Miller, author of the critically acclaimed Lewis Mumford: A Life and a professor of history at Pennsylvania's Lafayette College, sets forth in traditional narrative form perhaps the most heroic chapter in Chicago's urban biography-namely the city's rebirth following the October 8, 1871, conflagration that left 90,000 Chicagoans homeless and nearly 300 dead out of a population of some 300,000. Academic specialists should read these three books for their extension of this literature, but there are abundant other reasons to spend time with them as well.ĭonald L. The Second City has been the subject of one of the most robust literatures in American social science, the result of a century of research that now consumes countless computer bytes and endless library shelf space. For Miller, Chicago is more simply the "City of the Century"-the nineteenth century. 27), but as Rybczynski tells us, it is also the place where "in many ways twentieth-century American urbanism got its start" (p.
Chicago may be, as Ehrenhalt reminds his readers, "a reassuringly ordinary place" (p. They seek to reach intelligent and informed readers who are trying to make sense of the world around them, and all three place the great heartland metropolis of Chicago at the center of their reflections. The three authors do not address their books to narrow academic audiences, although each draws to a greater or lesser extent on urban scholarship. Miller, and Witold Rybczynski make their own distinctive contributions to this ongoing American debate about urban city life. The opposition between the city as a beacon of wealth and virtue and the city as a cesspool of corruption and violence has shaped American thinking about the urban experience since colonial days. The tensions between individual and community interest, private gain and public good, and freedom of expression and social control are among the most enduring themes of American urban history. WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI, City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World.
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