History told with newspapers and photos of the day, in this case of various murders and crimes in Chicago, by the author of Wisconsin Death Trip. Chicago in the 20s had a much higher murder rate than New York or any other major city (there were smaller cities with as much murder but no other big cities.) Some of this can be explained by the fact that the police department had been corrupt for years. He gets right down to cases with an account of a man who suddenly decided to kill his wife so he could re-enlist in the Army, then a woman who shot her lover. Of course Capone and his cohorts appear. Illustrated with great old photos. If you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you will like. ( )

This wasn't exactly what I anticipated. I suspect I'm jaded by the Luc Sante book, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York - an excellent history of all kinds of dubious activities in New York of the 1840's through the 1890's. It's social history at its best, illuminating the underground history of a major American city.

Chicago in the twenties is interesting in its own way, but perhaps most of all for the sheer amount of murders and murder trials that occurred during the time period. The tabloid press played a large role in this history as did Prohibition, changing standards of behavior for women, and the rise of the Mob. Michael Lesy focuses on murders committed by ordinary people, but rather than presenting a broad social history this book is twenty short true crime stories with nothing really connecting them. I found this disappointing.

Written in staccato bursts of language that seem to mirror the rhythms of machine gunning, the stories are too short to be anything other than superficial when presented on their own as they are here. Sprinkled with a few photos, it's also frustrating that other photos that he describes prominently in the stories aren't printed here. My disappointment may lie in my expectations and for some this may be a wonderful read, but for me it reads like any other quickly written true crime novel (ripped from the headlines in Law & Order speak). It's completely ephemeral, skipping across the surface like a mayfly, but never diving into the depths. ( )

I had high hopes for this book but they were not borne out. The concept is good - discuss a bunch of different murders from Chicago in the 1920s. The execution is not good at all. His writing is just plain weird; it's very staccato and, quite frankly, annoying. In at least one of the early cases discussed, he presented "here is what happened" except of course, no one knows exactly what happened - only two people were there, and one of them was the person who did the shooting and one was the person who got shot and died. So unless Lesy discovered hidden cameras that went back to the 20s, I doubt he can tell us exactly what happened. Every chapter is a different case, and they are presented with no thematic ties to each other until the Afterward. At that point Lesy presents a point of view, but I still found his overall thesis confusing and I really think a lot of the thoughts presented in the Afterward would have been much better as a Foreward.

The latter half of the book was also confusing. Lesy starts covering mob stuff at that point, which is fine with me although I didn't expect it based on the first half of the book. A few of the players tied in with what I'd read in Sin and the Second City (namely Big Jim Colosimo) and I found that a welcome touchstone. But besides that, I found the chapters on the mob very confusing. A chart that explained the relationships of each person to each person would have been very useful. It was also unclear on what year various events happened; a timeline wouldn't have gone amiss either.

It did remind me of a few other avenues of Chicago history I want to pursue, such as reading more about the Leopold and Loeb case, and the Black Sox scandal. It also gives the background of the two real cases that the movie, then play, then movie Chicago (which I did NOT like) are based on, which I found interesting - but this information isn't given until a later chapter! It's kind of ridiculous and I really want to know if this book even had an editor.

So all in all, a good idea that was just plain poorly done. If you are extremely interested in Chicago hisory, go ahead and get this from a library and read it. I wouldn't recommend spending money on it. ( )

I am fascinated in this subject, and was greatly disappointed in the impossibly jarring use of fragmentary language--it was very annoying to read. I tried to give the author the benefit of the doubt--the idea that he was emulating the language of the newspapers of the era. In my opinion, however, the author failed to do much but make the reading difficult and often confusing. ( )