The Chicago Blog

As the imminent Fourth of July holiday ushers in the annual paeans to American independence and editorials about the importance of remembering its history, several momentous chapters in our national story—including the temporary misplacement of America, the unfreezing of the Earth, and the invention of the prairie dog—are once again missing from the familiar Independence Day narrative.

So it's a good thing that, just in time to correct these grievous oversights, we rediscovered in the vault Walter Blair's Tall Tale America, a classic of American humor that features as its chief historical figures not presidents, military leaders, and tycoons but folk heroes and popular characters such as Davy Crockett (and his pipe-smoking pet bear Death Hug), Old Stormalong, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, and John Henry.

More traditional characters do make brief appearances: Blair briefly tells the story, for example, of when Thomas Jefferson "put on one of his oldest suits of clothes, just to show he was one of the folks.… walked from his boarding house through the mud up the hill to the brand new Senate chamber, and started to run the country." But the tall tales of "Daniel Boone's Discovery of Kentucky and His Other Puzzling Habits" and "Seaman Tom Smith's Theory about Dry Oceans"—not to mention their accompanying illustrations by John Sandford—are, if we may say so, much more interesting.

Archived in Commentary | Literature
Posted by MM at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at the New York Times' Room for Debate blog, the editors have assembled a star-studded panel to discuss the age old question: What are master's degrees worth? In this economic climate, many students are opting to stay in or return to the university system, rather than face unemployment or underemployment in the "real world." But MA programs are rarely as well-funded as their PhD counterparts (indeed, many programs exist to fund doctorate students), and, upon graduation, newly-minted masters often face crippling student debt. So are MAs worth the cost?

One panelist, Mark C. Taylor, says, well, it depends. Taylor, a longtime Chicago author whose books include After God, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption, and The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, last made waves in the pages of the Times in April when he called for the university to be "rigorously regulated and completely restructured." Now, Taylor urges caveat emptor:

As a lifelong educator, I believe more education is always a good thing, but buyers must beware. The debt crisis is not limited to governments and universities but extends to students and their families. Far too many students come out of college with substantial debts that plague them for years.

While Taylor urges potential grad students to think carefully about their costs and critically about their needs, other panelists offer other viewpoints. One suggests that while MAs may not make you rich, they can make you more interesting (which sounds like a decent payoff to this masters of humanities degree holder); another says it's probably not worth the debt; and yet another says it depends on the kind of degree.

Whether you are a doctor of philosophy or merely a master of humanity, you can find books here about higher education—as well as its discontents—from Chicago. For those determined to make a go of it in the ivory tower, check out The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure and read this handy guide to entering graduate school. But, of course, if you've been there, done that, and are now thinking, "Now what?," Susan Basalla and Maggie Debeliu''s guide to life beyond the doctorate, "So What Are You Going to Do with That?": Finding Careers Outside Academia, may be the better guide for your academic afterlife. Whichever route you chose, we have the books to help you along your way.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chicago Public Library has just announced that Carl Smith's The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City has been selected for its One Book, One Chicago program starting this Fall. According to the CPL website the "One Book, One Chicago encourages all Chicagoans to read the same book at the same time, offering events, discussions, exhibits and more to enhance the experience." And what better topic to bring together our diverse city than the fascinating story of how it all began?

Arguably the most influential document in the history of urban planning, Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago, coauthored by Edward Bennett and produced in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago, proposed many of the city's most distinctive features, including its lakefront parks and roadways, the Magnificent Mile, and Navy Pier. And as Carl Smith's fascinating history points out, the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment.

Beginning this August, we'll be blogging here, and at our Plan of Chicago Facebook page to keep you updated on all the forthcoming One Book, One Chicago events and discussions. You can also find out more about the program at the Chicago Public Library website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Humboldt Park native Michael Mann's new film Public Enemies, which portrays the life and death of one of the Chicago's most notorious criminals, John Dillinger, premiers in theaters this weekend. And in all likelihood, similar to last year's summer blockbuster Batman, you can be sure that thousands of Chicagoans, eager to see their city—or at least bits and pieces of their city—up on the big screen will be packing the theaters.

In light of such predictable crowds most reasonable people will choose to pass on Public Enemies in favor of some more edifying cultural experience this Fourth of July weekend. But, as David E. Ruth's Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934 demonstrates, with the right frame of mind—and the right book—Public Enemies might be as edifying as it gets. In Inventing the Public Enemy Ruth scrutinizes innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, scores of novels, and hundreds of Hollywood movies, to show how the media's "gangsters" are less a reflection of reality than a projection created from Americans' values, concerns, and ideas about what sells.

