{"title":"Chicago Visions And Revisions","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the heart of the Windy City with the Chicago Visions and Revisions series. Explore Chicago's vibrant past, present, and imagined futures through insightful essays and historical accounts. Perfect for urban enthusiasts.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"plan-of-chicago-book-carl-smith-9780226764726","title":"The Plan of Chicago","description":"Arguably the most influential document in the history of urban planning, Daniel Burnham's \"1909 Plan of Chicago\", co-authored by Edward Bennett and produced in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago, proposed many of the city's most distinctive features. Carl Smith's fascinating history reveals the Plan's central role in shaping the ways people envision the cityscape and urban life itself. His concise and accessible narrative begins with a survey of Chicago's stunning rise from a tiny frontier settlement to the nation's second-largest city. He then offers an illuminating exploration of the Plan's creation and reveals how it embodies the renowned architect's belief that cities can and must be remade for the better. Smith points out the ways the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment. Richly illustrated and incisively written, this insightful book will be indispensable to our understanding of Chicago, Burnham, and the emergence of the modern city.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49601537114385,"sku":"GOR007297643","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49794412577041,"sku":"CIN0226764729G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50300298101009,"sku":"CIN0226764729VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000263541009,"sku":"NIN9780226764726","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":52322818949393,"sku":"CIN0226764729LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":52959537365265,"sku":"CIN0226764729A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226764729.jpg?v=1761732054"},{"product_id":"bitten-by-the-blues-book-bruce-iglauer-9780226681986","title":"Bitten by the Blues","description":"It started with the searing sound of a slide careening up the neck of an electric guitar. In 1970, twenty-three-year-old Bruce Iglauer walked into Florence's Lounge, in the heart of Chicago's South Side, and was overwhelmed by the joyous, raw Chicago blues of Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers. A year later, Iglauer produced Hound Dog's debut album in eight hours and pressed a thousand copies, the most he could afford. From that one album grew Alligator Records, the largest independent blues record label in the world.  Bitten by the Blues is Iglauer's memoir of a life immersed in the blues--and the business of the blues. No one person was present at the creation of more great contemporary blues music than Iglauer: he produced albums by Koko Taylor, Albert Collins, Professor Longhair, Johnny Winter, Lonnie Mack, Son Seals, Roy Buchanan, Shemekia Copeland, and many other major figures. In this book, Iglauer takes us behind the scenes, offering unforgettable stories of those charismatic musicians and classic sessions, delivering an intimate and unvarnished look at what it's like to work with the greats of the blues. It's a vivid portrait of some of the extraordinary musicians and larger-than-life personalities who brought America's music to life in the clubs of Chicago's South and West Sides. Bitten by the Blues is also an expansive history of half a century of blues in Chicago and around the world, tracing the blues recording business through massive transitions, as a genre of music originally created by and for black southerners adapted to an influx of white fans and musicians and found a worldwide audience.   Most of the smoky bars and packed clubs that fostered the Chicago blues scene have long since disappeared. But their soul lives on, and so does their sound. As real and audacious as the music that shaped it, Bitten by the Blues is a raucous journey through the world of Genuine Houserockin' Music.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49730569437457,"sku":"NGR9780226681986","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50789518639377,"sku":"GOR014073366","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022668198X.jpg?v=1751357011"},{"product_id":"blues-dream-of-billy-boy-arnold-book-billy-boy-arnold-9780226809205","title":"The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold","description":"Simply put, Billy Boy Arnold is one of the last men standing from the Chicago blues scene’s raucous heyday. What’s more, unlike most artists in this electrifying melting pot, who were Southern transplants, Arnold—a harmonica master who shared stages with Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf, plus a singer and hitmaker in his own right who first recorded the standards “I Wish You Would” and “I Ain’t Got You”—was born right here and has lived nowhere else. This makes his perspective on Chicago blues, its players, and its locales all the rarer and all the more valuable. Arnold has witnessed musical generations come and go, from the decline of prewar country blues to the birth of the electric blues and the worldwide spread of rock and roll. Working here in collaboration with writer and fellow musician Kim Field, he gets it all down. The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold is a remarkably clear-eyed testament to more than eighty years of musical love and creation, from Arnold’s adolescent quest to locate the legendary Sonny Boy Williamson, the story of how he named Bo Diddley Bo Diddley, and the ups and downs of his seven-decade recording career. Arnold’s tale—candidly told with humor, insight, and grit—is one that no fan of modern American music can afford to miss.