Illinois Books

An Early Encounter with Tomorrow won the 1998 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society. From the Society's press release, this book meets "the highest standards of imaginative scholarship", "makes available much new information", and "interpretations cross disciplinary lines and point the way to new approaches." "Arnold Lewis demonstrates and analyzes the cultural importance of the Columbian Exposition and of the skyscrapers in Chicago's Loop....The major theme is Chicago's international importance in the transformation of Western culture at the end of the 19th century. Europeans who endtered the Loop walked int a real future, not a vision of one. Exhilarated or disquieted, they acknowledged Chicago's central district as the 'Museum of the present.' The minor theme is the usefulness for historians to study the encounter between the established and the new, the collision between old world assumptions and new world realities, not only in the Loop but also in the Columbian Exposition." From Meredith Clausen's April 1998 review in the American Historical Review, "Carefully researched, well-documented, clearly organized, and beautifully written, Lewis's book should be required reading for anyone in the field of American history, cultural studies, and women's studies as well as architectural history. It is cultural history at its best."

If you love architecture and want to understand the birth of modernism and tall buildings in America, and uniqueness of the Chicago school of architecture -- the inspiration for generations of American architects including Sullivan's student Frank Lloyd Wright -- you have to have this book. It is a gorgeous work of art, the design of the book is so simple and compelling, the large plate photographs do justice to both the beauty and ingenuity of the architecture as well as the architectural photography. For lovers of art books, architecture, black and white photographs, for those who want to own a book as a piece of art, this is a wise investment. I know I treasure it -- reading it is like taking a journey to the past, one in which American architects still dared to dream.

Now in a revised and updated second edition, Camille Stagg's The Eclectic Gourmet Guide To Chicago is a reliable and informative guide to more than two hundred of Chicago's top restaurants. Rated and ranked, each restaurant receives a complete, one-page, in-depth description of its best dishes, atmosphere and service. The restaurants are indexed by cuisine, quality, value, and location, with maps divided by geographic zone to locate the restaurants for easy planning by locals or out-of-towners. All pertinent information is provided including hours, reservation, credit card, dress, and parking information. Of special value is the "best picks" section for everything from burgers to desserts to delis. If you are going to be spending time in Chicago, get hold of a copy of Camille Stagg's The Eclectic Gourmet Guide To Chicago to make culinary and dining memories you won't soon forget.

Reynolds, a Texan, simply read what Southern newspapers were writing in the final year or so before the war began. Through thousands of articles in hundreds of papers, Reynolds showed that southern editors talked big about remaining in the union, provided northerners suppressed abolitionism and refrained from electing anyone who favored hindering the expansion of slavery into newly-acquired western territories. Once they realized that the Republican Party came to represent much of northern opinion, southerners felt their slave-based economy and lifestyle was threatened. Led by South Carolina--then a black-majority state--the south seceded rather than risk losing the slave-based society. This book takes the post-war revisionism--that the secession was about tariffs and constitutional abstractions and not slavery--and exposes it all as bunk. As this book shows through the multitude of newspapers and political speeches of the time--southern voices all--the south was obsessed with slavery, to the point of fetishism. Editors thought nothing of threatening the lives of those who disagreed with their hard-line, abolition-hating views. Many called for the lynching of suspected abolitionists, which is exactly what happened repeatedly during the summer of 1860. Reynolds argues at the end that editors contributed to the enthusiasm for disunion in the south. I might argue with that. I believe the editors, most of whom were desperate for a paying readership, simply went with the (white) mood of the times. Like their political representatives, those who were located in areas with many slaves favored secession, and those in areas with few slaves (western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina) were either tepid supporters or outright opponents of secession. Much as they would like to, modern southern partisans cannot argue with the words--and deeds--of their forbears. It needs to be said bluntly and without ambiguity--had there been no slavery, there would have been no mass secession and no war. The South said as much in its own words, on paper, thousands of times over. Yes, there was tremendous Northern hypocrisy and cruelty in the way the North waged war. But the sins of your enemies does not absolve you of your own wickedness. Something to remember before flying the Confederate flag in full view of black Americans. This book needs to be required reading in all journalism schools.

Because I am not a French historian, I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book! Sarah Curtis has produced a fascinating look at the inner workings of Catholic education in France after the Revolution. Historians will, of course, rejoice in this book, but anyone who is the product of "old style" Catholic education will also find much here that is valuable and surprising. For example, Curtis quotes the 1896 annual report of the Comite des Ecoles Libres of Lyon: "It is well to know spelling and arithmetic, but it less useful to know how to spell words than to know how one must live." The impact of this philosophy, Curtis convincingly demonstrates, left an enduring imprint on French education and culture. Curtis's lively prose adds to the book's overall appeal.

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.