SOURCE: "Royko Re-bound: Buying into a Journalistic Stereotype," Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 2, 1983, pp. 3, 7.

[In the following review, Griswold, a California writer, praises Royko's book Sez Who? Sez Me!]

Chicago is most often called the Second City by people prepared to drive six hours rather than spend a weekend in their own part of the Midwest. Chicago also is a city where holding opinions is confused with intelligence, contrariness is taken as proof of individuality, and the metropolitan style seems hopelessly frozen in an era when everyone wore hats.

As proof of this last observation, consider how Mike Royko is presented by his publishers in this recent collection of his columns: cigarette butts spilling out of an ashtray, filthy coffee cups everywhere, a ratty cubbyhole they call an office, and a newspaperman in a crumpled shirt hunching over an old Remington typewriter. His beat is Chicago, and...