Books Briefly
Books Briefly Machine Malfunction CHICAGO DIVIDED: THE MAKING OF A BLACK MAYOR by Paul Kleppner Northern Illinois University Press. 313 pp. $26 cloth; $9.50 paper. Chicago's politics are at once...
...In his third novel, Michael Thomas explores a father-son-daughter rivalry in a corporate takeover in the broadcasting industry...
...The famed Machine, Kleppner writes, guaranteed "white dominance over the city's culture-transmitting agencies, especially its schools, its neighborhoods, and its police...
...Money Is All HARD MONEY by Michael M. Thomas Elisabeth Sifton Books/Viking Press...
...17.95...
...451 pp...
...Novelist Thomas, who is also an art historian, vents his scorn at the extravagant opulence of the newly rich and their lack of taste in art...
...The narrator is a journalist, Sam Mountcastle, who is summoned to team up with X, a retired giant of commercial television...
...he was leading "a crusade for political liberation...
...In Chicago Divided, Paul Kleppner describes the city's political circus and explains the seriousness behind it...
...When he turns his artillery on President Erwitt, his "old money" corporate interests are overwhelmed by "hard money," the big moguls in oil, military contracting, real estate, brokerage houses, and investment banking...
...Washington was not just fighting the Machine...
...Kleppner, a historian and political scientist at Northern Illinois University, recalls the struggle in detailed but lively terms...
...Chicago's politics are at once funny and foul—funny because the practitioners speak frankly, foul because there is so much racism...
...Under son Abner, X's old news corporation has become a highly profitable conglomerate...
...His immediate subject is the 1983 election of Harold Washington, but he begins with the long history in which blacks were "subjects, not citizens, of their city...
...For a while, the legendary X brings innovation and quality standards to management and public entertainment...
...At seventy-five, X is concerned about posterity and wants to come out of retirement to revitalize news broadcasting and nip away at the incumbent President, Eldon Erwitt, and his Eldonomics...
...X's ugly-duckling daughter has the last laugh...
Vol. 49 • October 1985 • No. 10