Ruth takes us through a media landscape filled with efficient criminal executives demonstrating the multifarious uses of organization; dapper, big-spending gangsters highlighting the promises and perils of an emerging consumer society; and gunmen and molls guiding an uncertain public through the shifting terrain of modern gender roles. In this fascinating study, Ruth reveals how the public enemy provides a far-ranging and insightful critique of modern culture.

Read more about the book here.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People who live in fear of airplane accidents, flu pandemics, and other such disasters are often cast as alarmist or paranoid, despite the painful fruition of their fears in such incidents as the crash of a Yemeni jet this morning into the Indian Ocean (the second major plane crash this month), the lethal explosion last night of a freight train in northern Italy, and the collision last week of two Washington, D.C., Metro trains.

In Worst Cases, Lee Clark confirms that such individuals are more reasonable and prescient than they're given credit for. Surveying the full range of possible catastrophes that animate and dominate the popular imagination—from toxic spills and terrorism to plane crashes and pandemics—he explores how the ubiquity of worst cases in everyday life has stripped them of some of their ability to shock us. Fear and dread, Clarke argues, have actually become too rare: only when the public has more substantial information and more credible warnings will it take worst cases as seriously as it should. A timely and necessary look into how we think about the unthinkable, Worst Cases is essential reading for anyone attuned to our current climate of threat and fear.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by MM at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No, this isn't a post about Tweety's reading habits, but close. This morning's Tribune as well as the Chicago web publication Gapers Block both picked up on an item previously posted to the New Yorker's Book Bench Blog about the University of Chicago and a new book being written by two of its students. The book, Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less, is the brainchild of college roommates Alex Aciman and Emmett Rensin, both 19. According to the Tribune the book is the authors' attempt to rewrite (mangle?) "classics by Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Dante and other greats in 20 or fewer 140-character tweets." The authors have signed a publishing contract with Penguin, known for its excellent editions of the classics.

The reaction so far from the book world seems to be of two minds with the Gapers Block undecided whether to label the news "sad or ironic" and the Tribune anticipating its reception by book lovers as "a mixture of horror and why-didn't-I-think-of-that jealousy." But, the Tribune article continues, literature professor W.J.T. Mitchell seemed to give "the project his backing recently, telling the Tribune, 'this is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect University of Chicago students to come up with.'" And the New Yorker's Andrea Walker also seems to agree when she writes:

When I checked out the biographies of the guys who are doing it, I couldn't help thinking it might be really good.… The U. of C. is known for serious thinking combined with a sarcastic, self-deprecating sense of humor that always amused me when displayed on undergraduate T-shirts. These described the school as "The level of hell Dante forgot," "The place where fun comes to die," and "The University of Chicago: if it was easy it would be…your mom."

(For more of that unmistakable U. of C. wit see this blog dedicated to U. of C. slogans.)

As for the students themselves, they give a brief explanation of their motivation for writing the book on their website, (reprinted from another article on the subject appearing in the Telegraph last week):

"We had an epiphany."

"What, we asked, are the grandest ventures of our or any generation? And what, to give this a bit more focus, best expresses the souls of 21st century Americans?"

They concluded that the two most important platforms of expression for their generation were literature and Twitter, and so embarked on a project to entwine the two.

Archived in Commentary
Posted by TXM at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning, Bernard Madoff, convicted master-mind of a giant Ponzi scheme that swindled investors out of $65 billion, was sentenced to 150 years in jail. Over the course of two decades, the financier perpetuated a fraud that has erupted into one of the largest scandals of modern Wall Street history. Madoff's name has become synonymous with greed and corruption, but despite his high-profile crimes, he is not symbolic of the country as a whole. In fact, despite recent corporate scandals, the United States is among the world's least corrupt nations.

This wasn't the case, however, in the nineteenth century. Then, municipal governments and robber barons alike found new ways to steal from taxpayers and swindle investors. In fact, in those days, the degree of fraud and corruption in America approached that of today's most unscrupulous developing nations. Exploring this shadowy period of United States history in search of better methods to fight corruption worldwide today, the contributors to Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History reveal the measurement and consequences of fraud and corruption and the forces that ultimately led to their decline within the United States. They show that various approaches to reducing corruption have met with success, such as deregulation, particularly "free banking," in the 1830s. In the 1930s, corruption was kept in check when new federal bureaucracies replaced local administrations in doling out relief. Another deterrent to corruption was the independent press, which kept a watchful eye over government and business.

