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The epic of Chicago is the story of the emergence of modern America. Here, witness Chicago's growth from a desolate fur-trading post in the 1830s to one of the world's most explosively alive cities by 1900.

Donald Miller's powerful narrative embraces it all: Chicago's wild beginnings, its reckless growth, its natural calamities (especially the Great Fire of 1871), its raucous politics, its empire-building businessmen, its world-transforming architecture, its rich mix of cultures, its community of young writers and journalists, and its staggering engineering projects -- which included the reversal of the Chicago River and raising the entire city from prairie mud to save it from devastating cholera epidemics. The saga of Chicago's unresolved struggle between order and freedom, growth and control, capitalism and community, remains instructive for our time, as we seek ways to build and maintain cities that retain their humanity without losing their energy. City of the Century throbs with the pulse of the great city it brilliantly brings to life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

History of the building of the current city of Chicago
This book is about the work the that went into producing this wonderful American city of great architecture, art, music, open lake front, parks & shopping.We live in Michigan but are in Chicago every time an opportunity presents itself.This book tells Chicago's story well.

City of the Century
This is a facinating history of our great midwest city of Chicago.From its foundation as a French trading post in the late 18th century to the magnificent creation of the World's Columbian Exhibition in 1893, Chicago was a place where men of daring, raw power and creative genius excelled.It is a story of early exploration, construction and architecture, finance, transportation design, politics and culture.With perserverence, the citizens created a unique metropolis - a world-class city. Donald L Miller makes the story an exciting read.

THE Chicago history text
If you have an interest in learning Chicago history, if you live in Chicago and think you know its history, read this book. This book is the foundation of the largest city in America truly founded by "Americans". A lot of Chicagoans can recite tidbits from the past century, focusing on Capone and the city's Daley-run government as the most intriguing aspects of The Windy City.

But few fail to really understand the foundation of Chicago. This book takes you from its pre-white "settler" days through the city's, and one of the nation's, defining moments on a world scale, the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893.

Donald Miller takes you on an eloquently-written journey through the facts, people, architecture and overwhelming ideals that made Chicago what was in the 1900s and continues to be into the 21st century. Miller's writing, filled with information squeezed into each sentence via the ever-present use of the comma, can at times become overwhelming. However, Miller's style forces the reader to take his or her time and absorb each historic moral.

I do believe a reader can turn this book into a quicker read. Though its incredible amount of information and wonderful description of Chicago culture will not be fully understood in this way. This book is best treated like a fun but serious read. Grab a highlighter and some page flags so you'll be able to go back from time to time and remember little facts that will astound your friends, though your understanding of the city's history will already greatly impress anyone who casually asks a question about Chicago.

This book's build to the 1893 World's Fair is especially apropos currently, given Chicago's bid to bring the 2016 Olympics to the Second City. Many parallels can be drawn.

City of the Century
This is an amazing book for all Chicagoan lovers. There is soo much history about the city of Chicago and the author does an awesome of explaining it and taking you through a walk through the past. The book is a little long but I would recommend it to anyone interested in Chicago's history.

Boring
This book was not what I expected. I found the details tedious and boring. Not enough coverage of the most historical event in Chicago's history, the fire and the subsequent rebuilding.I fairness, I was so disinterested I did not finish the second half... I kept falling asleep. John Dwaine/ Chicago ... Read more

Product Description
The true story of the murderesses who became media sensations and inspired the musical Chicago

Chicago, 1924.

