Illinois Books

Reviewed by Kim Peterson for Reader Views (3/06)

The Calumet River wanders through northwest Indiana and northeast Illinois. More than 90 miles long, the river's watershed includes nearly 600 square miles. This complex water system has both influenced human lifestyle and been affected by mankind's choices.

Ogorek begins her account of the Calumet River before bridges spanned the water. The Potawatomi and Miami Indians patterned their lives after the seasons along the meandering river. Early settlers passed through believing the land unsuitable for farming. But in the early to mid-1800s, people pioneered the area, building log cabins and houses. They platted small towns and established businesses. Soon movable and high-clearance bridges spanned the navigable waters of the Calumet. Hunting and fishing, sugaring and farming provided food and marketable goods.

After the Civil War, industry boomed along the banks. Steel mills, produce processing factories, and refineries provided jobs. Railroad bridges crossed the waters to carry goods to and from Chicago. The river's waters were redirected into ditches and channels and harbors as even shipyards prospered. The industrial growth and wealth led to urbanization and highway systems that again reshaped the river's path. Pollution and flooding became major issues.

Despite the manmade woes plaguing the Calumet River, people still used it for entertainment and recreation. Past and current clean-up and preservation efforts protect the river culture while maintaining a thriving waterway.

As a graduate student I traveled from South Bend, Indiana, to Wheaton, Illinois, regularly. In the book, I recognized many names like Burns Harbor and Cal-Sag Channel, which served as landmarks telling me how many miles until I reached home. I enjoyed viewing the historical pictures and drawings of the Calumet River region.

Ogorek's book is part of the "Images of America" series and an important documentation of the history and development of the Calumet River. She presents the past as a collection of pictures with lengthy captions providing easy and interesting reading. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys history or the environment. School libraries of the northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana regions would also benefit.

As a professional historical researcher studying African-American migration and urbanization in the Midwest, I found this book invaluable. This is the first study of a black-majority town in the Midwest, and it represents a model of how such a study should be conducted. Anyone tackling the task of writing the history of ordinary people faces severe problems in finding sources, and this problem is compounded when one's subjects are African Americans. In particular, sources are extremely rare which reflect the perspective of working-class African Americans. Sundiata Cha-Jua has overcome these problems brilliantly.

He has mined a wide variety of source materials. Fortunately, African-American newspapers in Springfield, Illinois and St. Louis reported on events in Brooklyn and sometimes carried correspondence from Brooklyn residents. Manuscript censuses, probate records, and city directories have been used to reconstruct the socioeconomic structure of the community at various points in time. Criminal records also reflect community conflict.

These sources, employed with empathy and interrogated with important historical questions in mind, support a plausible narrative of the history of an African-American community from the perspective of the people themselves. Cha-Jua follows the community from its beginnings as a group of escaped slaves, through a series of struggles to wrest control from whites, to Brooklyn's eventual fate as a working-class dormitory community and vice district within the metro-east region. While sympathetic to the aspirations of community residents, the author is clearsighted in his critique of community factionalism and leadership failures. Throughout, he places the history of this tiny midwestern community in the context of larger developments within its region and the nation. As a result, the book carries us a long step forward in our understanding of African-American life during the industrial age.

America's Religions: From Their Origins To The Twenty-First Century by Peter W. Williams (Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religions and American Studies, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio) is a massive, comprehensive, meticulous study of the religious movements that have shaped the United States and ranges from Native American religions and early European colonization era communities of faith to the religious modernism and pluralism of the twentieth century. Divided into fifty-five chapters, the scholarly narrative path traces a long road across centuries of human belief. America's Religions is a fascinating read and a sweeping historical analysis which is very highly recommended for History Of Religion supplemental reading lists and reference collections.

Where can one start when reviewing a masterpiece? I was thoroughly amazed at the depth, the riches, and the erudite manner of expression of Dr. Bush's magnum opus; and yet, here is a book that could be easily digested and admired by a person of general education as well. I recommend this volume to anyone with an interest in books, culture, religion, history, government, Christianity, the Bible, humor, and the Kennedy presidency. Move over, David Reynolds! Take notice, Stanley Fish!

This is a fantastic book. Very few critics have the courage or the eyeball power to do what Kathryn Hume has done--offer a genuinely thorough discussion of the landscape of American fiction since 1960--over 100 books discussed. Anyone who wants to educate her/himself on postwar fiction ought to get a copy of this wonderfully written book. No creepy academic jargon, lots of intelligent comparison. Also, Hume offers a politically progressive review but is never (pinch my nose) politically correct.

This book serves not only as an informative social history of early 20th century Swedish immigration to the U.S., it is simply a delightful story as well. As we are a country of immigrants, almost anyone could look at an obscure man like A.V. Swanson and remember his or her own father, grandfather or great-grandfather. The immigrant's story can be told many times but as the author points out, "(But) each one has been different as a person, and unique in ways of becoming an American." The author is a marvelous and witty story teller. She unfolds the story of her father's life as it began in Sweden in the 1890's, the son of a coal miner, the oldest of ten children, and the hardships he and his family endured. Young Axel Victor Svensson was sent off as a farmhand at age 9 in order to supplement his family's poverty-level income. That experience set the tone for his determination not only to work hard but to work smarter. As a teenager, he caught "America fever" and set his sites on becoming not only an American but a successful one. As Axel Svensson became A.V. Swanson in Chicago, he became the most American of Americans. He chose his opportunities well, applied his work ethic, married and raised a family, established himself as a businessman and community servant in Ames, Iowa and then retired to farm life in his later but still active years. As life gradually slowed down for him, A.V. began his "life review", recounting his adventures that spanned two very different countries. These chapters, along with the author's fine research and a daughter's love and admiration mesh into a fascinating biography. I recommend this book to anyone whose interests lie in history of U.S. immigration, Swedish settlement in the Midwest during the early 20th century and to those who believe that "the stories of all of us need to be told."

