Living For The City

For the record, I am well aware that Chicago is the best city ever, and it would be inappropriate to talk about anything else but Chicago. But other cities are neat, too, and there are lots of books out there about cities which happen to not be Chicago.

Nelson Algren would've loved a night on the town with the author of Detroit: An American Autopsy. The book is as much about Charlie LeDuff's hard-scrabble life as it is about the struggles of one of America's most iconic cities. It's a tough book about a tough town fighting through the tough times.

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh first entered the public imagination with his book Gang Leader for a Day, which studied the complex relationships within Chicago gangs. His latest book, Floating City, moves to New York's underground economy. While Chicago's crime is built around tightly-guarded community boundaries, New York's crime wanders, floating through societal boundaries to find money wherever it can be found.

If even American cities aren't enough for you, across the pond there are cities so old nobody remembers how they got their names. London: The Biography covers a city so ancient and storied that you'll find whole sections devoted to London's dirt, church bells, smells, sewers, fires and whatever else caught the author's eye. It's a rambling, absorbing book about a fascinating city.

So if any of you Chicagoans get tired of other Chicagoans telling you how great Chicago is, there are plenty of books out there about the cities beyond our borders.