Notes

• "Lying on the shores of the boundless sea that is Lake Michigan, Chicago is the most American of American cities, offering what neither New York, San Francisco nor Los Angeles can provide: a reality check, an idea of what the heart of America is really thinking." "Like a cross between Philip Marlowe and Walter Benjamin, Marco d’Eramo stalks the city streets, leaving no myth unturned. Unpacking his "old world" conceptual baggage and maintaining a European’s detached, incredulous 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 economic school of the Chicago Boys. Here in this postmodern Babel, where the features and contradictions of American society are writ large and deep, we witness the revolutionary, subversive power of capitalism at its purest."–BOOK JACKET