A review by lindseysparks
The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream by Thomas Dyja

2.0

I bought this on my first trip to Chicago about 18 months ago and read it during my trip there this week. It's not bad, but it's disappointing. There's a lot crammed in here even though it's focused on a fairly short time period of the 40s and 50s and the narrative structure just didn't flow well for me. The author also seemed to expect you to know certain people or references that seemed a bit obscure to me. It didn't explain why he was talking about some of the people, so some of his choices seemed random. I did like the sections on architecture for the most part, race/housing and oddly Hugh Hefner. (I don't like Hefner but his story was interesting.) Sections on literature and art, topics I love, fell flat, as did the info on politics. I also felt like the author doesn't actually like Chicago very much or at least has an odd way of showing it. I also don't think it did a very good job of making the point of its subtitle: when Chicago Built the American Dream. He references this a few times but mainly in conjunction with Hefner and Ray Kroc, neither of which were actual focal points. There are probably much better books about Chicago out there. Now I'm stuck with deciding whether to keep this as a souvenir or not. That's the only problem with buying books as souvenirs - sometimes I don't end up liking them!