From the author of
There Are No Children Here and
The Other Side of the River,
a new work: NEVER A CITY SO REAL

Chicago is one of America’s most iconic and historic cities. For Alex Kotlowitz, an accidental Chicagoan, it is the perfect perch from which to peer into America’s heart. It’s a place, as one historian has said, of “messy vitalities.”

NEVER A CITY SO REAL takes the reader into America’s quintessential city through the pulse of a lively cast of Chicago characters: from steel worker Ed Sadlowski who became a working class hero only to fall then rise again in a slightly different guise, to Milton Reed who for years has painted murals in the nation’s most depressed community, to Dave Boyle who took on the mob and nearly lost.

As with There Are No Children Here, this is not so much a tour of a place as a chronicle of its soul, its lifeblood. Never a City So Real is a tour of the people of Chicago, who have been his guides into this city’s – and by inference, this country’s – heart.