Read Online Make Me a City A Novel Audible Audio Edition Jonathan Carr Fred Berman Macmillan Audio Books

Product details Audible Audiobook Listening Length 16 hours and 18 minutes Program Type Audiobook Version Unabridged Publisher Macmillan Audio Audible.com Release Date March 19, 2019 Whispersync for Voice Ready Language English, English ASIN B07PDT19PJ

Make Me a City A Novel Audible Audio Edition Jonathan Carr Fred Berman Macmillan Audio Books Reviews

• The effort to tell the history of Chicago through fictional accounts ultimately is unsuccessful. The dialect is distracting and obscures meaning. The bias of the author against innovation and progress is transparent and annoying. The emphasis on love affairs in every episode is unnecessary and jerks the reader away from the historical timeline.
• I received a free copy of Make Me a City from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review.
  
  This lengthy historical fiction reveals the "facts" behind the founding and growth of the city of Chicago through the 19th century. Facts is in quotation marks because the author, through his major narrator-writer Prof. Milton Winship, uses the term alternative facts quite frequently in his tale. The cast of characters is quite lengthy and readers will see them at different stages of their lives and at different stages in Chicago's evolution from dirty backwater to major metropolitan city.
  
  Throughout Make Me a City events and characters intertwine in such a way that there are few heroes and few pure successes. Greed, envy, and racism motivate some while wonder, grit, and love establish others. Real events like the establishment of a sanitary water system, the reversal of the Chicago River, the expansion of the railroad, and the World's Fair are clearly utilized to portray Chicago's growth in size and national importance. But such positive steps toward urban growth come at a substantial cost in lives and dollars. Powerful, unscrupulous people frequently managed to get a cut because immediate profit was viewed as more important than long-term safety and health.
  
  Make Me a City is a sweeping view of a century of change with no illusion that sacrifices and loss are part of development and financial growth. Some suffer so that a few will wildly succeed. This is not a fast read but it is well worth the investment of time.
• I’ve only been to Chicago a handful of times but I absolutely love the city and was so looking forward to learning the history. But this book did not live up to my expectations. Each chapter covers a specific timeframe of a year or more starting in the 1800’s and it moves between different events, happenings, and following several different people. I didn’t care for the flow of the story, when I would just got interested in one chapter, the next one would be on a completely different subject.
  All was not completely lost though, I did learn many facts that I did not know before, such as the raising of the city, the sewage problem and the building of the canal, but I felt like the story was shallow on human interest and could have been told in a more fluent manner.
  My biggest con on the entire book was the flow. I would not consider this an actual novel, it is a medley of historic facts from eyewitnesses, hearsay, newspaper articles and letters. Not what I was expecting. If you are a history buff, it may appeal to you.
  I was given an advanced copy from Henry Holt and Company through Net Galley for my honest review, this one gets 3***’s.
• Carr’s entertaining and uniquely written novel relates the “history” of Chicago’s first hundred years. Using many plot devices to unfold the story to readers, the novels storyline comes to us through excerpts from an “alternative” history manuscript, journal entries, letters, and newspaper articles among other devices. There is an eclectic mix of characters and their descendants, both historic and fictional, some who travel through the narrative, while others appearing only briefly.
  
  This sweeping portrayal of Chicago at its best and worst, its highs and lows, is exceptional. From prairie town to booming metropolis, Chicago and its residents come alive with the details and descriptions in Carr’s prose. He makes us feel the struggle and abject poverty of the immigrants as well as the greed and opulence of monied class.
  This is a sweeping and compelling novel of what is takes to make a city. Whether you are from Chicago, have visited there, or just love an engaging and expansive work of historical fiction, be sure and pick this one up.
  
  Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt and Co. for the eARC.
• Don't expect a straight narrative from this tale of Chicago between 1800 and 1900. Carr has used a variety of voices and sources to pull together what is more a series of vignettes than a conventional novel. This makes for some confusion early on but is ultimately rewarding because it reflects the patchwork nature of a great city. Jean Baptiste Pointe de Sable and his descendants figure prominently, as is appropriate. You might find one voice more compelling than another but don't count on it necessarily reappearing. I found this fascinating but understand why others might find it frustrating. Thanks to net galley for the ARC. I knew virtually nothing about Chicago before this book and found it very informative.
• Make me a City is a sprawling, raucous, noisy novel set in the early years of Chicago. Told through the lens of the founding father Pointe du Sable and his descendants, “City” delves the depths of the striving, ambitious, often criminal but always energetic stories of the first inhabitants of the city on the prairie.
  
  I loved the way story kept returning to the family of du Sable. In every generation, the history kept returning to the lie that formed the founding story, and its reverberations through the years.
  
  I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
• Make Me a City by Jonathan Carr is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in early March.
  
  A semi-fictionalized chronology of Chicago, starting in 1800, in the style of an academic journal in a second-person format, recalling possible conversations and written correspondence around historic events. The quality of writing is adequate, even good, but the story is hard to grasp, like a based-on-a-true-story historic saga that you start watching when it’s already a quarter of the way through.