 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com Chicago has been called by many names. Nelson Algren declared it “A City on the Make.” Carl Sandburg dubbed it the “City of Big Shoulders.” Upton Sinclair christened it “The Jungle,” while New Yorkers, naturally, pronounced it “the Second City.” At last there is a book for all of us, whatever we choose to call Chicago. Here, historian Dominic Pacyga gives his hometown the magisterial biography it has long deserved. Chicago traces the city’s storied past, from the explorations of Joliet and Marquette in 1673 to the new wave of urban pioneers today. The city’s great industrialists, reformers, and politicians—and, indeed, the many not-so-great and downright notorious—animate this book, from Al Capone and Jane Addams to Mayor Richard J. Daley and President Barack Obama. But what distinguishes this book from the many others on the subject is its author’s uncommon ability to illuminate the lives of Chicago’s ordinary people. Born and raised in Back of the Yards on Chicago’s southwest side, Pacyga spent his college years working at the Union Stock Yards. Chicago, therefore, gives voice to the city’s steelyard workers and kill floor operators, mapping the neighborhoods distinguished not by Louis Sullivan masterworks, but by bungalows and corner taverns. And their stories come alive through an extensive selection of evocative illustrations culled from major institutional archives, local historical societies, and the author’s personal collection. Filled with the city’s one-of-a-kind characters and all of its defining moments, Chicago: A Biography is as big and boisterous as its namesake—and as ambitious as the men and women who built it. |
Average Customer Rating:  A One-Volume Masterpiece Chicago is, and has been since its founding, a community of character and characters. Dominic Pacyga's wonderful Chicago: A Biography provides a rich narrative that exemplifies this statement as he takes us through the story of a ruined fort, a frontier town, a city on the make, and the establishment of a global metropolis. Always a hub of transportation and commerce, Chicago became a technological and financial center, a manufacturing behemoth, and the place where much of modern architecture was founded and nurtured. Pacyga narrates these triumphs superbly; yet he never underplays the racism and labor strife that shadowed so much of the city's business and artistic achievement.
Anyone who has spent a little time in Chicago knows that its culture is unique, defined by a great community of the arts, a sense of comedy all its own, and a tremendous number of ethnic groups keeping their diversity alive while contributing mightily to the community as a whole. Chicago didn't invent jazz but it gave it a second home and helped a large number of its most important musicians flourish. It has its own culture of cuisine, including the best pizza in the world; a proud and fierce, if not always triumphant, sports tradition; great universities, including one that, for better or worse, completed the fundamental science that ushered in the nuclear age. Politically, there's no place like Chicago. It has a form of government balancing the interests of the people, the Party, the State, big business, the church, and perhaps from time to time the interests of organized crime. Colorful is too colorless a word to describe this unique dynamic, but Pacyga does as good a job as anyone in bringing these broad interests into focus.
Great thingssome good, some badhave happened in Chicago. Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president here and then shepherded the nation through the dark hours required to end slavery. The Haymarket Riots occurred here as did the subsequent executions. Most of the police who were killed died from their comrades' bullets. Chicago was the site of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the demonstrations that helped to turn around American perceptions about the war in Vietnam. For a few days the war, in attenuated form, came home to America. Recently, Chicago provided the political base that launched the first man of color into the White House and gave hope to millions and millions of people in the U. S. and around the world.
If you have any personal or professional connection to Chicago, read this book. You'll be better informed and feel more connected to the de facto capital of the American Midwest. If you are a member of the Chicago Diaspora, curling your toes by the pool in some Sunbelt city, read this book. Come home again at least in memory to the story that in so many ways is your story and the story of your family.
Dominic Pacyga has created a one-volume masterpiece anyone can enjoy. He grew up in this city. He even worked as a night-shift wrangler in the Stockyards during that institution's last years. Pacyga has studied Chicago, walked it, talked it, and lived it his whole life. When you read this book, you are reading a narrative only a connoisseur of lived experience could create. That narrative is steeped in the passionate lives that have made Chicago great. Read this book!
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