Even though this reader lived in Chicago for just two (bless 'em) years, the city still has a magnetic hold on him.

There is Marshall Fields and Soldier Field. Kup's Column and the Cubbies. Big Stan and Big John cut off at mid-section by low-hanging clouds. Mayor Washington scrapping it up with Fast Eddie Vrdoliak in city council. Lake effect snow. And those friendly, unreserved, Midwestern people speaking with a peculiar, broad accent to us transplanted, you talkin' to me-type Northeasterners.

That's why "Chicago" is pure magic. All of the people, history, politics, and architecture are skillfully rolled into this slim and lively volume. Terkel catches Chicago's character and bottles it like no other chronicler could.

"Chicago" is also a freeze-frame, capturing a city whose edgy charm and sometimes gritty urban qualities are fading with the dawn of a new century. In this sense, the book is elegiac.

Ronald Reagan, speaking in a public service message for the Chamber of Commerce years ago, said it was unfortunate that he had only a minute to talk about why he liked Chicago. So it is with this review. But you'll have more than a minute with your memories when you open this book.

This book is a treasure. Terkel tells the story of a Chicago that seems to be passing. The passing of Terkel's Chicago is not entirely a good thing--the mural artists people have forgotten, the Greek delis that have given way to Starbucks and the working stiffs that can't afford to live in the city anymore. The shared triumph of Joe Louis and the political rallies.

People from Chicago should read this book and look at it from time to time to remind themselves about what makes Chicago the city that it is.

As a long time student of the photographic arts, I can truly appreciate the works of Helmut Newton. Intimate and perhaps slightly naughty, Newtons photographs have an exceptional power to them. Great book and a truly wonderful collection of work!!

HARD TIMES is moving oral history about the Great Depression of the 1930's from people who lived through it. A majority of the interviewees are Chicagoans, who on balance tend to reinforce the author's liberal views. We hear from former jobless, hoboes, people who had work, the rich, even a gangster. We read varied opinions on President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, which eased (but didn't end) the hard times before later evolving into the welfare state. Imagine times so difficult that thousands hopped freight trains and traveled long distances in an often-fruitless search for a job - any job. Some interviewees worked for the WPA, a New Deal program that put millions of unemployed men (including my grandfather) to work repairing sidewalks and building structures like post offices and Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. HARD TIMES helps readers understand why so many of our grandparents kept talking about the Depression long after it had ended.

Some say that Studs Terkel isn't an author, but merely a good listener with a tape recorder. Either way, the result is a series of very readable oral histories such as HARD TIMES, THE GOOD WAR, DIVISION STREET, WORKING, etc.

I had to read Studs Terkel's "Hard Times" for school. At first it seemed confusing and long b/c there where no main characters and it was 462 pages. I was surprised to sincerely enjoy it. It was a captivating book with many fascinating stories. I liked the way the book shows you all aspects of the Depression from people with all different lifestyles.

History is best talked about, not read. You can read scores of books about the depression, get your dates and figures right, but until you read first hand accounts you can never truly understand the times.

As a twenty-something in this new millenia, the depression has been shrowded in mystery for me, my parents got only bits and pieces from theirs, and I got even less from them. This book fills in the pieces, helps me understand an era I know very little about, and allows me to understand how that era shaped my parents, and myself.

Mr. Terkel has done us all a great favor with his books, and this one is on the top of my list.

Richard Evans offers the student of modern German history an excellent review of the so-called Historikerstreit, which took place amongst academics in the mid to late 1980s. He outlines the basic arguments of those "neoconservative" historians who attempted to relativize the crimes of the Nazi regime. Evans focuses primarily on Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber, both of whom claimed that Nazi atrocities were justifiable responses to impending violence on the part of the Soviet Union. These historians also asserted that the Holocaust was not fundamentally different from Stalin's murder of Soviet citizens in the Gulags or from the massacre of Armenians in 1915 by the Turks. Evans clearly sides with the majority of historians when he argues that these attempts at relativizing Nazi crimes are irresponsible. Overall, this book is quite useful to the serious student who wants a quick review of a heated historiographical debate in modern German history.

If you seem to have fond memories of the well-stocked bookstores of twenty or twenty-five years ago, it may not be all false nostalgia or a curmudgeonly disgust with modern "culture." Schiffrin, the former head of Pantheon Books, lays out in detail the sad decline of American publishing. The chief culprits are the mega-mergered conglomerates that have established a virtual stranglehold on the book trade in this country and elsewhere. Schiffrin's experience at Pantheon is used as an example of the disastrous effects of the takeover of small independent publishers by large, bottom-line oriented corporations. One remembers the incredibly interesting books Pantheon itself used to publish, which, if similar offerings were to even see the light of day now, they would be taken on by a university press, if at all. Schiffrin's thesis that the short-term bottom-line oriented outlook of the major publishing conglomerates is the main culprit, and it is hard to dispute this. Although a lot of titles continue to be published in this country, there has been a marginalization of serious "challenging" books from the mainstream publishing houses, and there has been a rightward shift in the politics of those books that deal with social and political issues, to coincide with the politics of their publishers. Schiffrin's accounts of the mendacity of the often near-illiterate businesspeople in charge is funny and sad. Book publishing should not be totally dictated by short-term profits. The intellectual decline of this counrty will only accelerate if this trend is perpetuated. My only gripe with this book is that Schiffrin himself is in need of better editors, as there are some mistakes here that his publisher should have caught.

Mr. Schiffrin has used the benefit of 40 years of publishing experience to develop a powerful argument that society is being denied access to important new ideas through books. This is occurring because of changes in ownership (and management philosophies) in the publishing industry, and similar effects in book retailing.