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49739280187665,"sku":"NGR9780226809205","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50930556764433,"sku":"CIN022680920XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53130799939857,"sku":"GOR012128109","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022680920X.jpg?v=1751290857"},{"product_id":"everyone-against-us-book-allen-goodman-9780226826233","title":"Everyone against Us","description":"A former public defender testifies to the vivid human suffering at the heart of America’s criminal justice system.     As a public defender, Allen Goodman faced cross-examination from family and friends every day: How could he work to help criminals? How could he live with himself? Presumed guilty by association, Goodman quickly learned that people didn’t really want an answer; they wanted a justification, perhaps even an apology. Ever the idealist, Goodman answered anyway: Everyone deserves justice.  Everyone against Us is Goodman’s testimony of his life as a public defender. In it, he documents his efforts to defend clients, both guilty and innocent, against routine police abuse, prosecutorial misconduct, and unjust sentencing. To work in criminal justice, Goodman shows, is to confront and combat vivid human suffering, of both victims and perpetrators. From sex trafficking, murder, and abuse to false conviction, torture, and systemic racism, Goodman describes the daily experiences that both rattled his worldview and motivated him to work ever harder. Part memoir, part exposé, Everyone against Us is the moving story of an embattled civil servant who staves off the worst abuses of the criminal justice system, at great personal cost.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49742846427409,"sku":"NGR9780226826233","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51303766032657,"sku":"NIN9780226826233","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226826236.jpg?v=1750940907"},{"product_id":"third-city-book-larry-bennett-9780226323794","title":"The Third City","description":"Our traditional image of Chicago-as a gritty metropolis carved into ethnically defined enclaves where the game of machine politics overshadows its ends-is such a powerful shaper of the city's identity that many of its closest observers fail to notice that a new Chicago has emerged over the past two decades. Larry Bennett here tackles some of our more commonly held ideas about the Windy City-inherited from such icons as Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Daniel Burnham, Robert Park, Sara Paretsky, and Mike Royko-with the goal of better understanding Chicago as it is now: the third city. Bennett calls contemporary Chicago the third city to distinguish it from its two predecessors: the first city, a sprawling industrial center whose historical arc ran from the Civil War to the Great Depression; and the second city, the Rustbelt exemplar of the period from around 1950 to 1990. The third city features a dramatically revitalized urban core, a shifting population mix that includes new immigrant streams, and a growing number of middle-class professionals working in new economy sectors. It is also a city utterly transformed by the top-to-bottom reconstruction of public housing developments and the ambitious provision of public works like Millennium Park. It is, according to Bennett, a work in progress spearheaded by Richard M. Daley, a self-consciously innovative mayor whose strategy of neighborhood revitalization and urban renewal is a prototype of city governance for the twenty-first century. The Third City ultimately contends that to understand Chicago under Daley's charge is to understand what metropolitan life across North America may well look like in the coming decades.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49908760576273,"sku":"CIN022632379XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51715672441105,"sku":"GOR011032896","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52734618468625,"sku":"NIN9780226323794","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022632379X.jpg?v=1750779572"},{"product_id":"hearing-happiness-book-jaipreet-virdi-9780226690612","title":"Hearing Happiness","description":"At the age of four, Jaipreet Virdi's world went silent. A severe case of meningitis left her alive but deaf, suddenly treated differently by everyone. Her deafness downplayed by society and doctors, she struggled to \"pass\" as hearing for most of her life. Countless cures, treatments, and technologies led to dead ends. Never quite deaf enough for the Deaf community or quite hearing enough for the \"normal\" majority, Virdi was stuck in aural limbo for years. It wasn't until her thirties, exasperated by problems with new digital hearing aids, that she began to actively assert her deafness and reexamine society's--and her own--perception of life as a deaf person in America.    Through lyrical history and personal memoir, Hearing Happiness raises pivotal questions about deafness in American society and the endless quest for a cure. Taking us from the 1860s up to the present, Virdi combs archives and museums in order to understand the long history of curious cures: hearing trumpets, violet-ray apparatuses, pneumomassages, electrotherapy machines, airplane diving, bloodletting, skull hammering, and many more. Hundreds of procedures and products have promised grand miracles but always failed to deliver--a legacy that is still present in contemporary biomedicine.   Weaving Virdi's own experiences together with her exploration into the fascinating history of deafness cures, Hearing Happiness is a powerful story that America needs to hear.