Rick Kogan: The couple that writes together has a pair of new books about the world around us

CHICAGO — Reunions can be pleasant and so it was when I got together with former Tribune colleagues Barbara Mahany and Blair Kamin. But our conversation was less about what old mutual pals have been up to, the health troubles that have come visiting, or what new hobbies or restaurants we’ve discovered than it was about the world in which we live.

These two have been married since 1991 and were for many of those years, and a few beforehand, among the brightest bylines to appear in the Tribune, Mahany as a stylish feature writer and Kamin as architecture critic, a chore that earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1999.

She left the paper in 2012, he in 2021, but they have stayed curious and productive, sharing a home in the near northern suburbs where they have raised two adult sons, Will and Teddy, who they refer to, charmingly, as “our homegrown double bylines.”

They call their house a book production factory and the most recent products are a pair of books, Mahany’s “The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text” (Broadleaf Books) and Kamin’s “Who Is the City For? Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago” (University of Chicago Press)

These were never intended to be companion volumes but they are very much that, since devoured together they will give any reader a new and positive and inspiring way of looking at the world, specifically the place we call home, wherever that may be.

This is Mahany’s fifth book, one inspired by a 2015 radio interview with Rabbi Rami Shapiro. And so was she off on a journey of heavy literary lifting but great rewards.

As she writes, “The weaving and writing of this book has been, as much as anything, an adventure in deep reading across centuries and subjects.” She read 200-some books. She is Catholic (Kamin is Jewish) but she read in a most ecumenical fashion and she brings you the words of those of other faiths and other centuries.

It is a hard book to describe in a few words, since it is such a distinctive and powerful narrative mix of essays, thoughts, observations and philosophies.

I could grab words from almost any of the book’s fewer than 200 pages as an example of Mahany’s writing, but here are some, on the subject of rain: “Because it’s so elemental, the life stuff of our very existence, the celestial surge that fills our rivers and waters our crops, rinses away the detritus, bathes all the woods, and the sidewalks as well, it’s been the subject of intense preoccupation and prognostication for a long, long time. Ever since ago.”

There are plenty of poets in the book and here is one of them, Mark Strand, offering, in what Mahany calls “plain-spoken logical terms,” these lines of his: “We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.”

In the book’s acknowledgments, she calls her husband “my beloved” and thanks him for many things, including his “editing excellence.”

In his new book, Kamin thanks his wife for, among many things, “her unflagging encouragement, gentle wisdom, and radiant spirit.”

He tells me, “I am nowhere near Barbara as a writer. My forte is structure, organization. We do read each other’s drafts but with the utmost respect for our skills and individual voices.”

His book is comprised of many pieces previously written for the Tribune over the last decade, updated to take an intelligently organized look at the city’s ever-changing face, some of its ongoing inequities and uncertain future.

He knows he has had a rare seat for the action, writing “I realize that I have borne witness to a dramatic transformation of Chicago, from a declining industrial colossus to a dynamic yet deeply troubled postindustrial powerhouse, whose favored emblem is a jellybean-shaped sculpture of highly polished steel.”

With this volume joining his two previous collections, it makes for a trio that should be required reading for any developer or politician with notions of having their hands in sharing and shaping the city.

“The idea of being a critic is to love your subject, but to have a demanding love, to want the best,” he says. “It is not just about making aesthetic judgments but to write about how buildings affect the life of the city and its people.”

Embellished by the fine photographs of Lee Bey, once a full-time Kamin competitor as the architecture critic for the Sun-Times and still a critic and editorial writer for that newspaper, Kamin’s book is important reading.

You will discover (or rediscover) some of the many things Kamin likes (the Apple Store on the banks of the river and the Riverwalk) and some he despises (a proposed addition to Union Station). You can read of his tempestuous “relationship” with that developer named Trump and learn why he called the refashioned Soldier Field a “Klingon-meets-Parthenon fiasco”; his explanation of the reason beyond “the widespread public revulsion” to the proposed Lucas Museum; feelings about The 606 and the coming of the Obama Center.

He gives his clear-eyed appraisal of the tenures of Mayors Emanuel and Lightfoot. It’s all there, the city on the page and in photos, tomorrow in shadow.

“It is important to pay attention,” says Kamin.

“It is important to look beyond the surface,” says Mahany.

That is true of the human-made environment and of the natural one.

From the high-rise windows in the room we were sitting, the city looked pretty good on a Sunday afternoon, people riding boats on the river, the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower in the distance.

That tower was our former home, the place we first met and we talked about that for a bit. It is now a place of very expensive condominiums. “No, we don’t know anybody who lives there,” says Kamin. “But it’s important that it is still there. It is a grand, ambitious and eccentric building. And for a time it was home.”