them are planted in city soil! (Collective […]
Printers Row on Saturday: A Celebration of Community
Near the end of Saturday at this year’s Printers Row Lit Fest, an 80-year-old Italian painter from the North Shore told me she’s going to have a huge party if […]
Review: A Riveting Account of a Nation of Fear, I Surrender: A Memoir of Chile’s Dictatorship, 1975, by Kathleen Osberger
Kathleen Osberger’s account of her three harrowing months as a religious volunteer with a community of Catholic nuns in Chile a half century ago brings the reader deep into the […]
Review: Wonder and Joy and Questions, The Happy Prince & Other Tales, by Oscar Wilde
It’s something of a surprise to be reminded that Oscar Wilde—the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray and the subject of a scandalous 1895 trial over consensual homosexual acts—wrote […]