There was nothing surprising about men turning up dead in the Second City. Life was cheaper than a quart of illicit gin in the gangland capital of the world. But two murders that spring were special - worthy of celebration. So believed Maurine Watkins, a wanna-be playwright and a "girl reporter" for the Chicago Tribune, the city's "hanging paper." Newspaperwomen were supposed to write about clubs, cooking and clothes, but the intrepid Miss Watkins, a minister's daughter from a small town, zeroed in on murderers instead. Looking for subjects to turn into a play, she would make "Stylish Belva" Gaertner and "Beautiful Beulah" Annan - both of whom had brazenly shot down their lovers - the talk of the town. Love-struck men sent flowers to the jail and newly emancipated women sent impassioned letters to the newspapers. Soon more than a dozen women preened and strutted on "Murderesses' Row" as they awaited trial, desperate for the same attention that was being lavished on Maurine Watkins's favorites.

In the tradition of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City and Karen Abbott's Sin in the Second City, Douglas Perry vividly captures Jazz Age Chicago and the sensationalized circus atmosphere that gave rise to the concept of the celebrity criminal. Fueled by rich period detail and enlivened by a cast of characters who seemed destined for the stage, The Girls of Murder City is crackling social history that simultaneously presents the freewheeling spirit of the age and its sober repercussions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Hypnotic recreation of 1920s era
Review by PAUL DI FILIPPO for B&N Review:

I must sternly advise readers not to approach Douglas Perry's The Girls of Murder City without being aware of the risks they run. Like the hero of Jack Finney's Time and Again, who steeped himself so intensely in vintage surroundings that he became unmoored in time and slipped back to Victorian-era New York, so too might the unwary readers of Perry's book find themselves sucked willy-nilly back down the decades to 1920s Chicago, as a result of Perry's incredibly visceral, sensual and hypnotic recreation of that era. Such a pleasant yet disorienting fate happened to me, I swear it. The man is simply a wizard of words, and must be approached with caution.

Perry shines his interrogator's spotlight on a longish moment in that Prohibition-fraught, flapper-rich decade when, in the words of a Chicago cop, the ladies "were bunching their hits at this time." In other words, an unusual spate of murders committed by women had occurred, the press and public were going gaga, and nothing would ever be the same. Perry's ambitious remit: to recreate a whole era and to delineate with lyrical precision the fascinating characters, high and low, connected with this short grisly epoch. It is a task he handles with jaunty spirits, journalistic verve and cleverness, and a hardboiled sangfroid. He is writing, after all, about the same period that birthed Black Mask magazine and all the ground-breaking noir writers associated with it. Consequently, we get great sentences from Perry like these:

"Just pleasantly buzzed, as usual, the kind of tingling warmth that held you like a new mother."


"...boredom trailed her like an annoying corgi, always there, underfoot."


"After a couple of hours in the saddle, her thighs and buttocks glowed, radiating from the inside out like a clay pot right out of the fire..."

Hot-cha-cha! If murder isn't far behind those radiant buttocks, Robert Leslie Bellem wasn't the father of Dan Turner.

Moving effortlessly through assorted milieus--the worlds of journalism, high society, finance, commerce, gangsters, politicians--Perry smartly follows one pole star: the reporter Maurine Watkins, whose coverage of several of the more high-profile murders launched her career and resulted in her writing the play Chicago, the source of the famed Broadway musical. Watkins could have been invented by Ben Hecht, and as an old-fashioned, smalltown girl, she serves as the perfect foil to the "gin and gun" atmosphere of Chicago. A mordant observer of the urban scenery ("Murderesses have such lovely names," Watkins coolly remarked), Watkins was talented enough to attract readers without stooping to yellow journalism.

Perry nimbly handles issues of racism, feminism and class struggle without employing a truncheon. He exudes immense sympathy for this vanished time, and implicitly raises a vital question. Has the weird glamour and hard-living vitality gone out of this nation? Are we today sanitized and groomed and leashed within an inch of lives, both mentally and experientally? No one wants to have a burst of female-perpetrated murders again, just to prove that the human spirit remains unconquerable and unpredictable. But damn, what a lusty, feisty, intriguingly unique bunch of people our ancestors were!

[...]

A New View of Chicago
This book was both interesting and intriguing.I found the history of the city fascinating.I enjoyed learning about the newspaper industry in Chicago, the riots of 1919, and the cultural views that were prevalent around the 1920's.