Though the Madoff scandal may seem to herald a new era of American financial malfeasance, it's reassuring to know that corruption is less prevalent now than ever before in our nation's history. And now that the monster behind the massive bamboozlement is behind bars, we can hope for a new age of honesty on Wall Street.

Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After being arrested in October of 2006 for the murder of acclaimed Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, three men—two Chechen brothers and a former police investigator—were found not guilty by a jury on charges that they provided logistical support for her killing. But today's New York Times reports that Russia's Supreme Court has now overturned their acquittals, as well as the acquittal of "a fourth defendant, a former colonel in the F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., who faced lesser charges," on the grounds that "there had been procedural violations by the judges and the defense during the first trial." According to the NYT:

Ms. Politkovskaya's colleagues said they were not surprised by the court's decision but said they feared that the new trial would be a distraction from their central concern: finding the gunman and the mastermind in the crime.… Investigators say they believe that Rustam Makhmudov, a brother of the two Chechen defendants, carried out the murder, shooting Ms. Politkovskaya, 48, with a Makarov 9-millimeter pistol on Oct. 7, 2006, in the hallway of her apartment building as she returned home.

He is thought to be in hiding abroad. The person or people who ordered the killing have not been found.

But, the article quotes Sergei Sokolov, deputy editor of the Novya Gazeta where Ms. Politkovskaya worked, saying that whoever ordered the killing, "it is obvious that the one who ordered it is a very prominent person." It has been widely speculated that the motive for Politkovskaya's murder was her outspoken criticism of the Russia's handling of its bloody conflict with Chechnya that began with the movement for Chechen independence in 1991 and continues to the present day. Her second book on the subject, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya was published by the press in 2003. In the book Politkovskaya recounts the horrors of living in the midst of the war, examines how the war has affected Russian society, and takes a hard look at how people on both sides are profiting from it. A powerful account of what is acknowledged as one of the most dangerous and least understood conflicts on the planet, Politkovskaya's book offers one of the world's only window's into this region and its troubles.

For more on the Politkovskaya's book read this excerpt. Also see our past posts on Politkovskaya's murder and the ensuing trial, or follow the NYT's coverage here.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

At the press conference he held yesterday to explain his now-infamous weekend jaunt to Argentina, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford seemed to be trying to say "that he screwed up, in the biggest possible way, because he lost his bearings. He lost his self-control. He was indulgent. He forgot that there were other humans in the world." That, at least, is how Slate's John Dickerson tried to explain what others described as Sanford's "rambling" and "strange" apology for the trip and the extramarital affair that prompted it.

Though the governor's behavior may indeed be unorthodox, the scandal itself is, of course, not. A quick survey of news from Italy to Japan to the UK reconfirms that he shares indulgent behavior and loss of self-control with politicians the world over.

While these kinds of antics are mostly painful and costly, the silver lining to their global reach is that they can offer a singularly revealing means of comparing cultures. Mark D. West uses just such a method in Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle, in which he organizes the seemingly random worlds of Japanese and American scandal to explore well-ingrained similarities and contrasts in law and society.

His study of scandals ranging from corporate fraud and baseball cheaters to political corruption and celebrity sexcapades approaches this inherently fascinating phenomenon from an entirely fresh angle. And it will be, if history is any guide, perennially timely.

Archived in Books for the News | Sociology
Posted by MM at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our new series, American Beginnings will publish original books, written by scholars but accessible to students and a general readership, that address critical issues in American history from the initial period of European contact through the beginning of the twentieth century. The series will focus particularly on questions of power, in all its manifold forms, in the centuries when America evolved from a loose collection of disparate colonies to a full-fledged nation-state. While it will include books on the kinds of institutions typically associated with power— government, legal systems, and voluntary organizations, to name a few—the series also seeks studies that explore expressions of power in more intimate contexts, such as the family and the household.

By affording a broad chronological frame, American Beginnings encourages work that moves beyond conventional periodization and in turn brings new insight to the formative influences on the early American past.

The series will include works by senior and junior scholars from a broad array of subfields, including political history, labor history, African American history, gender history, and financial history. In doing so, it hopes to facilitate novel interdisciplinary discussions about the practices of power in the American past.

For more information, you may contact Edward Gray (egray@fsu.edu), Stephen Mihm (mihm@uga.edu), or Mark Peterson (mark-peterson@berkeley.edu). You may also contact Robert Devens, the Press's editor for American history (rdevens@press.uchicago.edu).

Link to the announcement or download in PDF format.

