GO-GO CHICAGO

Chicago rides high with an adopted son in the White House and financial clout. But book editor, novelist, and native Thomas Dyja chronicles more profound and ambiguous influences in The Third Coast: When Chicago Built ' the American Dream (Penguin), a rollicking cultural history of the 1930s to the 1960s. What's a given now was often given by Chicago: high-rises, gospel and the blues, TV talk shows, Hugh Hefner's Playboy, McDonald's golden arches, sketch comedy, the bomb, and the brutish political machine. Creativity, muscle, and greed ran rampant. Bemoan mass markets and uniformity, but understand their genesis. Devour granular detail, too, of the torrid affair between rough-hewn Nelson Algren and cafe intellectual Simone de Beauvoir. Was it all dazzling coincidence or, as Dyja suggests, something in the water back then?

JAMES WARREN