Dawson can’t identify a clear path to the kinds of extreme reforms he advocates, but at least he puts subjects on the table that many want to avoid facing up to. For instance, rising sea levels are almost guaranteed to require painful retreats from coastal settlement. But it’s much sexier to talk about building green skyscrapers than it is to envision abandoning Miami Beach. The problem for writers like Dawson is that the future they foresee is so gloomy it promotes a fatalism that justifies inaction.

CHICAGO ON THE MAKE

Power and Inequality in a Modern City

By Andrew J. Diamond

421 pp. University of California. $29.95.

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This book is as much polemic as analysis. Nevertheless it effectively details the long history of racial conflict and abuse that has led to Chicago becoming one of America’s most segregated cities. Diamond includes the standard story of restrictive covenants, blockbusting, freeway and public housing construction and other exclusionary techniques. He also covers Chicago’s tradition of violence, much of it coming from white ethnic street gangs and mobs that were engaged in an ultimately failed attempt to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods. Chicago was so hostile to blacks that Martin Luther King Jr. made little impact there. There’s such a wealth of material here that incidents meriting book-length treatment, like the Chicago police’s use of suffocation and electric torture to extract false confessions from black men, can garner only a page or two.

Unfortunately, Diamond is too one-sided in his treatment of race, making excuses for black gangs and for the exploitative numbers rackets that plague black neighborhoods. Diamond also can’t convincingly explain why blacks have given overwhelming electoral support to the Democratic machine that has treated them so poorly. Just recently the neoliberal Rahm Emanuel won the black vote in his re-election over the progressive Chuy Garcia. Broader looks at Chicago’s civic and political cultures are needed to explain this, something Diamond’s focus can’t do.