Author Discussion & Signing for Local Writer and Poet, Patrick T. Reardon with Local Guest Author Floyd Sullivan
Titles: Let the Baby Sleep and Puddin': The Autobiography of a Baby, A Memoir in Prose Poems
Called Out: A Novel of Baseball and America in 1908
Date: September 17, 2023
Day: Sunday
Time: 2:00 PM

Description
Let the Baby Sleep is a fearlessly exploratory collection of poems. The poet, Patrick T. Reardon, dissects the world of his childhood, his upbringing, his relationships with his parents and siblings, his maturation and growth, and the wrenching shock of his brother's suicide. With extraordinary skill and grace, he exposes the worlds-physical, mental, spiritual-that he inhabited and is forced still to inhabit, and asks us to confront them with him.
This is a rare collection. Reading these poems feels like a privilege that should be reserved for the poet and his family, but the warmth, generosity, humour, and love that permeates the whole is offered without reservation. The poems are, by turns, gentle, harrowing, contemplative, heartfelt, but always insistently demonstrative, insistently declarative. There is no turning away.

Description
Puddin' The Autobiography of a Baby is
a memoir. It's not fantasy.
It is the story of a baby--me--during my first
fourteen months, leading up to the birth of David. It's told from the
perspective and in the voice of a baby. Each of this small book's 101 chapters
is imagined. Yet, each is rooted in reality, in facts and feelings.

About the Author
From 1976 through 2009, Reardon was the urban affairs writer and a feature writer at the Chicago Tribune. During his 32-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, public housing, Chicago’s public school system, the middle-class migration out of the city, the rebirth of the Chicago River, the inner workings of a ward boss’s organization, the social and cultural shifts behind the disappearance of the city’s taverns, the surprising importance of alleys in the life of the city, and the emotional, cultural and historical factors behind suburban sprawl. As a team leader, he has won three Peter Lisagor Awards from the Chicago chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for reporting. In addition, his book reviews won two Lisagors for arts criticism.
Reardon was one of a team of fifty Tribune reporters, photographers and editors who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for “Gateway to Gridlock,” a series of stories about the nation’s over-crowded skies.
During his career, Reardon used his expertise in social policy, demographics, statistics, community organizing, Chicago politics, Chicago history, the geography of the city and region, the city’s literature, the multiplicity of governments in the region, real estate development, religion and the history of the nation and world to hold a mirror up to the people of the metropolitan region. His goal has always been to help people understand where they’d been, where they were and where they were going.
While at the Tribune, he wrote more than 200 book reviews and profiled such writers as Gay Talese, Haki Madhubuti, Sandra Cisneros, Patrick O’Brian, Richard Russo, Robert Caro, John Keegan, Antonia Fraser, P.D. James and Roddy Doyle.
He has written for a variety of publications, including the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, National Catholic Reporter, U.S. Catholic, the Chicago Sun-Times, Crain’s Chicago Business, the Chicago Reader, Health Progress, Reality, Streetwise and Illinois Heritage.

Description
As 1907 becomes 1908, National Base Ball League President Harry Pulliam suspects that the owner of the New York Giants has hired detectives to spy on him and his lover, Ted Russell, with the goal of blackmailing him. The pressure tests the strength of his relationship and his ability to administer his league duties.
Lenore Caylor, Pulliam's new stenographer, falls in love with him and becomes his staunchest champion as he fights to preserve the honor of professional base ball and the National League. Near the end of the season, one of the most bizarre in base ball history, controversial, game-changing calls result in violent protests, riots, and death. The survival of the national pastime hangs in the balance, as do Pulliam's relationships with Ted and Lenore-and, indeed, his own life.

About the Author
Floyd Sullivan was born in Chicago and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a degree in history. He has written one non-fiction book, Waiting for the Cubs, and edited a collection of essays titled Old Comiskey Park. He blogs about baseball at Waiting4Cubs on ChicagoNow.com. He works as a freelance writer and photographer in Chicago, where he lives with his wife.
Barbara Gregorich, author, She's on First and Women at Play "I enjoyed learning more about both [Harry Pulliam], his secretary, Lenore Caylor, and the various team owners. I particularly enjoyed the author's descriptions of bugs-baseball fanatics. Sullivan does an excellent job of capturing the slang of the times and depicting the violence the bugs inflicted on opposing players. And what made me laugh with delight was each and every time a character in the book complained about the Chicago Cubs always winning the World Series. "...I cared about the characters in the story, and I cared about their personal outcomes as well as the outcomes for major league baseball. Called Out is a a book I'm glad I read, and I recommend it to others as an enjoyable way to learn about an important part of baseball history-and the more important issue of how to people should behave toward one another." Patrick T. Reardon, author; Pulitzer Prize winner; National Book Award nominee: "Sullivan...has done a crackerjack job of weaving together many strands to provide a nuanced look at base ball and at America of more than a century ago. "Called Out is a baseball book in which, ironically, few games are described. However, there is one particular game to which Sullivan devotes 30 pages-and then another 40 pages to its aftermath. "It's also a book about a quirky love story centering on the novel's two major characters, Lenore Caylor and Harry Pulliam-a love story that's the furthest thing from a romance novel, especially when you consider that one of the two is gay. "It's the story of a hero, Pulliam, clashing again and again with the entrenched powers-that-be of his sport-and losing. A tragic story. And, yet, as we know from the subsequent history of base ball, he was ultimately victorious."