If You Love "Chicago" the Musical, You Must Read This
It's true, if you love the musical "Chicago", then you will be most interested in this book. Until recently, I didn't realize the play was based on real life stories. I also didn't know, before reading the book, who wrote the original play (which was not a musical.) However, if you are not a fan of or are not familiar with the play, this book might not be for you. I found it rather poorly organized. Reading it as a stand alone book, might not work. I, for one, probably would not have made it to the end. Even with my love of the play, there were times when I became bogged down in some of the extraneous details. Also, couldn't help but wonder how much of this is documented (seems most of the documentation came from newspaper articles from the twenties) and how much was made up by someone who has seen the play too many times. So, my review is mixed. Loved the subject matter; wasn't so crazy about the writing.

Colorful Account of Celebrity Murderesses
Let me say I liked the book.It is primarily the story of a novice Chicago Tribune crime reporter by the name of Maurine Watkins, who began her career covering female killers in the Windy City of 1924.Most of the book is taken up with her coverage of two major murder trials of the day in which one extremely beautiful woman named Beulah Annan killed her lover and then claimed he was trying to rape her while she was pregnant.She wasn't pregnant and she gave him the money to buy the cheap wine they drank as they made out on her sofa while her husband was at work.The other femme fatale was Belva 'Belle' Gaertner, a twice divorced socialite with important connections throughout the area due to her ex-husband, who seemed to relish the role being known as Chicago's biggest cuckold. Belva whacked her younger boyfriend in her car down the block from her house when he wanted to break it off and then claimed she couldn't remember anything about that night.Beulah and Belva both faced all male juries, who would never convict beauty regardless of the evidence, especially when they each had high powered legal help.Those of lesser beauty and/or sophistication did not always fare as well at the time.Before you think that couldn't happen today, perhaps consider the goings on with Paris, Lindsay, and Britney.

The hook to the story is that Maurine quit her crime reporting shortly after these two trials and went back to grad school at Yale, wanting to be a playwright with a Broadway hit.She fashioned her play on all the girls murder trials she covered in Chicago, even using direct trial dialog calling the play 'The Brave Little Woman', but on advice from her mentor changed the name to CHICAGO CHICAGO The Original 1927 Film Restored and as we know that was done several times on Broadway and internationally plus had several versions with the 2002 version winning the Best Picture award Chicago (Widescreen Edition).

Maurine covered several other murder stories and the book details them also and her rivalry with the other female crime reporters from other more feminist papers and derisively referred to as the 'SOB SISTERS' , but the book basically focuses on these two 'girl gunners' as they are so often called in the book.She even covers part of the Bobby Franks murder by Nathan Leopold and Dicky Loew, but was disgusted by their motivation for the crime even more so than the reasons that Beulah and Belva gave for theirs.The story is pretty much told in a a Damon Runyonesqe voice moderated by Joe Friday's close clipped accounts.It was a nice friendly read at only 304pp and it may not want to make you become a crime reporter or attend law school, but it should provide some satisfaction on how the story finally ends for both these and other women discussed in the book.It's a great book to curl up by the fire with.

Wonderfully Detailed, Thoroughly Compelling
When Douglas Perry saw the Broadway revival of Chicago in the late 1990s, he became fascinated with the factual events that inspired the show. He expected to be able to find a book about the real-life "killer dillers," but found that there wasn't one. An accomplished journalist, Perry sought to rectify the situation by producing a tome of his own.

The result is The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and The Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago (Viking, 2010), a fascinating tale of the decidedly skewed sense of justice holding court in 1920s Chicago. Along with the Jazz Age came a rash of homicides committed by females, but the city's all-male juries were reluctant to condemn women murderers, especially the pretty ones.

