The World Is Always Coming to an End, Carlo Rotella
The World Is Always Coming to an End, Carlo Rotella
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The World Is Always Coming to an End
Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood

Author: Carlo Rotella

Narrator: Carlo Rotella

Unabridged: 9 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/06/2024

Synopsis

An urban neighborhood remakes itself every day—and unmakes itself, too. Houses and stores and streets define it in one way. But it’s also people—the people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors move in and move out. Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and burglar alarms. If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust outdoors, is it still a neighborhood? In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood—a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting—or avoiding—each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened—stories of deindustrialization and street life; stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor.
Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us. Tomorrow is another ending.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Paris

I first encountered this book in essay form, as an excerpt on walking a neighborhood extracted for some literary non fic publication. I feel as if that format (and length) is a more useful mode for the ideas of this book, which flow between personal recollection/reflection and broader step backs of......more

Goodreads review by Jenna

I think this book is actually a series of essays, and although Rotella "pulls out" the personal reflections from most of sociology in the first half in order to try and write two overlapping stories, in the second half they start to blend, especially in the final chapter about "Lost Cities", which i......more

Goodreads review by David

Wow. Its hard to know where to start. This is a highly personalized ethnography of a Chicago neighborhood that has experienced some major challenges. At the same time, the author integrates a highly personal perspective -- he basically grew up in this neighborhood. He is not an anthropologist but a......more

Goodreads review by Juli!~

Part memoir, part sociographic and ethnographic. I thought this was touching and thought provoking. I thought the chapter on the community of limited liability was really interesting - if the neighborhood wasn't providing then people shift focus to other voluntary associations. "A neighborhood is a......more

Goodreads review by George

Beautifully written and consistently interesting, The World Is Always Coming to an End illuminates not only the history and present day of a fascinating neighborhood in Chicago, but makes the reader reflect on notions of neighborhood, home, social change, and the way we grow into our lives through w......more

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