Carl Smith, an English professor at Northwestern University, dives into this familiar material, and though Chicago’s Great Fire doesn’t exactly break new ground, it serves as a wonderfully thoughtful and concise retelling of the tragedy and its aftermath ... But Chicago’s Great Fire goes beyond the disaster and its cause to recount the remarkable way the city sprang back.
The history of events can and does make for entertaining reading, especially when there is a dispute about what the events in question actually were. Chicago's Great Fire is on top of this, localizing the start of the fire in the O’Leary barn, but absolving Mrs. O’Leary and her cow of any responsibility for setting it ... But the history of ideas is often more fascinating, and it is here where Smith finds his best expression ... Chicago's Great Fire is an exemplary historical retelling of an event that still looms large in the American imagination, and an exploration of how the response to it was shaped by the ideas and ideals of the time. It manages the difficult balance between these two modes expertly, with an eye towards both the interesting anecdotal narrative and the greater historical significance.
It is, simply put, the best book ever written about the fire, a work of deep scholarship by Carl Smith that reads with the forceful narrative of a fine novel. It puts the fire and its aftermath in historical, political and social context. It’s a revelatory pleasure to read.
Smith drops readers right into the action, transforming us into virtual citizens caught up in the conflagration and its aftermath of raucous political debates, intense class and ethnic tensions, yellow journalism, and the incredible energy and drive that enabled Chicagoans to rebuild ... [Smith is] a true master of his craft, set[ting] the historical record straight in advance of the sesquicentennial anniversary of Chicago’s 'great fire'.
Smith's description of the fire's race through the city is gripping. Though readers already know how the story ends, he creates narrative tension through a series of vignettes based on the memories of those who fled the fire — including the long-maligned Mrs. O'Leary ... His discussion of why Chicago was vulnerable to fire and how it rebounded so quickly are equally fascinating ... Chicago's Great Fire is a colorful and careful account of the growth and regrowth of an American city.
Smith’s book resonates on unexpected levels for any Chicagoan—indeed, any human being—in this historical moment of worldwide disease ... Chicago’s Great Fire is an important book of Chicago history, highly readable, and deeply researched. Amazingly, it is also the first book since the 1871 conflagration to tell the story of the fire in a comprehensive way ... In Chicago’s Great Fire , Smith builds on these earlier works and, for the first time, brings together their insights into a thoroughgoing look at the fire, its aftermath and its meaning ... Carl Smith has written a crackerjack history that is rousing, thought-provoking and a necessary addition to the city’s historical bookshelf.
... a fascinating new history billed as nothing less than the first accessible, 'carefully researched' popular accounting of the fire ... Smith’s book is, in many ways, a narrative about the narrative that Chicago tells itself.
Historian Smith exhaustively chronicles the 1871 fire that destroyed nearly three square miles of Chicago and left approximately 90,000 people homeless ... The level of detail astonishes, but grows ponderous at times. Still, this is a definitive retelling of one of America’s 'most fabled disasters.'
