Patrick T Reardon
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Patrick T. Reardon is a Chicagoan, born and bred. He is an essayist, poet, literary critic, and expert on the city of Chicago. He has been writing about the city, its region, its planning issues, and the literary scene for more than 40 years. For much of that time, he was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune.
He has also written extensively about his Catholic faith in articles and essays in a variety of newspapers and magazines, as well as in several books.
Reardon is the author of ten books, including the urban history The Loop: The ‘L’ Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago (Southern Illinois University Press) and two poetry collections Darkness on the Face of the Deep (Kelsay Books) and Requiem for David (Silver Birch Press). Others include Faith Stripped to Its Essence: A Discordant Pilgrimage through Shusaku Endo’s ‘Silence’ and Daily Meditations (with Scripture) for Busy Dads.
In addition, he has written chapters for a variety of works including Chicago Days: 150 Defining Moments in the Life of a Great City.
Reardon was the urban affairs writer and a feature writer at the Chicago Tribune during a 33-year career at the newspaper. He specialized in writing about social issues, public policy questions and the interconnections within the Chicago region. He was the primary reporter and team leader on a wide variety of in-depth multi-part series on such subjects as the urban underclass, Chicago’s public school system and the middle-class migration out of the city. Reardon was one of a team of Tribune writers and reporters who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for Gateway to Gridlock, a series of stories about the nation’s over-crowded skies.
In 2009, he authored two planning booklets for the Burnham Plan Centennial and wrote 78 essays over a nine-month period for the Burnham Blog. In addition, he edited (and wrote key portions of) a report for the Friends of the Parks titled The Last Four Miles: Completing Chicago’s Lakefront Parks.
A former scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library, he was a member of the Archdiocesan Pastoral Council of the Archdiocese of Chicago and was a member of the advisory board of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. His poems and essays have appeared in a variety of publications in the U.S. and Europe.
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| Language | English |
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Recent Articles
Search ArticlesBook review: “Son of Nobody” by Yann Martel
What was Yann Martel thinking? I’m talking about the title of his new novel Son of Nobody, a double-barreled story of a lost epic about the Trojan War and of the scholar who discovers and translates the work. The cover art for the Norton hardcover makes it clear that this is a book about the era of Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Odysseus and all the other Greek and Trojan heroes of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
Patrick T. Reardon
O, brothers O, mother. O, father. O, brother self-gone. O, gentle mechanic. O, woman of thunderhead. O, sleeper on the el train bassinette. O, addled Denmark Jones of blessed memory, sidewalk wanderer, striding the Chicago grid like a voyageur, like a land surveyor, like a shuckling rabbi, like a lance-pierced ecstatic, like the self-watcher up near the ceiling, looking down on the antiseptic table as if half in and out of heaven. O, mother. O, father. Who never, help me to pray.
Poem: Here I Am
Here I am Precious ointment, good name. Day of death is true north. Day of birth is first step. Feast when possible, mourn always, knowing the future. The soul-sofa franchise of John of Lent advertises: Rest your weary spirit-bones, calm the joints and sinews of your ghosts. Calling all souls, flesh below flesh. Here I am. At the gate, Lucy sits in wisdom, watches the coming and going. Her eyes are lines to life, blind to foolish offerings. A start is hope. An end is knowledge.
Book review: “Farmer in the Sky” by Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein’s 1950 Farmer in the Sky has its moments — good and bad. Or, maybe better put, it has its good and bad moments for a reader like me. One of the good moments is when Bill Lerner and his father George use dynamite and a special stone crusher to grind up the rock surface of Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter, and turn it into a rich, fine powder, the first step in a process of creating soil.
Book review: “Field Guide to Illinois Mammals” by Joyce E. Hofmann
The new edition of Joyce E. Hofmann’s Field Guide to Illinois Mammals is sturdy and beautifully packaged, savvy and erudite. It’s easy to hold in your hand while out in some natural setting and hard to soil with its glossy and colorful pages. Indeed, it’s fun to carry anywhere with its cover images of two deer fawns and what seems to be a preternaturally intelligent red fox.
Poem: Learning reporting
Learning reporting Learning reporting at City News Bureau of Chicago, a boot camp for fact-gathering marines, beaten and hammered and formed by a drill sergeant editor, many came to love — not the ex-seminarian who was used to being hammered and formed without forgetting himself. The joke at City News was no joke: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. It was repeated every day. There was a poster on the wall. It was said to the ex-seminarian, and he said it to others.
Book review: “God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution” by Christopher Hill
In May, 1650, after Oliver Cromwell’s successful invasion of Ireland, he returned to London to face a new threat. Within a few months, he took his Parliamentarian army north to invade Scotland where Charles, the son of the executed Charles I, had been proclaimed king.
Book review: “The Passover Haggadah: A Biography” by Vanessa L. Ochs
A Haggadah is a “telling,” and Vanessa L. Ochs’s 2020 book The Passover Haggadah: A Biography is a telling of the life story of this Jewish ritual of remembering and honoring the Exodus from Egypt. To write “this Jewish ritual,” however, is a bit misleading. The Haggadah is one ritual, enacted annually at the seder table, but there have been more than six thousand versions — more than six thousand Haggadot — over the past two millenniums.
Poem: Rise up in splendor, Chicago!
Rise up in splendor, Chicago! Rise up in splendor, Chicago! Your light has come, the glory of the Lord. See, darkness in the alleys, under viaducts, along the broken sidewalk concrete. See, thick clouds. The sun of morning shines on you and each wrinkle of the flat land, city of the middle, link between high and low, West and East, earth and heaven. Holy Covenant, Holy Plan. Chicago the Hazelnut, Mustard Seed, Samaritan Heart. Your light is every language, each person, the document of breathing.
Book review: “The Temple of Jerusalem” by Simon Goldhill
For a building that has been gone for nearly 2,000 years, the Temple of Jerusalem remains a surprisingly vibrant presence and a resonant symbol in world culture today. And also, at times, a bitter flashpoint. As Simon Goldhill explains in his 2004 book The Temple of Jerusalem, the spot that the Temple occupied in Jerusalem is sacred to three major world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.