From Goodreads,
Like a cross between Philip Marlowe and Walter Benjamin, Marco d’Eramo stalks the streets of Chicago, leaving no myth unturned. Maintaining a European’s detached gaze, he slowly comes to recognize the familiar stink of modernity that blows across the Windy City, the origins of whose greatness (the slaughterhouses, the railroads, the lumber and cereal-crop trades) are by now ancient history, and where what rears its head today is already scheduled for tomorrow’s chopping block.
Chicago has been the stage for some of modernity’s key episodes: the birth of the skyscraper, the rise of urban sociology, the world’s first atomic reactor, the hard-nosed monetarism of the Chicago School. Here in this postmodern Babel, where the contradictions of American society are writ large, d’Eramo bears witness to the revolutionary, subversive power of capitalism at its purest.
From The Guardian, My Kind of Town,
D'Eramo seems to have spent the winter of 1992-3 in Lakeview (my old neighbourhood) and made some return trips since. A wide reading of primary and secondary sources supplements that direct experience, but this remains a European book about an American city. Chicago is a surprising, riddling and enraging object of contemplation. Sometimes D'Eramo lets himself be drawn: "The climate of hatred, oppression and segregation is so unbearable in the United States that you wonder why the Blacks don't revolt by staging an all-out rebellion." This is heartfelt, but useless. He is much better on the pompous little enclave of the University of Chicago, with its roster of Nobel laureates, its repro Oxbridge college buildings and its private police force to protect all this from the surrounding black neighbourhoods. His verdict on the laissez-faire economics of the U of C's so-called Chicago Boys is worth the price of the book alone: "Greed soaked in belief."
No comments:
Post a Comment