how whether or not they continue and become like singapore or the country i live in most of the time, italy, is a function of a different set of considerations which is trade off trips between incentives and labor markets and all the things we talked about among ourselves in the advanced countries. it is a different set of considerations and i have no idea how china can make those choices and where they will end up in the hierarchy eventually. george? >> have you perceived china getting off of its export -- is that going to be something that is natural or is it something -- >> very good question. there are two parts to that. they have to solve this problem on the aggregate demand and household income. if they are successful on social insurance they will lower the savings rate which is 30%. that will make a contribution but you can't solve the problem with that and asian countries tend to save at high rates. it really has to do with income mostly and then the question outsiders and insiders worry about is if the export sector, labor intense one that used to exist, about to be replaced by higher value-added exports sector and lose its relative significance relative to domestic economy, where are the four hundred million people who still have to move to the urban areas going to go? the answer people frequently come up with is there isn't anywhere to go. that was the route into the modern economy. that is wrong. the answer to the question where they are going to go is into the service sectors that are built into the massively expanding urban environment. that is a different route into the modern economy. is that railway -- closes down, then you get what people really fear which is the dual economy structure where they are trapped. probably one of the reasons the chinese are a little cautious about the exchange rate mechanism and probably biased towards the underevaluation even for people outside who are sympathetic to the idea of managing the relative price is uncertainty about the effectiveness and speak of the urban service sector. and i know they have huge fears of having some version of push versus pull in the nation process where people move to the city not because there is opportunity but because in rural areas the opportunity has declined so dramatically there is nowhere else to go and we have seen that in other parts of the world. they are scared to death of that and one reason they drag their feet on dismantling the urban president's system is precisely because that essentially turns the whole process over to market sources and incentives and it can go very wrong. thank you very much for having me. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction offer or book you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org. >> we're back at the 2011 chicago tribune printer's wrote literary festival. ellis cose talks about his book "the end of anger: a new generation's take on race and rage". >> thank you. welcome back to chicago. >> delighted to be. cf1ly eñandm put it in context 18 years ago you wrote the rage of a privileged class which talks about african-american middle class, african-americans being feeling in excruciating pain i think was the phrase. a new book is coming out this month, the end of anger which basically says okay feeling pretty good. so what happened? what changed? a lot changed. but before i even address that the book is interesting because you're right i did write a book about range, and the fundamental point that one person after another made in that book and conducted well over 100 middle-class african-americans the essential point we summed up with i don't care how hard i work or what networks i try to get into it is not possible to get past the glass ceiling. not possible to make it to the top jobs or to be the ceo of a corporation or to be the president's of the company. what changed? a couple things changed. not too long after rage came out which the big magazine excerpt came out of 93 and the book came out in 94. not long after rage came out you saw changes in corporate america. you saw a small but interesting group begin to rise. you saw richard carson became the head of time warner and the head of american express. you saw change in the calculus. of course with the recent presidential election you saw something that many people of many colors felt never happened at least in our lifetime which was the election of a president identified as african-american. the other thing that happened which is something that i found interesting is in the years since that book came out a new generation has come along so a lot of the voices represented in rage are different from the voice is represented in "the end of anger". it is not just a couple words about that. even though i've settled 100 interviews for rage i did more for this book. in addition to interviews a conducted a couple surveys. i did a survey of the black alumni of harvard business school. 74 questions. and also survey of graduates called the better chance which is a program that sends people for the most part from minority to some of the best secondary schools in the country so we did two surveys of these folks. what i found fascinating, i began to look through the results of surveys was the difference in how people respond to questions about opportunity and access as a functioning of age for generations and i am sure we will go through this later. the short story is those people who are under 40 and are and have a system have organized where i call these people generation 3-peat will. people who are under 40 respond differently to those who are over 40 in terms of how much discrimination they perceive in the workplace and in terms of what kind of opportunities were available for them personally. in terms of how difficult it was to make it in american society. so once i saw this generational break up in the data we went back and conducted over 130 