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High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing by Alex Kotlowitz EPUB

In 1999, the Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) Plan for Transformation instigated the relocation of thousands of families and the destruction of buildings that had once held such promise, especially for families who came to the city as part of the Great Migration. In the latest book from the admirable and acclaimed Voices of Witness oral-history series, we hear from public-housing residents. The majority of the narrators, each a memorable storyteller, have mixed feelings about seeing the high rises demolished, and we feel their confusion: these besieged towers were home but also the source of so much pain and neglect. As touching, illuminating, and valuable as these personal accounts are, Petty includes much more. The incredibly useful appendixes include a time line, glossary, and commentary from scholar D. Bradford Hunt and journalist Ben Austen. Also of great interest is an excerpt from a 2011 CHA report on 10 years of relocations and demolitions. This book accomplishes its mission to give voice to public-housing residents tenfold but is equally successful as a significant work of American urban history. --Annie Tully

"When I was a kid on the south side of Chicago I’d drive by the Taylor Homes or Cabrini Green and, equipped with a head full of bleak legends, wonder: 'What’s going on in there?' Now I know. This astonishing book tells us that what was going on in there was life: loving, fighting, kindness, insanity, addiction, aspiration, terror, redemption everything that goes on in any human community but with the dual compressions of poverty and neglect. Audrey Petty and her team have recorded and edited these stories in a way that is joyful, novelistic, and deeply moving. High Rise Stories radically expanded my understanding of human beings." -George Saunders, author of Tenth of December

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