Illinois Books

This is an excellent booklet on fossil hunting. It gives you a background on fossils, tips on where to look for fossils, and the tools that will be needed. The booklet then gives you information on common Illinois fossils via text and pictures.

I would recommend this booklet to anyone interested in fossil hunting.

This book was a great reading experience for me. Part of my job is to teach electric utility system operators. I always try to give them some background in the history of the business and how their job evolved through the years. Professor Platt used Commonwealth Edison and Chicago for his model of how electricity changed life in America. Chicago was on the cutting edge more so than other cities because of the Great Fire of 1871. The downtown area had to be totally rebuilt so this offered an open-field opportunity to try the new electric technology.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in American urban development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though the book focuses on Chicago, the same pattern would hold true for other large American cities. Professor Platt has done an outstanding job of research. This is a treasure trove of charts, graphs and other data that show how the industry grew from several independent lighting companies competing against each other in the 1880s, into the beginning of an interconnected super-power system by the 1920s.

The author provides a lot of material on Samuel Insull, the unsung hero of the business. Insull was the Henry Ford of electric power mass-production. He had the vision and financial genius to set up the model for the industry that existed until the 1990s when deregulation came around. It is largely thanks to Insull that we have the system we take for granted today. Insull was involved in scandal late in life. He made powerful political enemies by donating huge sums of money to favorable candidates, in one case over $125,000 to a U.S. Senator-elect from Illinois. This would-be senator was denied his seat in the Senate when it was revealed how Insull had helped him get elected. Insull was eventually indicted for mail fraud for which he was acquitted, but not before it ruined him financially. One cannot study the history of the electric utility business without studying Insull.

The book is not a dry read by any means. The writing is brisk and moves at a good pace. Because of my unique interest in ComEd history, I was constantly pausing to make notes in the margins or to just reflect on how certain installations still existing today got their start. I'm sure I'll be referring to this book many times to research questions about the history of the business.

The last sentence of the book summarizes the excellent thrust of this book. "Elizabeth can not be separated from the legend that she helped create." This book is the companion to the traveling exhibit on Elizabeth I that I was not fortunate to see, but stands on it's own merits.

There has been a plethora of books on Elizabeth I; unfortunately many of them are just chronological listings of events or the author has an agenda or preconceived thesis. This book is stellar in avoiding the usual approach. It is thematic. This book concentrates on the effects of Elizabeth's surroundings on her, and her effect on her surroundings. There two very good reasoned chapters on the religion and sexuality of Elizabeth. The book was meticulously researched and documented and used the figures in the book to visually support the book's themes. A very perceptive, albeit brief, section analyzes how Elizabeth I has been portrayed in cinema. The writing is concise and fluid and to the point.

I give a book on the Elizabethan era or Elizabethan/Shakespeare literature to my family every year as gifts. This is probably the finest.

This is the best overview of the state of the literature on Emerson. It gracefully carries the reader from the initial evaluations of Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Santayana, and John Dewey, through the development of what had become the standard view represented by Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) and Stephen Whicher's Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, (1953) to the contemporary 'detranscendentalizing' movement that reads Emerson "after Nietzsche, after Wittgenstein" as Stanley Cavell puts it. The book aims in part to counter the mid-century views that stressed the moral idealism and 'naive' optimism that made some experience reading Emerson's Essays as akin to taking "happiness pills" (Kennith Burke).

Lopez continues a revaluation of Emerson's "demanding optimism" that had its first roots in Newton Arvin's compensatory essay "The House of Pain: Emerson and the Tragic Sense." (Hudson Review, Vol. XII, No. 1, Spring 1959) Lopez describes a "New Emerson," like the "New Nietzsche" that has emerged since Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) Jacques Derrida's "Differance" (1968) "The Ends of Man" (1972) and Tracy Strong's Friederich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (1975).

