26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chicago's vitality made very real by Kotlowitz' characters, December 20, 2004
This review is from: Never a City So Real: A Walk in Chicago (Crown Journeys) (Hardcover)
In Alex Kotlowitz' capable hands, Chicago, the city with the big shoulders, emerges as a metropolis with an enormous heart. Written as part of the Crown Journeys series, his "Never a City So Real" celebrates the vitality, integrity and diversity of the city through discreet narratives of its people. Kotlowitz avoids both the familiar and the cliché about Chicago, instead focusing on a set of characters who capture the "flesh and bone...the lifeblood" of the city. Possessing "passion and hustle," the relatively unheralded Chicagoans whom Kotlowitz focuses attention personify the city with their grit, honesty and succinct energy.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that the fist person the author uses to symbolize Chicago is his father-in-law, Jack Woltjen, whose talents, vision and intensity emerge as larger-than-life. Part huckster, part social egalitarian, Woltjen has the "passion and hustle" Chicago extols as virtues. Kotlowitz understands why Woltjen was "celebrated" in Chicago; his "entrepreneurial spirit and his unwavering belief in himself" not only persuades others of his worth but transforms the very city that provides him the opportunity to live. Iconoclastic (he doctors paintings of the masters), indignant (he exposes police brutality against the Black Panthers) and idealistic (he serves as an agent for the integration of segregated neighborhoods), Woltjen embodies Chicago's penchant for contradictions. Even a sculpture in his backyard captures a "beautiful juxtaposition of power and fragility."
Mocked by a "New Yorker" columnist as "the Second City," Chicago unabashedly refused offense. Eventually, the city's fabled comedy troupe adopts the name. Its geographic location resulted in Chicago's emergence as a center of commerce and a magnet for the "cascade of immigrant groups" which now call it home. Its physical insularity, separated from self-aggrandizing New York and the glitz of Los Angeles by half a continent, gives Chicago its own opportunity for self-definition, creation and perpetuation.
Kotlowitz consciously selects artists who are either underappreciated or invisible; he portrays men and women who open not only businesses but their hearts to those who are barely getting by. Even his constant reference to Nelson Algren, "himself a bar of discordant notes," reminds us that Chicago often does not recognize its own greatness. It is "an imperfect place," but "Chicago is America's city; it dreams America's dream." We learn of "Oil Can" Eddie Sadlowski, union man who still inspires with his own life's history. We dine with Millie Wortham and Brenda Stephenson, upbeat and optimistic despite working with the most desperate and destitute of Chicago's poor. We learn to bow our own heads down in the presence of the irascible but compassionate Ramazan Celikoski, who runs a hole-in-the-wall diner where "the world intersects...on the city's northwest side."
Visitors to Chicago will still clutch their maps and travelogues. Those who want to understand the city will cherish Alex Kotlowitz' "Never a City So Real." This slim, beautifully written description of Chicago permits its readers not only to understand the city but to love it as well.
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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A New Classic, January 23, 2005
This review is from: Never a City So Real: A Walk in Chicago (Crown Journeys) (Hardcover)
I have spent the better part of two decades in Chicago. I love this city and have explored its neighborhoods and history. When I moved here from Indiana as I boy, my world opened up and the city appeared to offer almost unlimited possibilities. Now I have lived in and visited other cities and can compare Chicago to NYC, Paris, London, Copenhagen, Prague, Seoul, SF, LA, Singapore, etc. Yet I've never been able to give visitors from other places a complete and accurate picture of what makes this city so special and unique.
This book perfectly captures the essence of Chicago without clichés, generalizations or sentimentality. It captures the entrepreneurial spirit that led to reversing the flow of a major river, the creation of retail giants and the establishment of one of the greatest civic projects of recent times (Millennium Park). It explores the triumphs of one of the most vibrant and varied immigrant communities in the world without ignoring brutal patterns of discrimination and inequality.
It does all of this in a relatively small number of pages with what seems like an effortless ability to swing from laugh-out-loud humor to deep sadness and back again. The only regret that I have about this book is that I finished it in one sitting and wanted it to keep going.
The author attempted to create a portrait of Chicago in the year 2004 and achieved something of even broader and more significant meaning. The people are so vivid and wonderful that the book transcends the categories of biography, travel, anthropology, etc and should be read by because it is simply a timeless and extremely entertaining story.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Walk in Chicago: Never a City So Real, March 6, 2006
This review is from: Never a City So Real: A Walk in Chicago (Crown Journeys) (Hardcover)
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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