follow up interviews for people in a survey in addition to 100 conducted for the book. it was a different methodology. the country changed. but also we look at a different generation. >> part of it is generational and part is the obama collection, capstone to the corporate gains that were made. >> one of the things i had as a backdrop for this book were a series of studies by gallup, by the washington post indicating there was a measurable increase in terms of optimism in african-americans. the most recent large poll was done this year and it continues to show that african-americans are significantly more optimistic than they were ten years ago and becoming more optimistic than whites when it comes to looking at how people see the strength of the economy and engage processes for the future and how they see prospects for themselves. >> rob brown had a national journal poll that says two thirds of african-americans in the u.s. said that barack obama's policies would significantly help their advancement. the number for whites was 21%. there was quite a gap. [talking over each other] >> in terms of african-americans saying obama's election creates more opportunities for african-americans. it has been down since the election. in my own survey it is not as high as 70% but closer to 30% or 40% who were saying that would help them. but i also think the obama election is not just one phenomenon that accounts for all of this. it takes place against the backdrop of many things. certainly a huge event and one that for many people of color and others as well indicates things may be possible in this country that a lot of people thought were impossible a few years ago. it is an event that i call the end of final revelation. a series of things that happened which cause a lot of people to sit back and say let me rethink some fundamental assumptions i have always made about where this country is and where it is possible for people to go. >> what if he loses in 2012? >> the gain in you saw from his election in 2008 will there be a resumption of danger? >> first of all i am very careful to state in the book that there's a lot of angry people out there. that hasn't changed. there are a lot of angry people. some of the most angry people are the tea party types so it is not just black people who are angry. a anger is not going to go away but i also think the fact the presidency even if he loses in 2012 won't go away and the reassessment that has begun to take place won't stop whether or not he wins there will be a lot of disappointed people of all colors because if he loses -- but i don't think it will change the fundamental way people are beginning to look at what is possible in the physical arena. >> is very real divide in african-american thoughts or intellectual media that ask this based on what cornell west recently said? he said obama is a black mascot of wall street and black puppet of corporate -- now he has become head of the american killing machine and is proud of it. >> cornell is obviously rather upset. he is obviously a little upset. at any number of things with obama. i haven't spoken to him about his particular comments in this case. but he has consistently been a critic of obama along those lines and also ideologically they are in different places, correll and barack obama. >> is this more than attention grabbing? >> it has always been a mistake to assume that any group of african-americans are a monolith and it is always a mistake to assume people will all think the same way. we never have. no other group i am aware of ever has. there have been differences. what changed to some extent is willingness to air these differences publicly. clearly cornell west made the decision that he was ready and eager to go public with any number of complaints about barack obama and some of his complaints had to do with operation tickets and things like that. but i think it is healthy that he feels free and other people feel free to criticize this president. no president should be above criticism even from a group he happens to be long to. if you go back some time ago to the clarence thomas nomination there was a consternation among much of the black leadership at that point when he was nominated about whether to criticize him or not, with the people would stay quiet in the hopes that he would be something he hadn't demonstrated he had any inclination to be. i don't think that is healthy and whether or not i agree with all of cornell's criticisms he has the right to criticize and i don't think there's anything bizarre about that and it is healthy. >> you do talk to a number of people in chicago from the left who do complain or say that barack obama can go to egypt and give a speech or give a speech on the middle east and the world talks about the middle east for the next week so why hasn't barack obama come to the west side of chicago or gone to d 4 and talk about urban america? he missed an opportunity to put those issues which it is fair to say -- >> george bush ignored on higher plane? >> barack obama has a set of issues a white president doesn't have. i don't know what he is going to do if he gets a second term. when he tried to make a point, a teacherable moment -- stepped outside by the police in cambridge, he said okay. this is clearly a case of a cop overreacting and whatever the good professor said to him he was not creating a public disturbance or danger to anybody. so let me say -- let me use this moment to make statements about police behavior when it comes to the african-american community. there was a fire storm of reaction that broke down along racial lines. the vast majority of whites responded with dismay and anger and essentially saying the president shouldn't be getting involved in this stuff. one of the issues this president had that clinton didn't have is the issue of being accused of showing favoritism to the racial minority. if you look at the