The title is from a book by Studs Terkel (1912-2008), a best-selling American author and journalist who lived in Chicago. It's a book of interviews published in 1967, in the midst of one of the hottest periods of XX century cultural transformation in the US; the civil-rights movement is one good example of that transformation, to mention just one major thing.
It's a book about Chicago, and it's part of my evolving love affair with this town. It's a great selection of testimonies, by people from all walks of life, and a fascinating way to get inside America, and inside a city that shaped so much of what we know about the US as a whole; free-market capitalism, sky-scrappers, post-Bauhaus functionalist architecture (by the German-born Mies van der Rohe), the industrialisation of meat production and its consequences on civilisation as we know it, racial zoning laws and Black ghettos, labour and anarchist movements, the birth of urban sociology, the invention of futures and derivatives in agriculture, gangsters (remember Al Capone?), the melting pot, the Blues, anti-Vietnam war protests, a new concept of community work with Jane Addams and Hull House. NYC, move over!
Part XXI, called The Inheritors, a series of interviews with young people, opens with the following lines by Lucky Miller, aged 19, "I love life. I only wish some of it would come my way". Ah, Lucky you, to make poetry so easily!
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