Lopez's book is an excellent corrective to the conventional wisdom and what has nearly become the standard interpretation of Emerson, although Lopez argues forcefully that no reading of Emerson has established itself as the accepted standard view. Emerson is distinguished from other major American writers of his time such as Poe, Whitman and Melvill precisely on the lack of a consensus as to what his main writings mean. This is in part because scholars have been reluctant to take what Emerson says in his major published works at face value. The typical response to his 'hard sayings' is to attribute the hyperbolic style and his exuberance and enthusiasm. But Lopez shows more than that Emerson expresses ideas in line with the intellectual and philosophical milieux of the ninetieth century. He also shows that Emerson's ironies, aphorisms, peculiar voicing of claims and subtle forms of self-erasure warrant a view of his work as significantly more 'modern' or even 'post-modern' than has been allowed

Empowerment zones represent the latest in a series of market-centered federal efforts to revitalize cities by promoting economic competitiveness, attracting investment capital, and creating a favorable "business climate." Like the Enterprise Zone program of the Reagan-Bush years, the Clinton-Gore Empowerment Zone initiative embraces a supply-side policy approach that provides economic incentives to the private sector to invest in central city communities. However, under Clinton-Gore, economic incentives are targeted to resident-based 11 empowerment zones" rather than to industry-based businesses, as in the Reagan-Bush initiative. Whereas the Reagan-Bush program included no direct, citizen-based participation, a hallmark of the Clinton-Gore initiative is the creation of partnerships among government, business, and community organizations to encourage and sustain grassroots participation in policy making and implementation.

Empowerment in Chicago draws upon the research of a diverse group of scholars, graduate students, community leaders, and local activists involved with the National Empowerment Zone Action Research Project at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and DePaul University. The volume contains eight essays, and its contributors bring diverse methods and data to examine Chicago's experience in the early stages of the implementation of the Empowerment Zone (EZ) legislation (from December 1994 through 1996). Scholars looking for a broad overview of the effects of Empowerment Zones on business growth and investment, grassroots participation, and poverty alleviation will find much to like about this book.

The contributors use a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, including participant observation, semi-structured in-depth interviews, focus groups, content analysis of government reports, and statistical analysis of census and survey data. In the opening chapter, Michael Bennett, Noah Temaner Jenkins, and Cedric Herring introduce and develop an inductive methodology--critical events analysis--to understand citizens' participation in the EZ process as well as to examine and interpret data from specific events that predispose subsequent actions to follow identifiable lines. This analysis begins with a specific event or development and works backward in time to identify the important actions, decisions, and previous events that led up to it. Sociologists will recognize this method as a variant of path dependency used in political and historical sociology. Bennett, Jenkins, and Herring argue that critical events analysis can be used to "inform discussions about the content of authentic democracy and how forms of citizen participation potentially influence who gains what from the Empowerment Zone process" (p. 9). The method remains implicit throughout the book, and it is useful for understanding citizen participation in the EZ process.

The book succeeds in its major goals. The contributors build eclectically on several analytic perspectives to examine the implementation of the EZ initiative, at the same time interrogating the term "empowerment," using it as a normative standard for evaluating the relative success of the program. For the contributors, empowerment "depends on the success of requirements for citizen participation and on attempts to ,reinvent' government" (p. 7). Urban economic development means little, according to the editors and authors, if there is no direct participation of urban residents in the economic and political decision making that affects their lives. Chapter 2, by Doug Gills and Wanda White, is particularly strong in this regard. According to Gills and White, access to resources through formal organizations and informal networks is a requisite for initiating and sustaining grassroots participation (pp. 57-59). Indeed, as these contributors document, Chicago city officials have tended to restrict citizen access to decision making and have been reluctant to accept the notion of government-business-community partnerships in the EZ process. As the authors point out, the "fiercest battles have not been about fashioning a vision of change, but about implementing that vision into the practice of governance and into decisions about resource allocation" (pp. 64-65). Thus, it comes as no surprise that the city of Chicago has failed to acknowledge community structures in the formal makeup of Empowerment Zone governance.

Whereas Gills and White imply that EZ program can succeed with local government reform and the cultivation and development of resource networks, Cedric Herring (Chapter 3) and Nikolas Theodore (Chapter 7) are more pessimistic, arguing that the program is shot through with inconsistencies and opposing conditions. On one hand, to qualify for designation as an empowerment zone an area must exhibit high poverty, high unemployment, and other social problems-characteristics typically associated with socially and spatially isolated minority communities. On the other hand, residents living in the empowerment zone must participate directly in the policy making process to keep receiving federal money and economic incentives. As Cedric Herring points out, this expectation is based on a "one size fits all" model by which inner-city residents can forge a collective awareness of social problems and work together toward common objectives. Thus, rather than addressing the structural causes of urban social problems, the EZ legislation assumes that high levels of local political activism and collective action can combat poverty and solve the problems of distressed inner-city communities. As the chapters by Herring and Theodore point out, while political empowerment can address some urban problems, it cannot, by itself, remedy the problems of continuing racial residential segregation, minority poverty concentration, and urban disinvestment-complex and interrelated problems that are national in their scope and effect. The lesson here, according to the contributors, is that policies geared toward economic development, including the EZ program, must reject the false dichotomy between "empowerment" and urban "development." Urban areas need both kinds of targeted programs to help residents in their bottom-up efforts to revitalize their communities.