Archived in History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a quick post to point you towards Slate magazines' weekly poem, which is currently featuring Peg Boyers, author of Hard Bread and more recently Honey with Tobacco, reading her poem "The Fate of Pleasure."

Each week Slate's poetry editor Robert Pinsky chooses a poem to be featured on their site and added to the audio archive at Slate's Poetry Podcast. So in the spirit of full disclosure it should also be mentioned that Pinsky has recently released a new book with the Press as well: Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town. Though not a poetry book Thousands of Broadways does offer up some of the fascinating literary insights of its author as he examines the history and character of America's small towns, including reflections on his own time growing up in one.

Find out more about Pinsky's new book and Boyer's poetry on the press's website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
Posted by TXM at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This Friday evening, the Chicago officers who policed the 1968 Democratic Convention will reunite for the first time in 41 years. The gathering, billed by organizers as an occasion for the "Chicago Police [to] be honored and recognized for their contributions to maintaining law and order—and for taking a stand against Anarchy," has rankled veterans of the anti-war demonstrations. As the Chicago Tribune reports

Don Rose, a former spokesman for the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, condemned the reunion at a City Hall press conference held by Chicago Copwatch, a community group that is organizing a march to the Fraternal Order of Police hall—where the event is being held—on the night of the reunion.

Rose took issue with the "provocative language" used by reunion organizers. . .

"They seem to be seeking to rewrite history," Rose said. "These were unprovoked assaults by the police."

A counterprotest is planned.

John Schultz, a former professor and chair of the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College, was in the middle of the action on those tumultuous August days. While other writers contemplated the events of the 1968 Chicago riots from the safety of their hotel rooms, Schultz was in the city streets, being threatened by police, choking on tear gas, and listening to all the rage, fear, and confusion around him. We recently reissued the book that resulted from his experience of the protests, No One Was Killed: The Democratic National Convention, August 1968. The book is Schultz's account of the contradictions and chaos of convention week, the adrenalin, the sense of drama and history, and how the mainstream press was getting it all wrong. Read an excerpt.

Also relevant to any discussion of the role of the police in the 1968 DNC protests is Frank Kusch's book Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention the only book on Chicago '68 that gives voice to the officers on the street. You can also read an excerpt from that one.

Archived in Books for the News | History
Posted by SXH at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The lure of a career playing professional basketball—those infamous “hoop dreams”—is often blamed for distracting young African Americans from their studies and pushing them to spend more time on the playground than in school. But this jaundiced view ignores how much these young men can learn on the court—an education that Scott N. Brooks vividly brings to life in Black Men Can’t Shoot.

Brooks coached summer league ball in Philadelphia for four years, becoming intimately involved in the lives of the young black men on his team. Since no one is a born athlete, Brooks shows us that becoming a good player is a learning process—one that transcends the game of basketball and helps mold these kids into responsible adults. He illuminates this process through the stories of two young men, Jermaine and Ray, following them through their high school years, their breakthroughs and frustrations on the court, and their troubles at home. Black Men Can’t Shoot is at once a moving coming-of-age story, a thrilling sports tale, and a clear-eyed look at surviving the ghetto.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt.

Archived in Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From nameless Gitmo detainees to warrantless wiretaps, the abuse of executive power by successive presidents continues to make headlines. Even NPR's This American Life entered the fray with a piece that aired last weekend about the 1953 U.S. Supreme Court case that created a "state secret privilege" permitting the executive branch to derail normal judicial procedures for cases it claimed would disclose national security secrets. The TAL story reveals that the original 1953 case, in fact, contained no state secrets at all—calling into question not only the government's motives for moving to dismiss that trial, but undermining the legal basis for the string of cases shut down since—up through the Bush administrations and, unfortunately, the current administration as well.

If this were not enough to concern the ordinary citizen, Peter M. Shane, professor of law at Ohio State University and author of the new book, Madison's Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy argues in a recent article for George Mason University's History News Network that the most systematic White House power grab has garnered much less publicity.

Over the past thirty years, Shane argues, the White House has taken increasing control over "domestic rulemaking activity by administrative agencies"—agencies responsible for regulating everything from the air we breathe to discrimination in schools and entitlements to health care— by subjecting them to intensive scrutiny by the president's Office of Management and Budget. Along with torture, domestic surveillance, and executive secrecy—which Shane also discusses in his book—he sees rulemaking by the executive branch as a significant threat. Shane writes:

The move towards centralization of policy control in OMB should worry Americans for three reasons. First, a tightly controlled bureaucracy is actually less responsive to public sentiment than a bureaucracy in which administrators enjoy some room for independent judgment. This seems counterintuitive because we elect presidents, but not bureaucrats. The problem, however, is that the President is unlikely to reflect the views of the median voter on each and every issue of significant public concern. Because the President chooses agency heads, they will all share his general policy outlook, but each agency head is somewhat more inclined than the President to respect the median voter's view on the particular issues that his or her specific agency addresses.

