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(More customer reviews)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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The acclaimed author of There Are No Children Here takes us into the heart of Chicago by introducing us to some of the city's most interesting, if not always celebrated, people.Chicago is one of America's most iconic, historic, and fascinating cities, as well as a major travel destination. For Alex Kotlowitz, an accidental Chicagoan, it is the perfect perch from which to peer into America's heart. It's a place, as one historian has said, of "messy vitalities," a stew of contradictions: coarse yet gentle, idealistic yet restrained, grappling with its promise, alternately sure and unsure of itself. Chicago, like America, is a kind of refuge for outsiders. It's probably why Alex Kotlowitz found comfort there. He's drawn to people on the outside who are trying to clean up—or at least make sense of—the mess on the inside. Perspective doesn't come easy if you're standing in the center. As with There Are No Children Here, Never a City So Real is not so much a tour of a place as a chronicle of its soul, its lifeblood. It is a tour of the people of Chicago, who have been the author's guides into this city's—and in a broader sense, this country's—heart.
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