Customer Reviews

Chicagoland: City and Suburbs in the Railroad Age (Historical Studies of Urban America)

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The subtitle understates the scope of this book, which also covers Chicago and suburbs in the plank road age, the canal age and even the highway age. It links rural sites to the metropolitan region and offers critical tools for understanding the types of development that form the whole -- not only the downtown, or the city's community areas, but places that began as agricultural trade centers, satellite cities, railroad commuter suburbs and recreational towns. I was particularly please to see Keating sketch the history of picnic grounds and beer gardens that used to dot the fringes of the city, the best known of which evolved into Riverview Park.

My wife gave me this book last winter. I found it to be a boring, laborious read that included very, very little if anything about the railroads themselves -- the photo of the train on the cover and the book title itself are grossly misleading to the casual observer. The use of the words "Railroad Age" in the title describe only the time period of sprawl highlighted by the book, and not the subject matter. That's what fooled my honey into buying it.

The book is hardly entertaining -- it is a dry and cumbersome social study and written in a tough-to-decipher journalese that reads like a thesis or term paper and Viola! even contains text that is littered with superscript numerals tagged to annoying footnotes. For a railfan it is a complete waste of money. I was very mad that during its too-frequent begging sessions the local PBS station was billing it as "the perfect gift for a railfan." Hardly. Maybe the author, a college history professor, intended this as a textbook for a college-level class studying urban history, and somehow it went on to be widely distributed. However, it does come in handy. I keep it on the nightstand and opening it works better than Ambien.