Much of the general public ascribed such heinous acts by women to a loosening of moral values, and an overindulgence in the cabaret lifestyle and bootleg liquor. Or perhaps it was more of a general social malaise. "Something about Chicago was destroying the feminine temperament," writes Perry, not from his own point of view, but from the perspective of the general 1920s Chicago zeitgeist.

Enter Maurine Watkins, an aspiring journalist, playwright, and moralist seeking to acquire some first-hand experience as a crime reporter. Watkins became one of the few female crime reporters with the venerable Chicago Tribune. The Tribune considered itself the "hanging paper," in contrast to the Hearst publications, which sought to wrench as much human melodrama as possible from any given tragedy -- whether or not the details were actually true -- in the shameless pursuit of newsstand sales.

Shortly after Watkins arrived in Chicago, two sensational murderesses hit the real-life Cook County jail: Belva Gaertner (think "Velma"), a stylish former cabaret singer and three-time divorcee, accused of gunning down her married lover. And Beulah Annan (think "Roxie"), the beautiful car-mechanic's wife, who allegedly shot her lover and danced over his dying body to the strains of a jazz record playing over and over on her Victrola. What follows is a scandalous tale of sexism, racism, xenophobia, yellow journalism, and miscarriages of justices.

In The Girls of Murder City, Perry's descriptions of various murder cases and the attendant media circus are heavily detailed and thoroughly compelling. I did have to wonder, however, how he got as specific as he did with the precise descriptions of what the various characters were doing and feeling. Perry provides an extensive bibliography, and one can assume that his accounts are taken from those sources, but sometimes the level of specificity strained credulity. How, for instance, could he know that Beulah Annan, when attending church services, would be "leaning her cheek against her mother's elbow during services"? Perry's bibliography lists no source for this reference, so perhaps it's meant to be fanciful projection?

In any case, Perry certainly knows how to effectively set the scene. His descriptions of the rampant mob mentality during the funeral of one of the minor murderesses was alternately heartbreaking and terrifying. Perry also demonstrates a knack for building suspense during the trials of Gaertner and Annan, wringing compelling drama out court proceedings. Perry does devote a bit too much attention to the Leopold and Loeb case, which admittedly occurred during the time period, but would seem to be outside the scope of Perry's thesis.

Based on her experiences covering the Gaertner and Annan trials, a disgusted and outraged Maurine Watkins decided to turn these travesties into the play Chicago, which ran on Broadway during the 1926-27 season, and later toured the country. The play was made into a film twice, once in 1927 under the title "Chicago," and again in 1942, this time called "Roxie Hart." Watkins was unhappy with both versions, and to her dying day refused to entertain offers of a musical treatment.

When Watkins died in the early '70s, Bob Fosse approached her estate about creating a musical with John Kander and Fred Ebb, and you probably know the story from there. Fans of the musical Chicago will notice in Perry's book elements that have survived intact from the news reports and court documents, all the way to Watkins' play and Fosse's and Ebb's libretto. This includes actual lyrics, such as "We both reached for the gun," as well as plot elements, including Roxie's fake pregnancy.

One of the reasons the musical Chicago struck a nerve upon its 1996 revival was that the show's focus took on a new relevance alongside the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, a miscarriage of justice in a very different vein, which nonetheless made household names out of Marcia Clark, Kato Kaelin, Judge Ito, Johnnie Cochran, and Mark Fuhrman. I'm frankly appalled that even now, after 15 years, I can still recall those names. That's the insidious power of the media, and Perry's book puts a fascinating perspective on how another media circus evokes its own particular place and time. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

An Outstanding Resource on the City of Chicago
As a lifelong Chicagoan, I find this work outstanding. It includes many hands-on activities for kids, such as making a mini-glacier, constructing a simulated Native American longhouse, making a replica of a pinhole camera, using a pan to make a simulated Chicago River watershed, etc.

