A little more storytelling and reporting might have made this an even more compelling narrative, but this is an incisive and...
A brief, cogent analysis of gentrification in Chicago.
As a journalist on urban issues with a Harvard degree in government and a master’s in public policy from the University of Chicago, Hertz clearly knows this territory, and he ably translates matters of public policy into laymen’s terms. He shows how Chicago—and, by extension, other cities—experienced profound transformation before the “white flight” to suburbia in the 1950s and ’60s and how zoning, redlining, and other actions affected what areas were developed. In a city of segregated neighborhoods, the author clearly demonstrates that race has always been an issue, even in neighborhoods as proud of their liberal progressivism as Lincoln Park. Even Chicagoans will be surprised to learn that, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Lincoln Park “ranked sixtieth out of the city’s seventy-five neighborhoods” in terms of residents’ incomes. There was of “slum clearance,” as those who could afford it moved to suburbia. Yet “at the same time, a small but growing movement of white professionals viewed Lincoln Park as a gem waiting to be polished and reclaimed.” That set the stage for the titular battle, as rehabbers and urban-renewal investors transformed what had once been an area of beaten-down apartment buildings into single-family dwellings that lowered the population density of the neighborhood, and its diversity as well, while attracting higher-income residents. The proximity to downtown, the Gold Coast and the lake, as well as the neighborhood’s namesake park established it as an inviting alternative to suburban life. It also pitted the rehabbers and newcomers against those who had lived there longer and felt they had more authority and legitimacy. By the 1970s, the battle had shifted in tone, with the more militant Young Lords at odds with those they considered carpetbaggers. And what happened in Lincoln Park has subsequently been transforming adjacent neighborhoods in every direction.
A little more storytelling and reporting might have made this an even more compelling narrative, but this is an incisive and useful narrative on the puzzle of urban development.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948742-09-2
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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