Along the way in telling this story, you will read many interesting stories about publishing now-famous authors like Gunnar Myrdal (later winner of the Novel Prize) and Studs Terkel.

The former economic concept of a publisher was to earn an adequate income overall, and to operate as frugally as possible. Editors were paid like academics, and physical plant was modest. Profits above what was absolutely needed could be plowed back into books that presented important ideas, but might not earn their keep, and books that would require time to develop an audience.

Books that challenged the conventional wisdom were often best sellers in this environment. That kind of public opinion shift seldom happens today through books.

Mr. Schiffrin uses his own publishing experiences as a microcosm of these issues. Pantheon, which his father founded, was sold to Random House in 1961, and mr. Schiffrin joined to work in marketing. After Random House was bought by RCA, financial discipline was brought in to require that each book seek to earn a profit from its own activities in the near term. That began a process of trimming and redirecting lists.

Later, Random House was sold again, this time to S.I. Newhouse. Plans were soon afoot to greatly reduce Pantheon, and the staff eventually resigned en masse to protest just as the ax started to fall. Mr. Schiffrin left, also, and began a search for funding to start a new publishing house, The New Press. He was able to launch this independent publisher with the help of several foundation grants and W.W. Norton being willing to distribute the books. Random House, meanwhile, did not grow its profits very much and was sold to Bertelsmann in 1998.

During these intervening years, Newhouse actually lost lots of money seeking to improve profits in book publishing. Enormous losses occurred in unearned advances in seeking blockbusters. Overhead costs soared as salaries, marketing, and expense accounts were expanded enormously.

By seeking ever higher near-term profits, publishers have established a market test for new books that makes it more attractive to publish an offshoot of a new Hollywood movie than a book challenging the political orthodoxy. Books like the former have swelled while the latter have dwindled. Many publishers and imprints now publish in very few categories, with limited types of books in those remaining categories.

The industry has also become very concentrated. Ten publishers accounted for 75 percent of U.S. book sales in 1999. The publishing operations themselves are now small parts of large media conglomerates. Some of these publishing conglomerates seem to use book publishing as a way to curry favor for other parts of their businesses. Rupert Murdoch appeared to have done so in publishing a certain work while not publishing others, in a way that would be most appealing to Chinese politicians while trying to get permission to take Sky Broadcasting into mainland China.

Even university presses are under tighter budgets. This means that about 1 percent of the book publishing resources are available through independent, university, and religious-organization-connected presses to open the doors to unpopular ideas. He argues that this is a challenge to our very concept of a free society. I agree wholeheartedly.

The main countervailing force is the Internet. No one knows how this will play out, but it could change the economics of book publishing to allow independent publishers and self-publishing to flourish. If electronic publishing becomes more mainstream, fewer authors may feel that they need the traditional publishers. Stephen King's now-famous experiment of publishing his novella electronically is described. Time will tell how this will all turn out.

In the meantime, I have a suggestion for all readers. We should each take some sizeable percentage of our reading and dedicate it to reading works in subjects we would normally not consider, authors we do not know already and who are not well-known generally, and from publishers who are not in the top ten. This would encourage a greater diversity of ideas more than anything that publishers can do. I promise to be sure to do this with my reviews from now on to help you follow up on this idea and have successful reading experiences at the same time.

Overcome more stalled thinking through your reading!

...

At least from a writer's perspective, all of Schiffrin's assertions about the publishing industry are stunningly true. In fact, my agent quit the business some years ago after attending a lecture by a revoltingly wealthy and revoltingly arrogant agent who assured her and the rest of the audience that yes, money is indeed the bottom line.

As Mr. Schiffrin points out, publishers are simply not interested in authors anymore, they are interested only in the book being submitted. That is to say, there is no attempt-as in the days of Max Perkins, the legendary Scribner's editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe-to invest in an author whose first book may not be a great seller, nor even her second but who will nonetheless write books the house can be proud of and may some day turn produce that most marvelous of beasts, the literary bestseller (a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike, Toni Morrison).

In a smooth, flowing voice that, while it may lack bells and whistles, is exceptionally lucid, Schiffrin tells the story of how publishing houses went from being, for the most part, "family owned and small, content with the modest profits that came from a business that still saw itself as linked to intellectual and cultural life" to an industry in which some of the executives, such as Alberto Vitale at Random House, freely admit they are too busy to read a book! I was riveted almost from the opening page.

Some of the reviewers have accused Schiffrin of being elitist-maybe because he lives on the Upper West Side or because he believes editors should have some say-beyond profitability--in what is being published. They find him distressingly left wing. The fact is, Schiffrin is arguing for all editors, EVERYwhere to get behind authors of their choice. Many small houses will present many diverse voices rather than 5 huge conglomerates chasing the same dollar with their celebrity memoirs and Tom Clancy thrillers. He argues for the freedom for editors and houses to express their tastes and to let the public decide whether that taste suits them or not. But if a book never sees the light of day because corporate executives, who often know nothing about books (Vitale, Schiffrin points out "did eventually agree to read the novels of Judith Krantz" published by his own company), decide it won't sell enough copies, then you have market censorship. When that happens on a large enough scale, it's not the end of democracy, but democracy is certainly weakened by a shrinking pool of ideas and opinions from which to draw. Schiffrin quotes the German publisher, Klaus Wagenbach: "If books with small print runs disappear, the future will die. Kafka's first book was published with a printing of 800 copies. Brecht's first work merited 600. What would have happened if someone had decided that was not worth it?" Somehow, advocating books with tiny print runs like this doesn't strike me as elitist.

If you are even slightly connected to the book business, if you are at all interested in books, if you give any thought at all to the future of the free exchange of ideas in this country and abroad, this is a must-read. I can't recommend it highly enough.