The American Robot: A Cultural History By Dustin A. Abnet The University of Chicago Press Robots are endlessly fascinating—as all-purpose helpers, industrial workers, personal slaves, and even companions. Ian McEwan’s 2019 novel, […]
Rodham: A Novel By Curtis Sittenfield Random House We think we should all know her by now. After decades in the limelight, Hillary Rodham Clinton remains, for many, an enigma. Now author […]
Cities of the American West A History of Frontier Urban Planning By John W. Reps Princeton University Press, 827 pages, available on the internet starting at $40 Part One of Two Parts […]
Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century By John Loughery and Blythe Randolph Simon and Schuster Dorothy Day—that radical of 20th century radicals, that voice of conscience in the face of a self-centered, self-indulgent, […]
Banned Book Club By Kim Hyun Sook, Ko Hyun-Ju, and Ryan Estrada Iron Circus Comics Alongside guns, flags, and cats, few things spark people’s passions more than books. And why not? Books […]
Stateway’s Garden By Jasmon Drain Penguin Random House There are many reasons to read Stateway’s Garden, Jasmon Drain’s debut story collection, but perhaps the most unexpected is the case it makes for […]
Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists and Intellectuals 1893–1930 Edited by Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed University of Illinois Press, 296 pages, $28 In November 1904, […]
Blessed Blessed are the dead and the dying. Blessed, the mourn-filled good-byes to loves behind glass, behind walls. Blessed, neighborhoods of pain, grief communities, lightning-struck homes, annunciations of the […]
Like many Chicagoans, Susan Kelsey was likely familiar with Caldwell Woods and the Billy Caldwell Golf Course on the northwest side, but her first introduction to the historical figure behind the name […]
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, adapted and illustrated by Kristina Gehrmann, translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger Ten Speed Press, 384 pages, $24.99 Kristina Gehrmann’s graphic novel version of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The […]
After Afaf’s older sister disappears one night, their family is never the same. As her mother succumbs to mental illness and her father to alcoholism, Afaf struggles to come of age as […]
Third Coast Review writer Patrick T. Reardon recently published a fine piece in praise of tackling extra-long reads during the social isolation era. For those who’ve completed all the popular great big […]
