The Illinois and Michigan Canal: A Contemporary Perspective in Essays and Photographs |
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The Illinois and Michigan Canal: A Contemporary Perspective in Essays and Photographs
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by Jim Redd
Sales Rank: 2460632
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List Price: $34.00
$34.00
At Amazon
on 4-15-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 128 pages
Published by: Southern Illinois University PressEdition: 1st Edition May 12, 1993
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0809316609
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0809316601
Book Dimensions:
10.3 x 7.2 x 0.6 inches
Weighs: 1.2 pounds
Book Description
Merging narration with exhibit-quality photographs—weaving history, nostalgia, and even a touch of Romance around good graphic evidence of what the canal has become today—Jim Redd takes us on a highly personal journey down the Illinois and Michigan Canal as it follows the Des Plaines and Illinois rivers from Chicago to La Salle.
In order to understand the whole of what the canal means now and what it has meant, Redd looks at and photographs the present, an old ruin of a canal out of use for half of a century. But he also sees the beginning, the time before the glaciers inched south—contemplating the two hundred years when the "ice flowing from the north just balanced the melting loss" when "the moving ice was like a continental conveyer belt, dumping tons of entrained rubble and granite from as far away as the Canadian Shield." He envisions the trappers, travelers, and traders who crossed the terrain—this vast mud lake. He brings back the days when Père Jacques Marquette brought the Jesuit message to the frontier.
Redd also tells what the canal did for the region, how it bolstered Chicago from a town of twelve hundred at the time of the 1836 groundbreaking ceremony to a city of seventy-four thousand after six years of operation in 1854. During the peak traffic—from the 1860s through the 1880s—more than five million tons of freight passed through the canal, generating a million dollars in tolls and opening a trade route from the East Coast to the Gulf of Mexico.
About The Author
Jim Redd is a writer and photographer living in Chicago.
Reader Reviews
In 1848, the Illinois and Michigan Canal was opened, connecting Lake Michigan to the Mississippi, via the Illinois River. In 1993, some sixty years after the I&M Canal finally closed, author and photographer Jim Redd followed the length of the Canal, documenting its history and its present condition. Overall, I found this to be a pretty interesting read. The author did a good job of showing the Canal as a relic of the past. My one complaint is that the author does have a certain, rather strange, contempt for his subject. Sprinkled throughout the book are distracting and unnecessary attacks on the canalmen, and the Canal itself (focusing primarily on its environmental impact). But, that said, it is a rather good book on the Canal, one that anyone interested in it should read. I give it a somewhat guarded recommendation.
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The Illinois and Michigan Canal: A Contemporary Perspective in Essays and Photographs
Available from Amazon
Price: $34.00
Updated on 4-15-2008.
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