tea party there was a poll a year-and-a-half ago by the new york times bringing out the tea party response. vast majority of people who considered themselves part of the tea party agreed that obama had given too much attention to african-americans etc.. it would be politically naive to think he doesn't have this in his head. should he make some strong statements and have strong policies with regard to poverty? of course. people claim he does but he doesn't talk them up as much. clearly that is a major issue and dealing with it as a vigorously as he deals with another issue. >> you brought up the tea party and what you say about the tea party and conservatism will cause some controversy. i want to read a couple paragraphs. what it all adds up to is an america that is psychologically and politically divided in a most bizarre way. one america celebrating the rise of a black president and the beginning of the end of racism while the other drowns in paranoiac and racial fears. in one of america of danger is mellowing and any other it explodes. one america future seems brighter than other and any other it is cloaked in gloom. the biggest locus of anger these days seems not to be in the nation's black and brown community but in the white heartland where numerous people are struggling to make sense of what seems to be a world turned upside down. a world they see as increasingly alien, one from which they are growing ever more estranged. >> i have a lot of observations, one being the party people themselves when asked what they are concerned about. i went out and spoke to a number of people in an attempt to get at what is really bugging these guys. i found many of them incoherent. who do you want to take america back from? the people in washington. what are you angry about? i had a store and people broke into my store and know america is not good for the common man. there was a lot of incoherence. part of what i draw from that is these people have this outside a dressings they either cannot police or are uncomfortable voicing. we are looking at a country that is demographically changing. we are looking at a country which obviously as we have been talking in the last 20 minutes where you have a person of color in the top job, at least some people, most tea party people question whether he was actually born in united states. why? i think they prefer to see america represented by a different kind of person that they're more congenial with. they don't like this idea. this is my take but it has been formed by data. they don't like this idea that these folks who don't represent america in the 1950s are taking over as they see it. it is an attribution--an exaggeration of how much is being taken over by whom but two is this a anger at this other dynamic which also happens to encompass people coming over from the southern border etc.. which unsettles a lot of people and says to them this america that is evolving is not the america that i knew and loved which is the america of the 1950s. >> what is going to ease that anger? obama brings up during the primaries when he talked about the bitter people clinging to their guns and religion and he got enormous blow back. he may have lost texas for that. >> i don't think the issue is a religion here. in large number of don't think it is done is. i think the issue is there are a hard core set of people who question everything about this president and the current direction of this country and i am not sure that will go away anytime soon. the positive spin on that is these folks stuck in the old paradigm tend to be rather old so at some point they will give way to other people. >> talk about growing up on the west side. you write in the book about the impact rioting on the west side when you were a young person had on you. >> i am a chicagoan and i will be back this weekend in chicago and i am part of a particular part of chicago. for me a fundamental part of my childhood was growing up in a neighborhood -- in 1966 as result of the disturbance aggravated by the police and in 1968 as a result of the assassination of martin luther king. i remember quite clearly as a very young person walking along madison street which is the main commercial corridor shortly after the riots and being able to feel the heat from the flames and the fire that consumed several stores. there was one day in the 66 riots where we had to hit the floor because bullets were flying and we were fearful something would happen. that shaped my view of what is happening in america at that time, preteen and teenager, shakes your view of the community and also shaved my view of the press somewhat. it is hard to think back that far. >> each year it gets harder. >> i basically became a writer out of that. the short story is i remember reading the newspaper at the time. even though i was a kid i read the newspapers. i remember thinking that the neighborhood was being reported about in the newspaper full of thugs and criminals and crazy people was not the neighborhood that i knew. and a perceived in my ignorance and arrogance a need for and other phillies that could inform the discussion and i went to high school and at the time when i enrolled and started in high school until the time i graduated i had sort of thought i would go into the scientific field. i originally -- my favorite subject was math. i thought it might be related to mask or something like that. and the thing that made me change course was something that happened in my senior year in high school. i had a teacher -- i have always had these fights with my english teacher is because i thought english was boring. at least if it was talked at length, was answering questions that i knew the answers to and it was a waste of my time. so i had this big battle about whether i was going to do the english assignment and i remember saying in the midst of this heated discussion i don't see the point in doing