Sweet home Chicago. . .

• Bitter Fruit : Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931-1991 (William J. Grimshaw)
  Grimshaw offers an insider's chronicle of the tangled relationship between the black community and the Chicago Democratic machine from its Great Depression origins to 1991.

  

• American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (Adam Cohen et al.)
  A complete examination of the life of Chicago’s legendary mayor (1902-1976), which dissects the complicated legacy of a poor-boy-made-good.

• Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Eric Klinenberg)
  Chicago has always been a city of climactic extremes. But the heatwave of 1995 was something else: hundreds of people, mainly poor, died of heat-related illnesses. The author, a sociology professor at Northwestern University, blames inequality and alleges a cover-up.

• Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (William Cronon)
  In a fresh approach that links urban and frontier history, Cronon explores the relationship between Chicago, 1848-1893, and the entire West, tracing the path between an urban market and the natural systems that supply it.

• The Man With the Golden Arm (Nelson Algren)
  Considered Algren's finest work, it recounts one man's self-destruction in Chicago's Polish ghetto. The novel's protagonist, Frankie Machine, remains a tragic American hero half a century after Algren created this gritty and relentlessly dark tale of modern urban society.

  

• Deep Blues (Robert Palmer)
  Chicago’s jazz and blues scene is legendary (the city’s industrial base made it a magnet for southern blacks moving north). Read all about it in Palmer’s engaging rundown of movers and shakers.

• One More Time (Mike Royko)
  The 100 best Chicago Tribune columns from the revered and widely syndicated champion of the "little guy." The book includes an introduction by Studs Terkel, a fellow luminary.

• Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Eric Schlosser)
  This searing critique of the fast-food industry by an award-winning investigative journalist includes a damning examination of Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Read it in tandem with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

• The Jungle (Upton Sinclair)
  This novelistic account of Chicago’s meatpacking industry in the early 20th century, as experienced by eastern European immigrants, won its author a place among the ranks of the original muckrackers. The public outcry it inspired provoked the passage of The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

• The Chicago River (David Solzman)
  A thorough examination of the city’s winding waterway, in historical and environmental terms.

  

• Division Street: America (Studs Terkel)
  First published in 1967, this look at 20th-century urban life, with Chicago as the case-study, sealed Terkel's reputation as America’s best-known oral historian.

• Plays One (David Mamet)
  This volume of early plays by the prolific Chicago-born writer and film director includes "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" and "American Buffalo."

• Lost Chicago (David Garrard Lowe)
  Chicago’s rich architectural history is brought to life in this collection of rare photos.

To David's Chicago

Last Modified 11 February 2005