I found Meet Me in Monaco: A Novel of Grace Kelly’s Royal Wedding in a Little Free Library and grabbed it, because Monaco is a country and I have a long list of countries to read about. This is a fun read that moves along at a nice pace, about people who are tangentially involved… [Read More]
Blog
Category: Chicago
Refugee Community Connection is helping new Chicagoans
Recently, I decided to write a bit about things that are really getting worked up—in a good way—and one of these is Refugee Community Connection. It’s a grass-roots mutual aid society operating in Chicago, started by a group of people who wanted to provide assistance to people arriving in Chicago under the State Department’s Special… [Read More]
Kenosha and Life in Fly-Over Country
Midwestern writer Twitter was really salty about a story that ran recently in Harper’s about Kenosha. Harper’s is a prestige magazine, and many writers would love the opportunity to have a clip from it. But the editors are sometimes clueless about the rest of the world. The Midwest is strangely misunderstood, dismissed as flyover land… [Read More]
Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago
Many people are astonished to find out that Chicago has a huge Latinx population, given that it’s far from the southern border and the weather is, well, a bit different than that of Mexico. Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Historical Studies of Urban America) by Lilia Fernandez is an… [Read More]