these assignments. they are a waste of my time. i don't think i ought to do this stuff and she said to me ok, obviously you are a bright kid and the work you decide to do is fine. what are we going to do here? i said it seems to me that the point of this class is to be able to make sure i have an understanding of the english-language and have research skills and can make a coherent argument. why don't you test me on that? i said what do you mean? have you write something? she said fine. what are you going to write? why don't i write a history of riots in america? and she said okay. and i went off and several weeks later came back -- don't remember exactly how long it was but a 140 page manuscript. and mrs. clinger take it home and comes back the next monday and called me back to class and says i will give you an a for the course but i am not really capable of evaluating this material. send this to a professional. i am a kid from the project. professional what? said it to who? she says send it to gwendolyn brooks. you know who she is. the poet laureate of illinois. we will send it to her. she teaches at such and such college and i sent it to her and a few months later she called me in to her office and said look, young man, i don't know what you intend to do with your life but you ought to be a writer. that made an impression on me. so from their, i read defined myself and went on to become a columnist for the chicago sun times at the age of 19 and might have once at. >> we both know clarence page is very well. wonderful story how he got hired on the chicago tribune with 1969, westside gone up in flames and chicago tribune revenues room to find out who they could send who knew the west side and there was nobody. clarence gets hired. did you have a similar experience getting into the business? >> not exactly but i got in on the the same energy. beginning with a 1965 riot you are talking about the time when for reasons we should not go into in depth most major metropolitan newspapers saw no need to higher anybody black some most of them didn't have anybody black on the staff. the l.a. times noticed this in 65 and they were looking around the newsroom and can you send someone out who has a sense of community and won't be in danger and the only one they could think of was a salesperson who they immediately set your journalist. go and cover it. what he wrote was representative of what you expect from someone who had no idea what journalism was. there were a lot of stories like that in the washington post, one major newspaper -- if you had one or two people but most had nobody. after that there was a sense of a huge story and huge community. our reporters don't understand it and too and comfortable out there. we need to hire some people to do it. i was hired differently. i was too young to cover that what i did get hired in my first job when i was 18 was the chicago sun-times was as a columnist for something called the youth pointed for schools. they realized they didn't have any voices from people of color on this page and after doing that for however many months i got called in to the manager's office and jim said to me i have been reading your column in new viewpoint for schools. what do you think starting monday if i give you a column in the real newspaper? and i looked at him and fully confident 19-year-old and said that is what i want to do all the time so sure. so i wasn't hired as a direct result of the riot but certainly there was an awareness at that time that newspapers were at the disadvantage for not having no people of color on staff. >> we both watched this business get shaken to the core. the basic underpinnings of journalism. if you were running into ellis cose on the west side of chicago now would you advise him to go into journalism? >> if i ran into the coming out of the west side no. i would first of all say the route of entry is totally different. first of all i don't know anyone who got hired the way i did anyway even back then. that was kind of unusual and contributed i think to the vision -- and jim hoge who saw this young kid eager and ignorant and said we see something here. let's do something with that. the field itself is contracting radically. the chicago tribune had the playoffs. every large newspaper i know of has. the future is very uncertain. and also the road to journalism is a little bit different. more and more of the path of entry has become getting a graduate degree at northwestern or colombia and get a degree from there so you find more and more people and large institutions with those credentials. what i would say to a young person with a journalism career today is it can be a hell of a field but there is so much uncertainty so be prepared to embrace that uncertainty if you're going to embrace this career. >> if you have a question i invite you to come to a microphone, glad to take your questions. let me ask one other question which has been a struggle to diversified news rooms and now we have seen as those new rooms have shrunk, journalists going into alternative fields. are you better off these days looking for a dot.com job and newspaper or newsweek? >> those are very different jobs. what we are seeing in journalism is contraction of mainstream journalism. we're seeing very different tiers developing. there are lots of dot.com jobs that they won have won the third but many are traditional jobs. so these are jobs that will appeal to people who for the most part are quite young and drilling to work for very little money in the hopes this will leverage into something better in the future. it is a hard call for a lot of young people going into this field in particular right now because it is a field of such lock and journalism was never a profession you wanted to be rich unless you had hopes of the network anchor or something. but it was a field that not too long ago particularly with larger publications you