Topics covered include the Indian past (including the Bowman site and the Blue Island culture), the early fur traders, pre-Fire Chicago, the Chicago Fire, the rapid rebuilding, the Stockyards and consequences of industrialization, various social issues, the 1968 Democratic Convention, the ascension of Harold Washington to the Office of Mayor, etc. An extensive bibliography in the back of the book allows the reader to do further research on this dynamic city.

Great condition of Chicago book
I was very pleased upon the receipt of Chicago History for Kids. It arrived promptly and was in great condition. My students and I are really nejoying its contents.

Really Great Book for both kids and adults
This is such a great book.It covers a lot of the history of Chicago that appeals both to kids as well as adults.My nephew really liked the book and had a lot of fun doing the crafts.It was refreshing to have so much fun with a book instead of trying to bear through it.Owen Hurd wrote this in such an intelligent way that it is as entertaining for adults as it is for kids. ... Read more

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Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.

The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. In this book the smoke, romance, and mystery of the Gilded Age come alive as never before.

Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.Amazon.com Review
Author Erik Larson imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves checking the book's categorization to be sure that The Devil in the White City is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Larson tells the stories of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair's construction, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. Burnham's challenge was immense. In a short period of time, he was forced to overcome the death of his partner and numerous other obstacles to construct the famous "White City" around which the fair was built. His efforts to complete the project, and the fair's incredible success, are skillfully related along with entertaining appearances by such notables as Buffalo Bill Cody, Susan B. Anthony, and Thomas Edison. The activities of the sinister Dr. Holmes, who is believed to be responsible for scores of murders around the time of the fair, are equally remarkable. He devised and erected the World's Fair Hotel, complete with crematorium and gas chamber, near the fairgrounds and used the event as well as his own charismatic personality to lure victims. Combining the stories of an architect and a killer in one book, mostly in alternating chapters, seems like an odd choice but it works. The magical appeal and horrifying dark side of 19th-century Chicago are both revealed through Larson's skillful writing. --John Moe ... Read more

Customer Reviews (940)

Kudos are well-deserved for this amazing history
I don't know what prevented me from reading this book until now. I remember hearing about it and seeing it in the bookstores and even picking it up and reading the dust jacket. I guess something just didn't click or maybe I thought reading about the behind-the-scenes drama that went into staging the 1893 Chicago Worlds Fair would be boring - especially when contrasted with the activities of a serial killer who stalked his prey as the exposition drew crowds.

Had it not been for a friend who recommneded the book, I might never had read it. Now I figure I owe that friend at least a dinner for suggesting The Devil in the White City.

This is one of those outstanding histories in which the author makes the story come alive. Many of us find it easy to be fascinated by tales of serial killers, but to get excited by, for instance, engineering specifications for the world's first Ferris wheel? Now that takes a special kind of writer. Fortunately, Erik Larson is that sort of writer. In alternating chapters he tells the story of the monumental effort by Daniel Burnham and a host of others to design and build the fair against times and odds and the tale of H.H. Holmes who operated a nearby rooming house complete with a basement examining room and crematorium.

I can't imagine more dissimilar story lines, but somehow Larson manages to make it work. Maybe it's because both Burnham and Holmes were flip sides of a young nation's reach toward modernity. The only thing the two men had in common was that they were both very, very successful.

Great Book
This TRUE Story is rivetting!! The country was changing so rapidly and moving into the 20th century.The evil of Holmes and the scope of the World's Fair planning made a terrific read.

Dotti O'

Fascinating History
I knew nothing about the Chicago World's Fair and I really have no interest in architecture, but I loved this entire book!

Wonderful read
As mentioned in many other reviews, this book alternates between the telling of two stories from the same city. At the end of each chapter, I wanted to continue the story being told, but I was also eager to continue with the story left at the end of the preceding chapter. The story of the architects of the White City was as compelling as the murder story. Upon ending the book, I was sorry it was over; I wished there was more to read.

