What I liked about the book: It was well-written, even exciting in places, and gave a very good overview of a large and complex subject. One part that fascinated me was the history of how the city was raised. The land the city was built on was essentially a swamp. To provide for drainage, the entire city was lifted up as much as 12 feet. In some areas, entire blocks were raised at once, including lamp posts and trees. Property owners who didn’t want their buildings raised were left standing in holes with front doors only accessible down steep flights of stairs.

What I didn’t like about the book: It covered architecture a bit too extensively for my taste, and bogged down in a couple of other areas. But that stuff is all part of the city, so this isn’t really a complaint. At the beginning, Miller makes some leaps in chronology that were a bit hard to take, but this lessened considerably as the book went on.

The most interesting quote: With its new sewage system, Chicago became a drier and healthier city … but the more Chicago grew and the better the system worked, the worse the river — and the drinking water — became. Pollution was not the only problem. Small fish were drawn to the warm water of the city’s shoreside collecting basin and were sucked into the pipes and poured out into the drinking cups, cooking pots, and bathtubs of Chicagoans. It was not uncommon … to find minnows sporting in one’s wash-bowl, or dead and stuck in the faucets. When they got into the city’s hot-water reservoir, they came out cooked, and one’s bathtub was apt to be filled with what squeamish citizens called chowder.

Recommendation: I gave it an 8. It doesn’t cover the 20th Century, but it is very interesting on what it does cover.

Further Comments: Having lived in Chicago for three years while attending Moody, I can picture many of the places and buildings mentioned in the book. But there are an awful lot of things I haven’t seen. It made me want to hop a train and explore.