would have been on a good career, no longer the case. so that is for young people looking at a profession that they need to acknowledge the scope and say ok, despite that this is something worth trying to do. >> question? >> maybe we should say made in the usa for this, audio visual systems which is the microphone stem. i didn't prepared to know what you were talking about. i didn't read your book and i assume it was about the black experience. eyes are a psychiatrist some time ago in the 70s and never forget what he said early on. with regard to my having a history of mental problems, he grinned and said at least you are not black. compare that to barbara perlman who are saw in the 80s who didn't tell me she was terminally ill with breast cancer and she died at the age of 37 in 1986. i can recommend some books. i am getting to requested by of the were the used before don't overruled my questioning. i recommend a book called sex, murder and the meaning of life. >> this is not a forum for that -- [talking over each other] >> do you have a question? [talking over each other] >> if people want to hear your book recommendations they confined you afterwards. >> the question is about language. i use merriam-webster. if we don't use the same meaning of the words we use we will be in trouble. speaking another language of i don't believe in using words that make us more distant than we have to be. i think we should go back to negro and caucasian. it would be -- >> your question. >> would be bad for people to be more scientifically literate. black and white are totally opposite. do you think it would be better to talk about this in a way that makes us closer instead of saying black and white for the opposite sex that makes us more different than similar? >> okay. to i think it would be better to talk about ourselves in ways that bring us closer? of course. the question is what that way is and it is not as simple as substituting the negro for black or caucasian for white. negro is obviously a mispronunciation of negro which is spanish for black. i am not sure that is the root to do that. in principle absolutely. >> about things getting better. obama is good for white people especially zionists who put him in power for israel. obama -- under obama, white unemployment goes down and black unemployment goes up or stays the same. illinois has been noted in the chicago reader to have a 400 towns in which obama cannot sleep except in jail. >> is there questions somewhere? >> considering how racism is embedded in the criminal justice system would you say blacks are deluded to think things are getting better when more than half of people in prison are black? >> that is a good question. the bureau of labor statistics just last month released statistics which show that black employment is higher. black employment his lower than it has been since statistics have been kept. we are seeing a situation in economics, african-americans have been particularly hard hit by the latest downturn in the recession and we are also as the questioner indicate in the last 35 to 40 years we are seeing a huge uptick in the number of african-americans who have been incarcerated and having to deal with the criminal justice system such that if current trends continue roughly 1-third of african-american males will end up incarcerated at some point. i agree those are national tragedies. the studies that are assigned do not give an objective assessment whether thing they're getting better or not. they are talking about people's attitudes and the future which by definition is unknown and what they perceive as their options which for many people is broader than it has been. i think that we as a society for long time, many of us did, that if we somehow get a handle on the issue of racial inequality we will solve the problem of inequality in society. in some respects, not all but in some respects we are getting a handle on that issue and what we are finding is the issue of inequality is more complicated than many people thought it was and dealing with the decline of virulent racism which has immeasurably declined is not the same as new opportunities for society. >> you suggest in the book, you break out in the generation of change that african-americans are more likely to have been preyed on by a shady lenders in the mortgage crisis. let me ask about that and also whether when you talk about "the end of anger" is there a growing economic divide, people who succeeded are feeling much better about racism or those who haven't succeeded economically feeling different? >> you touched on something i alluded to before. in answer to that direct question those who are doing economically better feel a lot better about their options in life as measured by my various surveys. in -- even people doing not so well at all if you ask are african-americans better off now than they were 15 years ago the vast majority of people across class lines say they are. on the one hand if you ask the question do you think your children have a better life than you do you find poor people as likely as well-to-do people to say yes they will. on the one hand you have a sense that the option and opportunities are not nearly as bleak as a function of race than they used to be but clearly you also have people make their personal assessment based on where they were or where they are. i don't really reference -- i did a small survey of people who were involved with a group called the portion society who were recently out of prison or who have been diverted into programs to avoid going to prison and we asked about their options in life. most of them needless to say are unemployed. they acknowledge they will have a hard time because of their prison record, getting a job. i don't think people are totally out of touch with reality. i do have a chapter that deals with predatory lending. the reason i have that chapter is it is an example