OK
First of all to correct some reviewers ideas: This is NOT a novel. The author clearly states that. The story(ies) are couched in Chicago's debut as a major contender of big cities with the building of the great fair. At the same time, America's first known serial killer is doing his thing in proximity. The two stories have no relation to one another other than the killer's building of a hotel to house people attending the fair...especially unsuspecting young women. The historical account of the fair's development is done well. However, the author tends to bog down in the minutiae day-to-day activity that becomes quite boring. Is it really necessary to go into great detail about each and every plant, shrub, tree and soil type the landscaper bickered about with the architects building the fair? With every informative passage about how this marvel came to be, there is even more slogging through details that average readers could care less about. These segments which shows the author's research capability add little to the flow of the story unless one has a particular interest in finite matters of this sort. As the fair's story bogs down, the author then switches to the serial killer's activities seemingly in an effort to awaken the reader from their nodding off as a result of the boredom. Unexpectedly we go from a tome to writing about a killer. These two stories have no business being entwined. Yet without the serial killer portion, the book would be a drag. Once the halfway point is reached, the book begins to pick up and the story (particularly of the fair) is told as it should have been told all the way through. And fortunately the wearisome tale of the serial killer is also wrapped up more neatly and completely. Overall not a fun read and that's too bad because the story of the fair (forget the killer unless you're particularly drawn to such things)would be captivating. ... Read more

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Mapping the relationship between racial formation and sexual classification in the United States
"Slumming" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction.Professor Heap's book interview is running as cover feature here today, August 5, 2009. ... Read more

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In a book akin to There Are No Children Here, the award-winning creators of NPR's Ghetto Life 101 and Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse combine their talents with gifted, young photographer John Brooks to help readers see America the way they do--from the inside out.Amazon.com Review
This heartbreaking and inspiring book goes a long way towardfulfilling the wish one of its authors, LeAlan Jones, makes in hisepigraph: "You must learn our America as we must learn yourAmerica, so that, maybe, someday, we can become one." Based onhours and hours of taped interviews that Jones and Lloyd Newman, twohigh school students, conducted for two National Public Radiodocumentaries they prepared in 1993 and 1995, Our America is ano-holds-barred look at the devastatingly poor Chicago neighborhood inwhich they live. It's a world where elementary school students learnabout sex and drugs before they learn how to read, and where many boysdo not expect to live to be 20. You finish the book marveling not thatso many of those who people it are trapped, but wondering that anyonesurvives at all. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (23)

Our America
The book is in GREAT conidtion, looks grand new. My order arrived quick. All in all, good.

NEVER RECEIVED
I am very disapointed and frustrated with this seller.I placed my book order on March 26th and I still have not received it.I had to contact this seller by email about what the hold was and I got a reply about 2 weeks ago saying "it would arrive shortly."Once again, the weeks have passed and I still do not have the book.Nor has the seller contacted me about the extreme delay for this book order.

I would NEVER order from this seller again. Finally, I called Amazon directly and they refunded me my money.

Our America in the classroom
Our America is a book begging to be shared.It is not a quiet or introspective read.It is an in-your-face, honest tale in the voice of two young teens who are wise beyond their years.Without question, it is the best book that I teach to my freshman level English class in terms of student engagement.It challenges prior knowledge, stereotypes, and opinions and broadens a student's sense of self and the world around him.Compiled from hundreds of hours of audio footage, the book captures two radio documentaries ("Ghetto Life 101" and "Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse") paired along additional footage. LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman have honest and open voices that allow the reader to enter their world.

great book
...for use in the classroom on diversity, cultural difference, and endurance over challenges in a person's environment.

Our America
Our America, a book by two young boys from a housing project on the South Side of Chicago, is raw and beautiful all at once. It tells the story of the authors, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman, as they make their way in the Ida B. Well's housing project and tell the story of a five year-old's death from one of the buildings. The book, which was written by the boys in collaboration with author David Isay, is part journalism, part activism and part reflection. It takes a very factual look at the events of the child's death, there are transcriptions from interviews, and there are their own ramblings and editorializing about what's going on in their part of the country.

