RaveThe Wall Street JournalOdd, occasionally funny and sometimes painful ... A sprawling narrative peopled by an eccentric crew of relatives and friends and quickened with an array of setbacks, successes, disappointments and cruelties told with wit and a few regrets ... The comedy flows throughout, as Mr. Hirsch describes people and relates events in a straightforward, deadpan style ... Despite the humor, an undercurrent of sadness runs through the book ... Mr. Hirsch relates the difficult scenes...in the same matter-of-fact tone he employs to describe the many details of his childhood. This stands in notable contrast to his poetry, which also focuses on quotidian events but is invested with salvos of emotion.
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalCarl Smith, an English professor at Northwestern University, dives into this familiar material, and though Chicago’s Great Fire doesn’t exactly break new ground, it serves as a wonderfully thoughtful and concise retelling of the tragedy and its aftermath ... But Chicago’s Great Fire goes beyond the disaster and its cause to recount the remarkable way the city sprang back.
Carl Smith
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalCarl Smith, an English professor at Northwestern University, dives into this familiar material, and though Chicago’s Great Fire doesn’t exactly break new ground, it serves as a wonderfully thoughtful and concise retelling of the tragedy and its aftermath ... But Chicago’s Great Fire goes beyond the disaster and its cause to recount the remarkable way the city sprang back.
R. D. Rosen
MixedThe Wall Street JournalOne of the pleasures of this biography is its salting with quaint details of American life from not so long ago ... We’ve certainly missed the chance to explore how growing up with a man capable of such violence influenced the young athlete. The author does his best to glean what can be learned, but records and recollections offer little ... The book glancingly refers to the anti-Semitism that Sid Luckman faced in his athletic career—he was one of the few Jewish players in the NFL—but in general the role of religion in his life rarely comes up ... Mr. Rosen invests considerable effort to link Luckman’s father to one of the most infamous Jewish gangsters of the era, Louis \'Lepke\' Buchalter.
