Reviews for One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko

The average rating for One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-22 00:00:00 Scott Kelly I grew up in Chicago and, like many of my fellow Chicagoans, I grew up with Mike Royko. His column in the afternoon newspaper, The Chicago Daily News, helped me understand Chicago politics and the plight of those who had to earn their living or survive on the streets of The Windy City. Royko was a Nelson Algren kind of guy from the next generation. He was a newspaperman and he wrote like a newspaperman. His sentences were mostly spare and his adjectives didn't get out of control. Yet his compassion was often front and foremost, which led many to say that "he had the soul of a poet." Those saying that were not the aldermen on Chicago's City Council nor its "Mayor for Life" Richard J. Daley (see Royko's book Boss). Royko wrote a daily weekday column and each week you could count of him illuminating a new facet of the difficult life many Chicagoans had to cope with and how "the powers that be" were often indifferent to that. He did not spare himself in his criticism. (See, in this book, his piece on why, after decades, he moved from the old Milwaukee Avenue neighborhood to a lake view high rise.) This collection includes pieces from the Daily New and his later post at the Chicago Tribune. Many focus on issues that are somewhat dated but others, such as the death of his wife, are timeless. He loved to tease Chicagoans who only supported the Cubs when they were winning. He could supply trivia about the Cubs of yore such as: "Which current Cub swears the most? It's a tossup between Ron Santo and Leo Durocher. Expert observers say Durocher swears more when he is angry; Santo, when he is happy." And, "Moe Drabowsky, born in Ozanna, Poland is still considered the best pitcher Ozanna… ever produced. The best hitter was the immortal Ziggy Grobnik, Slat's father. He once hit his wife twelve times without a miss. But that's another game." Chicago was/is the largest Polish city in the world, with the exception of Warsaw. Civil rights, gun control, graft and corruption were regularly discussed. Abuse of children and spouses were identified and personalized. His story about Joseph and Mary arriving in Chicago instead of Bethlehem is a classic on how the Chicago bureaucracy treats the poor and homeless. This book has selections from the 1960s through the 1990s and is a good way to understand urban history in America's Heartland. 4.5*

Review # 2 was written on 2011-11-11 00:00:00 Efrain Cerero When I was a newspaper copy boy in the late 1970s, one of my jobs was to clear the telex machine, rip the paper where appropriate and arrange all the incoming stories into piles - news, sport, features etc. Mike Royko's columns were syndicated then and even came to our little newspaper in Tasmania, Australia. I spent waaaaaaaay too long poring over his humorous/poignant/indignant/teasing columns to get the other piles right for when the cranky old news editor started work and began tasting the copy. I was the last in a long line of copy boys he called Idiot Boy. I think I was Idiot Boy 26 but at least I was well read. Imagine my delight when - now a cranky old journalist myself - I found this gem of a collection. No more curly-whirly pieces of paper. There's a column for every mood. My favourite is Royko capturing the sense of "wow" as he sits with an elderly man and the rocket head to the moon in 1969. I think all young journalists should read that one. Bugs in food, the Vietnam vet without a face and Frank Sinatra offering to let Royko pull his hair rate closely behind. Mike Royko made us laugh, he made us tear up.