Taj's Reviews > Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Re-read on Amtrak to and from Chicago. Much better than when reading in a day for a class. Cronon is at his best when describing the transubstantiation of nature's bounty into commodity. Theme of "first & second natures" is explored throughout— "resorting to the Hegelian and Marxist terms 'first nature' (original, prehuman nature) and 'second nature' (the artificial nature that people erect atop first nature)." Waxes poetic, too, about Capital, which slowly sidles onto the stage and is introduced as a dramatis persona only 75% of the way through, when the reader has seen much its shadowy tendrils & animating force, but only through second-hand observation. Important explorations of the link between economy & ecology, which I think are particularly important. (And what distinguishes the two? Oiko-nomos & oiko-logos? Each could almost equally as well be referred to as the other.) Drives home point about the linkage & co-development of the city & country, and eviscerates the American pastoral/yeoman fantasy.

Weakest in the chapter on debt linkages examined via bankruptcy records: interesting & innovative use of primary sources, but I'm not sure it would stand up to more thorough examination. Attempts to control for problems inherent in looking at bankruptcy records (i.e. only seeing flows of bad debt) by studying periods after economic shocks, because of their exogeneity—but I think it's still a little hand-wavey. More detailed & rigorous econometrics might be in order.