The expedition of discovery Louis Jolliet, a merchant-explorer, and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, undertook with five other men in 1673, was a pivotal moment in the history of North […]
In late 1972, Ed Marciniak, a perennial social critic and justice activist, became president of the Institute of Urban Life, a small program affiliated with Loyola University Chicago. He had just […]
How can someone be so famous and yet so misunderstood? It’s easy if your name is Hillary Clinton. Gary Scott Smith, author of Do All the Good You Can, contends […]
Thomas Leslie’s Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 is an impressive and important book that ranks with other works providing the deepest insights into what makes Chicago, Chicago: Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon, […]
Toya Wolfe’s debut novel Last Summer on State Street is a harrowing, poignant, and visceral evocation of life and death in the Robert Taylor public housing development in its final […]
Who We Lost: A Portable COVID Memorial, edited by Martha Greenwald and published by Belt Publishing, started out on Greenwald’s website WhoWeLost.org, an online, crowd-sourced memorial to those who perished […]
When the world is literally on fire, who can think about writing? The present writer was reminded of Chicago author Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 Electric Literature essay on the topic (“The […]
It’s appropriate that True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work and Times by Robert Greenfield ends with the 2019 Broadway staging of True West, Shepard’s iconic play about the American West, manhood and brotherhood. […]
According to the foreword of Kill a Punk for Rock and Roll, music photographer Marty Perez is a very likable guy. The fact that providing a bio in the book […]
In a year or so, the 2024 Democratic National Convention is coming to Chicago, marking the 27th time the city has played host to one or both of the major […]
Nobody knows anything about Homer except what’s in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and, even there, it gets dicey, as James I. Porter details in his challenging and provocative Homer: […]
In the handful of years after the Civil War, Illinoisans went crazy for baseball, a game that was then spelled as two words “base ball.” By 1868, however, an editor of […]