Customer Reviews

Chicago: A Biography

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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 things'some good, some bad'have 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!

I agree with the other reviewer who commented on the book not being current in its use of the recent literature on Chicago. I was shocked at how many important books recently written about Chicago that Pacyga has overlooked. This book is alright as a very basic guide to Chicago history, but the author misses every opportunity to enrich and complicate the story. Why no use of such fine new books on Chicago by authors like Adam Green, Sudhir Venkatesh, Nicholas De Genova, Ana Ramos-Zayas, Eric Klinenberg, Andrew Diamond, Richard Lloyd, Chad Heap, Mary Patillo, etc.? Granted these are academic studies and Pacyga seems to want to attract a more general audience, but their insights would have made this a much better book.

The author says "My goal is to... tell the story of Chicago through events minor and major"

What he doesn't tell you is that he is going to bore the pants off of anyone not interested in the immigration and labor issues. After a wonderful start (the first 10% or so of the book, maybe less), detailing the first visitors to the area and providing a nice history of the area leading up to the formation of the city, the author spends at least the next 40% going on and on about labor and capital, this union and that union, this church and that church. What I thought was going to be a history of Chicago, turned into a way-too-academic study of the labor movement and cultural tensions that could have taken place in ANY city, and usually were. I finally had to quit at around the 50% mark and start reading something enjoyable. Considering the size of this book, I give myself a lot of credit for making it that far.

Another gripe I have is with the formatting of the Kindle version, all of the pictures are way too light, the contrast is very poor, and it is impossible to make out much detail at all.

Unless sociology and the topics I've mentioned above are of interest to you, you probably want to skip this book, as it is not the history or "biography" we were led to believe.

This is the kind of book that had been screaming to get written for decades. Dominic Pacyga finally wrote a history of this fair city on the lake.

This book really does read like a biography, with the author seemingly taking a backseat to describing the general history of Chicago. No one person is excessively written about. The main idea are events and significances.

Dominic Pacyga writes in the introduction "Chicago's South side plays an important role in this story, as it has in my own life..." but anyone who knows anything about Chicago history is that most of the big events happened there. The majority of its mayors came from the south side. Workers lived there, riots broke out there, and for many years action happened on the south side. But this book does not focus just on the south side.

Full of archival photographs from the Chicago Historical Society and private collections, this book is broken down into 11 chapters. From Chicago's nascent years as a swampy outpost off Lake Michigan to the 2008 presidential election of a Homeboy from the South Side, the true "action" begins in Chapter 3, "The Era of Urban Chaos" with the 1871 fire and subsequent labor and union riots later that same decade. Another good read are the following chapters: "Reacting to Chaos: Pullman, the West Side and the Loop," "The Progressive and not-so Progressive City,"The Immigrant Capital and World War I," "Daley's City" and a final chapter on 21st-century problems. If it happened in Chicago, it's in this book. But like Pacyga writes, this book is not about EVERYTHING that happened to Chicago. For that, many more pages would have to have been written.

My one complaint about this book is more of a technical comment. This is one heavy book, both figuratively and literally. Holding it in my hands tires my wrists and I find myself preferring to read this book in bed lying down. But as a former Chicagolander, I find the information in this book and the well-organized chapters to be informative and concise. Sometimes it reads like a dry, scholarly textbook. Some events seem out of order (the 1855 "beer riots" or "Lager Beer Riots" were found in the 4th chapter on chaos. But, for a general history of Chicago, no current work matches the efforts of Pacyga.

This is a book I highly recommend to anyone from this city or any urban historian. The sources used for this book alone are quite impressive.

My son is using this as a text book for his high school history class. He actually loves it and says that it is easy to read and very interesting. Fast delivery!

I read a lot of history and will be in Chicago in July. So, naturally, I went searching for a book to give me a grounding on what makes the city special, hoping to get a feel for back story, neighborhoods and people. This dull, overly scholarly tomb is a difficult read with little juicy detail to hold my interest. Worst of all, it doesn't motivate me to get excited about going to Chicago. This is an expensive book, but doesn't deliver. So, I'm looking for more interesting reads.

This book is largely a synthesis of previous literature on Chicago, which is not in itself a problem. What IS a problem is the fact that the author has failed to incorporate almost anything written within the last decade or so. This is a major weakness that limits the value of the book for anyone who is familiar with Chicago history.

Dominic Pacyga's book starts with the first colonial white men, Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, who navigated the Chicago River in the early 17th century, and covers the early days of this settlement (whose name means little onions in the language of its pre-colonial natives). Chicago became a city on the Western border of the new world, facing several Indian tribes that were at times friendly, and at other times hostile.
According to Pacyga, Chicago's boom came largely due to its location both as a frontier, therefore receiving the attention of the federal government that stationed Fort Dearborn on the mouth of the Chicago River, and as a port connecting the Atlantic to the Mississippi after the opening of the Erie Canal in New York, followed by the Illinois and Michigan Canal.
With the natives moving further west, the frontier moved with them and federal attention declined. Yet Chicago kept on booming as a transportation hub, a role that America's third-largest city still plays until today thanks to its always busy O'Hare Airport.
Pacyga argues that Chicago was to a great extent the "daughter of New York city." He highlights the international character of Chicago, and the history of its immigrant communities. Even though the book does not follow a strict chronological order, it generally flows from one decade to another.
The book covers, extensively, Chicago during the civil war, and the boom it witnessed being away from the front, but still servicing the federal government's war needs. The book also covers the events leading to and the consequences of the fire of 1871, and that of 1874.
It follows divisions amongst Chicagoans in the buildup to and during World War I, with German-Americans openly siding against the US government for entering the war on the side of Britain and France. After WWI, Chicago became the gangland - during prohibition - for the likes of Al Capone. Then like during the civil war and WWI, Chicago prospered once more during WWII by servicing the government's war needs.
After each war, Chicago's economy would slow down, pushing the city's mayors to look to Washington for assistance: Enter Mayor Richard Daley the father, whose political machine left a mark on the city and its political culture and who succeeded in nation-wide winning attention for the city. After the death of the strong Daley, who served as mayor between the mid 50s and mid 70s, divisions marred Chicago's politics to the extent that it was called "Beirut on the Lake," after the civil-war-battered capital of Lebanon.
Chicago saw the election of the first woman mayor, Jane Byrne, in 1979, and the first African-American mayor Howard Washington in 1983. In 1989, Richard Daley, the son of the legendary Daley, became mayor, a post that he occupies until today.
The book is a very entertaining read and has a lot of priceless old pictures. However, a few drawbacks should be noted.
First, Pacyga exhausts topics that might be of interest to him alone, such as the history of the labor movement in Chicago. This topic could have been covered in a briefer manner. Second, Pacyga also covers the history of construction of Chicago's neighborhoods in a manner that might be interesting to Chicagoans only. Third, the book sometimes reads like a chronicle, whereas as a historian, Pacyga should have been more selective and briefer. Fourth, it reads like a propaganda leaflet when the author prints his own wishes that Chicago win its bid to host Olympics, which Chicago actually lost. Such piece of information cannot possibly be part of history as it was still pending when the book went to print.
Overall, the book is a very good scholarly work and one wish there were many of its kind covering more American cities.