Chicago history, Chicago history, Lit, Nonfiction, Suburbs and exurbs

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 […]

Patrick T. Reardon /
Design, Lit, Nonfiction

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 […]

Patrick T. Reardon /
Fiction, Lit, Reviews

Review: Searching for Meaning in the Absurd World of Rajkamal Chaudhary’s Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories

The late Indian writer Rajkamal Chaudhary (1929–1967) came to prominence in the first two decades of independent India in the 1950s and ’60s, producing a prolific number of works in […]

Elizabeth Niarchos Neukirch /
Lit, Nonfiction, Suburbs and exurbs

Review: An Artist/Photographer Analyzes the Wanderlust of Stray Shopping Carts

The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification By Julian Montague Second edition, 2023, University of Chicago Press Julian Montague published his first edition of The […]

Nancy S Bishop /
Children's books, Fiction, Lit, Poetry

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 […]

Patrick T. Reardon /
Children's books, Fiction, Lit

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 […]

Patrick T. Reardon /
Art & Museums, Lit, Nonfiction, Poetry

Review: The Epic Question Mark of Western Lit, Homer: The Very Idea, by James I. Porter

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: […]

Patrick T. Reardon /
Lit, Nonfiction

Review: Private Arts, The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America, by Lisa Z Sigel

Picture of the author

The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America By Lisa Z Sigel Reaktion Books Masturbation is the only sex act that’s both universal and forbidden. Universal in that […]

Dan Kelly /
Lit, Music, Nonfiction

Review: How Soul Got Its Soul, Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power, by Aaron Cohen

Move on Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power By Aaron Cohen University of Chicago Press One of the pleasures of reading Aaron Cohen’s 2019 Move On Up: Chicago […]

Patrick T. Reardon /
Lit, Nonfiction

Review: A Pride Parade on Paper, Queer Legacies, by John D’Emilio

Picture of the author

Queer Legacies: Stories from Chicago’s LGBTQ Archives John D’Emilio University of Chicago Press Reviewed by Carr Harkrader Who doesn’t love a parade? It wouldn’t be completely wrong to describe Queer […]

Carr Harkrader /
Design, Lit, Nonfiction, Photography

Book Review: Push Butt, Receive Bacon, Hand Dryers, by Samuel Ryde

Hand Dryers By Samuel Ryde Unicorn Publishing Group Distributed by the University of Chicago Press Books In the appropriately senseless year of 2020, Hand Dryers, by Samuel Ryde, was published. […]

Dan Kelly /
Lit, Nonfiction

Review: Lovable or Sinister, Robots Rule Industry, Technology and Culture in New History

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 […]

Nancy S Bishop /