The advantage of the volume is that it provides a critical analysis of the assumptions and aims of the EZ program. However, some historical background and comparative insights would have helped. Nevertheless, Empowerment in Chicago is an informative and well-written book that will appeal to a general audience as well as urban planners and policy analysts interested in urban revitalization strategies and community organizing.

The Era Of Education: The Presidents And The Schools 1965-2001 by Lawrence J. McAndrews (Professor of History, St. Norbert College) is a close study of educational policy under presidents from Lyndon Johnson through Bill Clinton, especially concentrating on the issues of public school aid, private (particularly Catholic) school aid, and school desegregation, with concern as to the proper role of the federal government in education. Research of records from presidential and other archives, as well as interviews with key players in governmental policy have allowed McAndrews to meticulously reconstruct the evolution of internal debates, negotiations, decisions, and non-decisions over the decades. The result is an exhaustively detailed history, and absolute "must-read" for any parent, educator, or political professional, concerned about the future of local and national educational policy. Highly recommended.

With great anticipation, I have awaited the release of this book. Pirtle recounts the true story of Susan "Sukey" Richardson's escape to freedom using the Underground Railroad. Through letters that had been hidden away for more than a century, Pirtle weaves us in and out of the life of one of Sukey's most sympathetic supporters, William Hayes. Through this non-fiction account we learn of the hardships all Americans faced during the mid-19th century. We're told of Sukey, her master, and those brave men and women who risked their lives, reputations, and personal finances to help others make their way to freedom. Equally fascinating is the courtroom drama between Sukey's master and those who allegedly helped the young woman in her run to freedom.

If you're a US history enthusiast, a fan of Illinois history, an Underground Railroad aficionado, a Civil War buff, or just a casual reader who's interested in a captivating story...you'll be sure to enjoy this tome. I highly recommend it.

And...if you're interested in other stories related to Southern Illinois history, I urge you to try to get hold of Pirtle's other two books: "Shining Moments" and "Where Illinois Began: A Pictorial History of Randolph County."

I read this book while doing a presentation on CA at university, having got interested through the Game of Life. It's a marvellous summary of the work of people like John Von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam and although dated (I don't think it even had details of E F Codd's work) it must be an essential read for anyone interested in CA.

This is a very well written, well organized and interesting book about the ethnic history of Chicago. Starting from the early settlers, the authors write about the history of different ethnic groups such as Poles, Ukranians, Germans, Chinese, Japanese and Greeks among others. Most, if not all chapters are written by someone from the ethnic group in question, and each chapter seems to be very well researched. I admire the neutral and scientific writing style. In other words, there is no hint of side taking, even when the authors describe recent and painful conflicts between ethnic groups. This is just how a research book should be.

The book is easy to read, and I found it very illuminating. It is a very good source of information about Chicago. The book traces the history of different ethnic groups in Chicago through the 19th and 20th century, their struggles for adaptation, their neighborhoods, occupations, and life styles. After reading the book, I feel I appreciate the diversity of this great city even more. I learned many things I did not know about this city from this book, and I keep looking for the neighborhoods and landmarks mentioned in the book with interest.

The book is also a very good source of reliable information about American history in general, because the immigration patterns in Chicago and the process of adaptation of the immigrants to American life occured in somewhat similar ways to other large cities, and in several chapters, the authors discuss the immigration of a certain ethnic group to the USA in general, as well as to Chicago in particular.

Finally, I found the book very helpful in terms of information about recent world history. The reasons that led the ethnic groups in question to immigrate to USA and Chicago (the push factors) are shortly discussed in each chapter, and this gives the reader an overall idea about the recent history of each of the nations in question.

The editors of the book did a very good job in ensuring continuity across chapters. Even though each chapter is written by a different author, I did not feel any gaps between chapters, and did not think there were any problems of continuity.

This looked like a thick book with 600+ pages, but I finished it in a few weeks, and I think this was time well spent.

Very, very useful discography to help figure out which pre-war discs are truly ethnic, rural material. A "must-have."