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50022891847953,"sku":"CIN022669061XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51693543686417,"sku":"CIN022669061XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51732146979089,"sku":"GOR011374742","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022669061X.jpg?v=1750909166"},{"product_id":"third-city-book-larry-bennett-9780226042930","title":"The Third City","description":"Our traditional image of Chicago - as a gritty metropolis carved into ethnically defined enclaves where the game of machine politics overshadows its ends - is such a powerful shaper of the city's identity that many of its closest observers fail to notice that a new Chicago has emerged over the past two decades. Larry Bennett here tackles some of our more commonly held ideas about the Windy City - inherited from such icons as Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Daniel Burnham, Robert Park, Sara Paretsky, and Mike Royko - with the goal of better understanding Chicago as it is now: the third city. Bennett calls contemporary Chicago the third city to distinguish it from its two predecessors: the first city, a sprawling industrial center whose historical arc ran from the Civil War to the Great Depression; and the second city, the rustbelt exemplar of the period from around 1950 to 1990. The third city features a dramatically revitalized urban core, a shifting population mix that includes new immigrant streams, and a growing number of middle-class professionals working in new economy sectors. It is also a city utterly transformed by the top-to-bottom reconstruction of public housing developments and the ambitious provision of public works like Millennium Park. It is, according to Bennett, a work in progress spearheaded by Richard M. Daley, a self-consciously innovative mayor whose strategy of neighborhood revitalization and urban renewal is a prototype of city governance for the twenty-first century. \"The Third City\" ultimately contends that to understand Chicago under Daley's charge is to understand what metropolitan life across North America may well look like in the coming decades.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50097027154193,"sku":"CIN0226042936G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51841189806353,"sku":"CIN0226042936VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226042936.jpg?v=1750738001"},{"product_id":"plan-of-chicago-book-carl-smith-9780226764719","title":"The Plan of Chicago","description":"Arguably the most influential document in the history of urban planning, Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, coauthored by Edward Bennett and produced in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago, proposed many of the city’s most distinctive features, including its lakefront parks and roadways, the Magnificent Mile, and Navy Pier. Carl Smith’s fascinating history reveals the Plan’s central role in shaping the ways people envision the cityscape and urban life itself.   Smith’s concise and accessible narrative begins with a survey of Chicago’s stunning rise from a tiny frontier settlement to the nation’s second-largest city. He then offers an illuminating exploration of the Plan’s creation and reveals how it embodies the renowned architect’s belief that cities can and must be remade for the better. The Plan defined the City Beautiful movement and was the first comprehensive attempt to reimagine a major American city. Smith points out the ways the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment.   Richly illustrated and incisively written, his insightful book will be indispensable to our understanding of Chicago, Daniel Burnham, and the emergence of the modern city.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50116159832337,"sku":"CIN0226764710G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51326576460049,"sku":"CIN0226764710VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226764710.jpg?v=1750843709"},{"product_id":"you-were-never-in-chicago-book-neil-steinberg-9780226104157","title":"You Were Never in Chicago","description":"In 1952 the New Yorker published a three-part essay by A. J. 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Throughout, Steinberg never loses the curiosity and close observation of an outsider, while thoughtfully considering how this perspective has shaped the city, and what it really means to belong. Intimate and layered, You Were Never in Chicago will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of all Chicagoans - be they born in the city or forever transplanted.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50116644569361,"sku":"GOR008343423","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346808869137,"sku":"CIN022610415XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346844684561,"sku":"CIN022610415XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000337039633,"sku":"NIN9780226104157","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52942330003729,"sku":"CIN022610415XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022610415X.jpg?v=1751389552"},{"product_id":"world-is-always-coming-to-an-end-book-carlo-rotella-9780226624037","title":"The World Is Always Coming to an End","description":"An urban neighborhood remakes itself every day—and unmakes itself, too. Houses and stores and streets define it in one way. But it’s also people—the people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors move in and move out. Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and burglar alarms. If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust outdoors, is it still a neighborhood?   In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood—a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting—or avoiding—each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened—stories of deindustrialization and street life; stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents’ deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there.   Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us. Tomorrow is another ending.