ePub American Sports by Pamela Grundy; Benjamin G Rader in History

Description

“Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch; you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose; you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren’s writing that “you should not read it if you cannot take a punch.” The prose poem; Chicago: City on the Make; filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns; lives up to those words. In this sixtieth anniversary edition; Algren presents 120 years of Chicago history through the lens of its “nobodies nobody knows”: the tramps; hustlers; aging bar fighters; freed death-row inmates; and anonymous working stiffs who prowl its streets.Upon its original publication in 1951; Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make was scorned by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and local journalists for its gritty portrayal of the city and its people; one that boldly defied City Hall’s business and tourism initiatives. Yet the book captures the essential dilemma of Chicago: the dynamic tension between the city’s breathtaking beauty and its utter brutality; its boundless human energy and its stifling greed and violence.The sixtieth anniversary edition features historic Chicago photos and annotations on everything from defunct slang to Chicagoans; famous and obscure; to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever; this is; as Studs Terkel says; “the best book about Chicago.”