Avg. Customer Rating:(based on 8 reviews) Sales Rank: 148295 Category: Book
Author:Alex Kotlowitz Publisher:Crown Studio:Crown Manufacturer:Crown Label:Crown Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published) Media: Hardcover Number Of Items: 1 Pages: 160 Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1 Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 4.7 x 0.8
Product Description The acclaimed author of There Are No Children Here takes us into the heart of Chicago by introducing us to some of the city?s most interesting, if not always celebrated, people.
Chicago is one of America?s most iconic, historic, and fascinating cities, as well as a major travel destination. For Alex Kotlowitz, an accidental Chicagoan, it is the perfect perch from which to peer into America?s heart. It?s a place, as one historian has said, of ?messy vitalities,? a stew of contradictions: coarse yet gentle, idealistic yet restrained, grappling with its promise, alternately sure and unsure of itself.
Chicago, like America, is a kind of refuge for outsiders. It?s probably why Alex Kotlowitz found comfort there. He?s drawn to people on the outside who are trying to clean up?or at least make sense of?the mess on the inside. Perspective doesn?t come easy if you?re standing in the center. As with There Are No Children Here, Never a City So Real is not so much a tour of a place as a chronicle of its soul, its lifeblood. It is a tour of the people of Chicago, who have been the author?s guides into this city?s?and in a broader sense, this country?s?heart.
Readable and interesting, but one-sided and politically skewed February 20, 2008 Alex Kotlowitz's "There Are No Children Here" is rightly held up as one of the greatest works of journalistic nonfiction of the last twenty-five years. His "Never a City So Real," though, falls somewhat flat precisely because he tries to write an anecdotal series of re-creations of "Children."
This book is readable and even interesting, but fails at introducing its reader to much of Chicago as a city. It contains almost no history and focuses solely on poorer, fringe neighborhoods while neglecting many more central (and historically important) points of interest. An interesting diversion, but one that is too skewed by Kotlowitz's politics to serve as anything more than that.
Readable & Revealing July 30, 2007 Alex Kotlowicz mostly succeeds with this slice-of-life look at Chicago's grittier side. He begins by interviewing Ed Sadlowski, former steelworker and union official living on the southeast side where most of the mills have shuttered. Equally interesting was the view from Edna's restaurant in the west side ghetto where there are few businesses other than liquor stores. We also hear from an artist that paints murals for residents in public housing, a neighborhood of recent immigrants from many lands, a gadfly that fights corruption in the border suburb of Cicero (former headquarters of Al Capone), and several others. In many ways the author captures the city's feel, and allows readers to see how Chicago has evolved into a mostly post-industrial city, yet one where poverty and fear of minorities and violence remain touchstones for some.
Oddly the author, who moved here 20 years ago from New York City, alternates praise with suggestions that the most successful see Chicago as unlovely and leave. In reality, most stay put in middle-class neighborhoods (or suburbs), acknowledging the city's problems, but prideful of our vibrant economy, superb lakefront, museums, parks, skyline, and universities - Chicago leads the USA in Nobel Prize winners. Despite small flaws, this is a revealing, concise, readable book.
Horrible April 27, 2007 1 out of 10 found this review helpful
This waste of ink, paper, and time isn't even useful as a doorstop. This book is not about Chicago, it is about the author's politics (which is communism disguised as liberalism.)
Early in the book, the author claims that the owners of Chicago steel companies got complacent and forgot how to compete. The fact of the matter is that meeting the demands of the unions priced the steel much higher than the units arriving from East Europe and Asia. This is the first of so many instances that the author proves he is uninformed. He is also inaccurate in geography, history, and one funny instance of a math goof.
Don't waste your time.
It was fine February 10, 2007 0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Sometimes a book is "fine". This is one such book. I'd recommend it, but not very very strongly.
A Walk in Chicago: Never a City So Real March 6, 2006 5 out of 6 found this review helpful
A Walk in Chicago: Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz Crown Journeys, Crown: New York 2004 159 pp. Hardcover
The "Big Onion" is better than the "Big Apple" in many ways, and Alex Kotlowitz, a former New Yorker who has made Chicago his home for over twenty years, sets out to prove how great and diverse his adopted city really is. As he writes in his introduction, "Chicago is a place of passion and hustle...a place eternally in transition, always finding yet another way to think of itself, a city never satisfied."