Second, the system is potentially less accountable to the public. The more decision making is concentrated in the White House, the easier it becomes to use executive privilege as a shield against disclosure of the decision making process. To be fair, recent Presidents have taken some significant steps to make White House regulatory review more open and transparent than it was in the 1980s, but the potential for changing course towards more secrecy is always present.

Third, the system adds months of delay to the process of issuing new regulations. As I detail in Madison's Nightmare, it has never been demonstrated that the reduction in regulatory costs produced by White House review has adequately compensated for the value of benefits foregone by delaying new health, safety and environmental regulations for periods often lasting six months or longer.

Shane concludes:

I wrote Madison's Nightmare partly in the hope of explaining persuasively … how aggressive presidentialism undermines good governance. Much of the book deals with the dramatic questions of torture, domestic surveillance, and executive secrecy that are so often in the news. I hope that the book also brings at least some greater attention to the centralization of presidential policy making control, which deserves far more public attention and debate than it has seen since its inception.

Read the complete article on the History News Network and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fifteen years ago this month, police in California charged O. J. Simpson with murdering his former wife and her friend, then chased him for about 50 miles before he surrendered, starting a process that would lead to one of the most famous trials in recent memory.

As Robert Ferguson reminds us in The Trial in American Life, an estimated 150 million Americans, the largest TV audience ever, watched the verdict, which arrived "only after thirteen months of media frenzy." These excesses were, well, particularly excessive—but they are not unique. In his fascinating investigation of prominent trials in American history, Ferguson points out that "media frenzies during noteworthy trials have become such a staple of our times that dozens of instances will come to mind."

But despite its cultural prominence, the trial is, in reality, almost extinct. In 2002, less than 2 percent of federal civil cases culminated in a trial, down from 12 percent forty years earlier. And the number of criminal trials also dropped dramatically, from 9 percent of cases in 1976 to only 3 percent in 2002. In his new The Death of the American Trial, Robert Burns warns that this decline could lead not only to the loss of a vaunted institution, but also to the dangerous erosion of American democracy.

Discussing his book in a recent post, the Virginia Quarterly Review blog noted that

high-profile lawsuits with a controversial verdict—the OJ Simpson trial, for example—may have affected social perceptions about the value of decisions delivered by jury, but as Burns demonstrates in his book, the trial is actually a fundamental component of American democracy.… The 20th century has left us with a legacy of famous trials and Supreme Court verdicts that have shaped our history as a country. As we move into the 21st century with even greater challenges ahead, let us hope that this part of our legal system does not come to exist only in television reruns.

Archived in Books for the News | Law
Posted by MM at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new exhibit at the Chicago Tourism Center showcasing some of Chicago's most gorgeous gardens is currently on display from June 17-August 16. According to the Chicago Tourism Center website, the exhibit highlights the planning and growth of Millennium Park's Lurie Garden; public gardens in Chicago parks; community gardens; garden inspired photography and artwork, as well as gardens as explored in Cathy Jean Maloney's, Chicago Gardens: The Early History.

Demonstrating how Chicago earned the sobriquet, Urbs in Horto, in Chicago Gardens Maloney draws on decades of researching the city's horticultural heritage to reveal the unusual history of Chicago's first gardens. Challenged by the region's clay soil, harsh winters, and fierce winds, Maloney shows how innovative horticulturalists found both pragmatic and aesthetic uses for many of the area's hardy native species. This same creative spirit thrived in the city's local fruit and vegetable markets, encouraging the growth of what would become the nation's produce hub. And her vibrant depictions of Chicagoans like "Bouquet Mary," a flower peddler who built a greenhouse empire, add charming anecdotal evidence to her argument—that Chicago's garden history rivals that of New York or London and ensures its status as a world-class capital of horticultural innovation.

With exquisite archival photographs, prints, and postcards, as well as field guide descriptions of living legacy gardens for today's visitors, Chicago Gardens will delight green-thumbs from all parts of the world.

Find out more about the book on our website including these extracts about five historic Chicago gardens, then plan your trip to see the exhibit at the Chicago Tourism Center, 72 E. Randolph Street 10 am - 6 pm, through August 16.

Archived in Author Events | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)