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Rave Third Coast Review Smith’s book resonates on unexpected levels for any Chicagoan—indeed, any human being—in this historical moment of worldwide disease ... Chicago’s Great Fire is an important book of Chicago history, highly readable, and deeply researched. Amazingly, it is also the first book since the 1871 conflagration to tell the story of the fire in a comprehensive way ... In Chicago’s Great Fire, Smith builds on these earlier works and, for the first time, brings together their insights into a thoroughgoing look at the fire, its aftermath and its meaning ... Carl Smith has written a crackerjack history that is rousing, thought-provoking and a necessary addition to the city’s historical bookshelf.
Daniel T. Rodgers
Rave Chicago Tribune Rodgers’ superlative book is an intellectual page-turner—a muscular examination of the culture and theology behind the \'Model,\' a cogent study of the methods by which a nation gives itself meaning through the inventive interpretation of documents from the past, and a sharp-eyed accounting of how Winthrop’s \'city on a hill\' phrase came to be used in modern political parlance ... One compelling wrinkle in the narrative is how Reagan’s speechwriters took the two-sentence section from the \'Model\' that their candidate, and later president, had used many times in the past, and lopped off the second sentence.
Christopher Moore
Positive The Chicago Tribune ...Moore has produced a book that’s moodier than his usually snappy fare. For his cast of characters, occupying the lower levels and the margins of society, postwar America is a place of job shortages, housing shortages and \'broken veterans\' as well as racial prejudice and sexual exploitation ... Lest any of Moore’s regular readers think he’s gone sappy, it’s worth noting that he’s as silly as ever ... Noir is a sad and daffy and wacky, and surprisingly heartfelt, novel.
Stephen Greenblatt
Rave The Chicago Tribune ...thoughtfully readable and deeply erudite, a book steeped in humanity and in the unending efforts of humans to figure out who they are and why their lives are filled with pain, struggle and death … Greenblatt asserts that the Adam and Eve story, far from fading from the world culture, has vital importance today. In its seeming simplicity, it expresses core human issues and remains ‘a powerful, even indispensable, way to think about innocence, temptation, and moral choice, about cleaving to a beloved partner, about work and sex and death.’
Alice McDermott
Rave The Chicago Tribune Alice McDermott’s new novel, The Ninth Hour, is about the ghosts that haunt lives down the decades, especially in families. Ghosts, like the one in the courtyard, that seem to appear as visions, but, even more, the ghosts of actions taken, choices made ...a jagged, unsettling novel that tells the stories of two families as far back as the Civil War and as far forward as the present day, all in 247 pages ... There is no central figure, but large roles are played by Sally and Annie and several nuns... On McDermott’s pages, these sisters feel and act out of greed and compassion, love and the desire for control, pity and anger.
Mark Kurlansky
Mixed The Chicago Tribune ...a rambling stroll through the technological development and refinement of paper and its use by and impact on people. It's the book of a former journalist, breezy and discursive, and will attract a lot of readers ... Kurlansky's book is rooted in a Western-centric world view that nowadays seems quite antiquated ... To give Kurlansky his due, Paper is filled with interesting tidbits as readers of his earlier popular histories would expect.
Sandra Cisneros
Positive Chicago Tribune A House of My Own isn't a greatest-hits collection or a slap-dash clean-out-the-archive grouping. It is a surprisingly resonant account of Cisneros' life, which is woven through each of these pieces, regardless of their subject.