But this is not the Chicago of the Art Institute, of Michigan Avenue, of Water Tower Place, or the Magnificent Mile. This is the Chicago of the South Side housing projects, the South East's closed steel mills, of Division Street and the 26th Street Criminal Court. It is the Chicago of the resilient and dedicated people who make their own neighborhoods places that come to life with positive energy and social change.
In Kotlowitz's book you meet "Oil Can Eddie," AKA, Ed Sadlowski, the retired steelworker who climbed the ranks of union leadership and "...who loves his city's opera, its museums, and its baseball teams..." You read about how this steelworker went from the steel furnace to the cover of Time Magazine, and how the union that he organized created a better life for its workers, and how that working life is now in peril. The 64-year old Sadlowski takes Kotlowitz on a city tour in his beat-up "Crown Vic" to places off the tourist map, places like Pinkerton's gravesite and the Calumet Riverfront where the strikers once clashed with police.
You get to lunch at Manny's Jewish Deli just south of the Loop, the hangout for political bosses and pit stop for every major politician who swings through Chicago. Then it's off to Edna's soul food restaurant with his two social worker friends, Millie and Brenda. As they sit down to eat, we get to overhear their conversation as if we were sitting in the next booth. This lets the reader eavesdrop on some of the problems that plague this city, from gangs in public housing to unwed teenage mothers. But in Kotlowitz's hands, the city is brought to life through the eyes of Millie and Brenda. And we get to meet Edna, sixty-six years old, who in the middle of taking lunch orders hears gunshots and runs out onto the street to shoo away the gang kids with her apron.
We meet Milton Reed, the lanky street artist who paints provocative murals for the residents of the projects, and we tag along while Milton sets up his sketch pad on the street corner so that he can sketch portraits of parade watchers as the Bud Billiken Parade winds its way through the city's South Side, a still racially divided part of Chicago.
Next we meet the embodiment of Sandburg's "City of Big Shoulders" in the form of a sturdily built six-foot female attorney, Andrea Lyon, who once while being attacked for her bag, punched her mugger so hard she broke his jaw. This imposing former public defender now works as a De Paul law professor and takes on some of the city's toughest criminal cases. It's a riveting account of the goings-on in this huge criminal beehive of a courthouse, and how Andrea heats up the proceedings.
And we also meet a painter who paints the derelicts and prostitutes on Division Street near Wicker Park, and who has sold his work for many thousands of dollars in Paris, but who remains unknown in his own city. Robert Guinan paints the side of the city that is fast becoming gentrified out of existence and we hear him lament that the city is trying to homogenize itself. Guinan takes us into his studio and down to the jazz clubs like the HotHouse and the Velvet Lounge where he has painted the famous Blues musicians that have made Chicago legendary.
We even go outside the city limits to Cicero, a suburb made infamous by Al Capone, to meet Dave Boyle, political gadfly and social activist, who runs a legal clinic for Cicero's disenfranchised. In Boyle's account, we learn how he foiled the town's corrupt politicians by exposing them to the truth of their actions when he tried to have illegal liquor licenses revoked.
And finally, near the end of our tour in the city's northwest side at GT's Diner, a diner taken over by an Albanian immigrant who hands out free coffee and food to the Mexican day laborers who congregate in the parking lot outside his business, we read how he grumbles about the ones who don't pay and who sit all day in his booths, but we also learn why he sympathizes because as a child in Albania he learned from his parents that you have to help others.
We read about how the city keeps changing in Kotlowitz's book as new immigrants arrive and change old neighborhoods, but we learn how much they add to the life of this great city. Wherever Kotlowitz takes us, we learn to love "his Chicago" and the very real people he introduces us to. These are the people that you would love to meet and sit down with in a bar to talk to for hours. Fortunately, Kotlowitz has done the sitting for us, taking it all down in this brilliant book.
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