The boys become involved simply by bringing their notebooks, pens, tape recorders, cameras (and their instincts) to their own neighborhood. Interview subjects include teachers, young children, cousins, neighbors, the chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority, police officers and lawyers. Their approach is direct and simple - they ask the tough questions of the people in charge. For example, Lloyd asks the CHA chairman, "Would you want your kids growing up in these public houses?" With the help of David Isay, LeAlan and Lloyd become the chroniclers of their particular time and place.

The book's readability level is low - at maximum, it's on a fifth grade level in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure. However, the themes and issues developed in the book are far more advanced. Students of any age level in high school should be able to grasp the content and then think critically about the issues it presents around racism, poverty, gang violence, family structure and public housing. It is a book aimed not only at young people but also the adults in power, the people who make the decisions that affect the poor.

Our America is not something to pick up for light Saturday afternoon reading, or to help you forget about the troubles of the world. Instead it's a book to crack open the minds of two young boys living an all-too-common reality, and face both the issues and the joys that they see every day. Its literary value is lesser than its cultural significance, one of the few books written by young African Americans and one of the few resources for genuine information about what their lives are like.

Our America is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, 1997.
... Read more

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In forty-fve years as one of Chicago's liveliest journalists for Time, Life, and the Chicago Tribune, Jon Anderson has established a reputation for picking up on what someone once called "the beauty of the specific fact." Part "Talk of the Town," part On the Road with Charles Kuralt, Anderson's twice-a-week "City Watch" columns in the Chicago Tribune seek out interesting and unexpected people and places from the everyday life of what the author calls the "most typical American big city." In the process he discovers the joys and triumphs of ordinary people.

Anderson writes with wit and insight about those who find themselves inspired or obsessed with alternative ways of viewing life or getting through the day. Like the man who started with one light pole, then painted all the poles in his southside neighborhood. Or the founder of Cats-Are-Purrsons-Too, a nun who lives with sixty-seven cats. Or the philosopher who, with no financial success, still publishes a newsletter called "The Meaning of Life." After years of hunting down moments of everyday life that have drama and meaning, Anderson offers a book that has curious power, because all of its stories are true.

Drawn from the best of Anderson's columns, City Watch introduces readers to an eclectic mix of social clubs, subcultures, and minor celebrities. From Foraging Friends, a group of penniless ecologists who forage for wild foods in a county forest preserve, to the annual Dumpster Diver fashion show, from the Oakton Elementary School chess team to a group that calls itself Some Chicago Anarchists, readers will discover the characters and events that define Chicago's local color. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Looking for a 'feel good' read?
Jon Anderson is a national treasure. His insights are wise, his words, witty and his take on his city and its people, delightful.

Anderson Renders Chicago Life a Page Turner
Exceptionally well written, the book is both funny and compassionate, astute and compelling as it profiles some of the the people and institutions that call the third coast home.Anderson's vignettes challenge those who believe that New York City is the only REAL city in America with anyone/anything worth watching. The book will appeal to those wtih a taste for things cultural and intellectual, as it includes an interview with the late poet John Nims, as well as writing on such plances Hemingway's childhood home and the "Book Orphanage," and well as those readers drawn to the more material practices of a city, for example: "Clothes found in the Rubbish don't have to look trashy" (a Dumpster-Diving Fashion show) and "Finding the Humor in Haggis" (the dinner of the Illinois St. Andrew Society). Anderson's book provides the reader with a kind of "back-stage pass" to the city, as well as serving as a primer for how to write non-fiction that is as riveting as any novel.His strong voice and intellegence unites the peices and makes the reader want to get to know Anderson himself.I haven't enjoyed a work of non-fiction this much since "naked" by David Sedaris. ... Read more