Poet laureate of Illinois Kevin Stein presents American Ghost Roses, an unusual poetry anthology consisting entirely of elegies. Free verse in a variety of formats mourns the brevity of human life and the death of a father. An honest and upfront approach to grief, these verses stir a resounding chord in the individual reader. Thinking of Kandinsky while Shaving My Father: It pains the back, not to mention the spirit, / to kneel beside one's father limp in his electric lift chair. / Scrape goes the blade, tick the clock whose arms / spin blades pinned at the donkey's tail / heart makes of us. With one deft false move // I could end this, though try that excuse on the cops. / Next his hair cut and shampoo, my day's dirty work / spiraled down the drain. Who's weak now? / For scenes like these, Kandinsky claims / the spirit can be strengthened by exercise. American Ghost Roses is highly recommended as being thoughtful and thought provoking reading.

Provides an excellent source for maps of all the Chicago area counties. Even with online mapping services available, it is still nice to have all this information readily available in book form.

I picked up American Millstone on a bargain shelf at a local bookstore in Houston. I wrote to the Chicago Tribune for more copies but they had none. The chapters are an EXCELLENT source of short reading articles for a high school English class. I wish they would do a more up to date series as this book was written before the infamous "crack wave."

First published in 1969, Weiss's careful assessment of the so-called "American myth of success" is still relevant today and continues to be referenced by other authors writing on the subject. Roy Anker has honored it with several pages of exposition in his Self-Help and Popular Religion in Early American Culture (1999). He stated that Weiss's text "seems balanced, fair-minded, and revisionist in import, especially in its analysis of the character ethic."

According to Weiss, the success myth involves the belief that "all men, in accordance with certain rules, but exclusively by their own efforts, can make of their lives what they will" as well as "the cluster of ideas surrounding this conviction". It is rooted in an idealism and ideology that believes "opportunity exists for all" quite apart from any empirical investigation into "the degree to which opportunity has or has not been available in our society".

Success is generally defined in material, earthly terms this side of death. However, as Weiss demonstrates, this doesn't mean that there wasn't or isn't a moral and/or metaphysical dimension to success. He begins with the Protestant ethic of early American Puritanism, making reference to Max Weber's influential book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930). The maxims of this ethic include industry, frugality, and prudence. Weiss states that even Benjamin Franklin espoused these virtues in his The Way to Wealth, but secularized them and gave them a utilitarian aspect where proper behavior brought earthly rewards. The tradition of the Protestant ethic continued into the 19th century, but after the Civil War, during the "Guilded Age", there was a transition from moral purity to metaphysical power, from traits of character to states of mind as the key to success or failure. Within this context, the literature of the New Thought movement is given attention as an inheritor of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalist dogma but mixed with the pragmatism of William James (Weiss also acknowledges in a Chapter 5 footnote the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg's ideas on New Thought and James through his father; however, he fails to mention the influence of Swedenborg on Emerson). During this transition there were those who attempted to salvage aspects of the older values through fiction while also critiquing industrialism, urbanization, excessive wealth-getting, and moral decline. The literature of Horatio Alger, Jr., as well as the work and attitudes of the following five popular Christian novelists are discussed: Augusta Jane Evans, E. P. Roe, Charles Sheldon (of In His Steps fame), Gene Stratton Porter, and Harold Bell Wright, each offering practical spiritual and moral counsel.

One must keep in mind that Weiss is not concerned with clearly distinguishing between conservative and liberal Christianity, both of which have a history throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, although it is clear for those who know the differences (aside from the variations within each camp) that Emerson and the later New Thought proponents in the 19th century embraced a heterodox, liberal type. Weiss points out that the "reformist nature of New Thought extended beyond matters of organization to questions of doctrine as well. The new dispensation denied the doctrine of original sin. The well-known couplet from the New England primer - 'In Adam's fall, we sinned all' - had 'no truth in it at all'" (page 144). Although the Puritan's Calvinism (which associates original sin with the Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity) falls within the parameters of conservative Christianity, it is not equivalent with it (contrary to the opinion of some Calvinists). The move away from Calvinism in the 19th century included conservatives as well as liberals who embraced Arminian or Pelagian/Semi-Pelagian concepts of moral freedom while holding different opinions on the notion of "original sin". See, for example, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century (Second Edition, 1996) by Melvin Dieter for the conservative transition, and The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion (2001) by Gary Dorrien for the liberal transition. Weiss ends his book by looking at the thought of Norman Vincent Peale whose book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which was influenced by New Thought, impacted both conservatives and liberals alike, making it one of the most popular books in the self-help tradition. Anker's Self-Help and Popular Religion in Modern American Culture (1999) looks at the literature and influence of Peale, and his student Robert Schuller, in more detail.

I highly recommend Weiss's book, and refer to it often along with Roy Anker's two-volume study while researching success literature in American history.