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50162797019409,"sku":"CIN022662403XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52850337972497,"sku":"CIN022662403XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022662403X.jpg?v=1751324250"},{"product_id":"soldier-field-book-liam-t-a-ford-9780226257068","title":"Soldier Field","description":"Sports fans nationwide know Soldier Field as the home of the Chicago Bears. 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Ford describes it all in the voice of a seasoned reporter: the high school football games, track and field contests, rodeos, and even NASCAR races. Photographs, including many from the Chicago Park District's own collections, capture these remarkable scenes: the swelling crowds at ethnic festivals, Catholic masses, and political rallies. Few remember that Soldier Field hosted Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr., Judy Garland and Johnny Cash - as well as the Grateful Dead's final show. Now part of the city's bid for the 2016 Olympic Games, Chicago's stadium on the lake continues to make dramatic history. \"Soldier Field\" captures this history in the making and will captivate armchair historians and sports fans alike.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50248209072401,"sku":"CIN0226257061G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52172670796049,"sku":"CIN0226257061VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226257061.jpg?v=1751005233"},{"product_id":"never-a-city-so-real-book-alex-kotlowitz-9780226619019","title":"Never a City So Real","description":"Chicago is a tale of two cities, headlines declare. This narrative has been gaining steam alongside reports of growing economic divisions and diverging outlooks on the future of the city. Yet to keen observers of the Second City, this is nothing new. Those who truly know Chicago know that for decades--even centuries--the city has been defined by duality, possibly since the Great Fire scorched a visible line between the rubble and the saved. For writers like Alex Kotlowitz, the contradictions are what make Chicago. And it is these contradictions that form the heart of \u003ci\u003eNever a City So Real\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The book is a tour of the people of Chicago, those who have been Kotlowitz's guide into this city's - and by inference, this country's - heart. Chicago, after all, is America's city. Kotlowitz introduces us to the owner of a West Side soul food restaurant who believes in second chances, a steelworker turned history teacher, the Diego Rivera of the projects, and the lawyers and defendants who populate Chicago's Criminal Courts Building. These empathic, intimate stories chronicle the city's soul, its lifeblood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This new edition features a new afterword from the author, which examines the state of the city today as seen from the double-paned windows of a pawnshop. Ultimately, \u003ci\u003eNever a City So Real \u003c\/i\u003eis a love letter to Chicago, a place that Kotlowitz describes as a place that can tie me up in knots but a place that has been my muse, my friend, my joy.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50318490304785,"sku":"CIN022661901XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000260198673,"sku":"NIN9780226619019","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51182909620497,"sku":"CIN022661901XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":52709510873361,"sku":"CIN022661901XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022661901X.jpg?v=1751227740"},{"product_id":"wagon-and-other-stories-from-the-city-book-martin-preib-9780226679808","title":"The Wagon and Other Stories from the City","description":"Martin Preib is an officer in the Chicago Police Department - a beat cop whose first assignment as a rookie policeman was working on the wagon that picks up the dead. 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Preib's accounts, all told in his breathtaking prose, come alive in ways that readers will long remember.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346002055441,"sku":"CIN0226679802G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226679802.jpg?v=1750909162"},{"product_id":"friends-disappear-book-mary-barr-9780226156460","title":"Friends Disappear","description":"Mary Barr thinks a lot about the old photograph hanging on her refrigerator door. In it, she and a dozen or so of her friends from the Chicago suburb of Evanston sit on a porch. It's 1974, the summer after they graduated from Nichols Middle School, and what strikes her immediately-aside from the Soul Train-era clothes - is the diversity of the group: boys and girls, black and white, in the variety of poses you'd expect from a bunch of friends on the verge of high school. But the photo also speaks to the history of Evanston, to integration, and to the ways that those in the picture experienced and remembered growing up in a place that many at that time considered to be a racial utopia. In Friends Disappear Barr goes back to her old neighborhood and pieces together a history of Evanston with a particular emphasis on its neighborhoods, its schools, and its work life. She finds that there is a detrimental myth of integration surrounding Evanston despite bountiful evidence of actual segregation, both in the archives and from the life stories of her subjects. Curiously, the city's own desegregation plan is partly to blame. The initiative called for the redistribution of students from an all-black elementary school to institutions situated in white neighborhoods. That, however, required busing, and between the tensions it generated and obvious markers of class difference, the racial divide, far from being closed, was widened. 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