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Kotlowitz on Chicago

My weekly e-mail from the Hideout pointed out that Fast Company had named Chicago U.S. City of the Year for 2008. Best of all, Fast Company hired Alex Kotlowitz [full disclosure: I’ve met Kotlowitz a couple of times and corresponded a bit with him via e-mail] to write the feature story that accompanied the announcement. As author of both There Are No Children Here, an eminently compelling piece of investigative journalism and a crucial document of life in Chicago’s housing projects in the late 1980s, and Never A City So Real: A Walk in Chicago, Kotlowitz seems poised to join the ranks of Chicago’s great chroniclers. His place among them was reinforced last when Kotlowitz stood in for an ailing Studs Terkel, arguably Chicago’s greatest living chronicler, at a reading at the Harold Washington Public Library. So I guess my point is that Fast Company picked the right guy to write about Chicago, and that Kotlowitz made good on the opportunity. The feature is a revealing, rewarding read.

The New York Times Magazine’s August, 2007 publication of another fascinating investigative piece from Kotlowitz, this one centering on the uneasy coexistence between Caucasians and Latino immigrants in Carpentersville, Illinois, left me wondering if Kotlowitz had found the subject of his next book. As many, including Powell’s Books, have pointed out, Kotlowitz, in writing about specific people in a specific place, addresses the issues at the heart of our larger America, and encounters between whites and Latinos in rural America are sure to shape the cultural landscape of our nation in the next two decades.