of how even policies that on their face are not explicitly racist in particular wake and disproportionately harming particular communities and we have a textbook example in the case of how various neighborhoods were targeted and various groups were targeted in a way that end up devastating those communities and people who own homes and never get together in a room to target black people to do that. >> i would like to ask about education in the united states. your sister in law was a co-founder of a charter school that worked in chicago. many charter schools including your sister-in-law's network had done very well and it is a very controversial issue in the city. that comes down to and economic divide. an ongoing argument whether traditional schools wind up being shortchanged because of the emphasis on alternative schools. >> i don't think there's any question with boston and new york. i don't think there is any question that a charter school is well designed. that is an important stipulation. pretty crummy charter schools also. without question the charter school that is well designed that has good leadership and dedication can do wonders in communities where public schools have not. they can take kids who a lot of schools have given up on. and get some oriented towards college, get them to believe they can go to college which is part of what they need to do in certain areas and get them prepared for life that they otherwise wouldn't have if they just stayed in their neighborhood schools. the reality is unless something radically changes, people who run charter schools will be relevant from start to finish. the issue i see is not to get rid of the starter schools which in some cases are doing a tremendous job but we need to wrestle in a serious way with how to make public education better. >> not too far a wheat to get what is going on in wisconsin and ohio and indiana. this may go to some issues you talk about, the new anchor. your sense whether we have a growing divide between the government class and the rest of america. >> sure we do. pensions and things like that, taxpayers have to pay for and as our economic times become less certain, less willing to pay for that but that is overlaid with a lot of issues. every census since the last five that have been taken has found a greater divide between the top in terms of income and the lower fifth quintile. we are becoming a society where those who have wealth are doing progressively better and those with less wealth are doing worse. there's something screwed up with that picture. i don't have the answer to that but there's something screwed up about that picture that goes beyond issues of race. i think we need to figure out how to get that right. >> we're out of time. ellis cose, thank you very much. [applause] >> ellis cose, former columnist of newsweek magazine and author of subtle -- several books including killing affirmative-action color blind and the rage of the privileged class will be on in depth, booktv's three our call in program on september 4th. for more information visit his website, ellis cose.com. >> one of the beauties of your book is unfolding the gun fight. in step-by-step fashion. it unfolds in a way that seems both inevitable and a total accident if that makes sense. you get to the final moments and virgil hurt --earp has that moment like what custer had when he got on to the ridge and fall these indians or travis had when he realized nobody was coming to save him at the alamo. virgil says i don't mean that. what does that tell us about how this event happened? >> i will repeat that i think something was bound to happen. whether it was going to involve these specific individuals or others there was too much tension and too much mistrust. james earp said there was a certain amount of pressure on virgil by some of the townspeople that none of this would have occurred. i liked virgil a lot and i felt sorry for him. i think he tried hard to be a good lawmen. in the eyes of average americans today the gunfight at the o.k. corral involved why at her, doc holliday and the clintons. seems virgil and morgan have been bumped into the background as have tom and frank mcclowey. virgil preferred giving people a chance to back away without embarrassing them or having their pride intact. he did his best that day to lead the cowboys settle down and write out of town and finally felt forced to act. when he did he call on the people he trusted most, is two brothers and there was doc who was never going to miss an occasion like this. it was a terrible tragedy that this happened and i think if things had happened differently in one or two instances, if virgil hadn't been approached by a couple town leaders offering vigilantes', if there hadn't been that altercation -- if the cowboys walking through the ok corral really mean to leave town but not wanting to leave too fast because they didn't want the onlookers to think the earps made them leave. if that had been the case something similar would have happened some time soon. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> here are this week's nonfiction best sellers according to amazon.com. whar raja hildebrand tops the list with unbroken:the world war ii story of survival, resilience and to mention. in the garden of beasts by erik larsen. he talked about his book on booktv. you can watch this program on line at booktv.org. coming in surge is bossypants followed by david mccollum's the greater journey:americans in paris at number 4. the miracle of freedom by chris stewart claims the no. 5 spot this week. and ann coulter with the monarch --demon --demonic. she will on our call on program. number 7 on the list, the 2008 financial collapse is dissected in reckless endangerment. you can watch ms. morgan's and online at booktv.org. number 8 on the nonfiction best-seller list is seal team 6. at number 9, the tale of a dangerous rescue mission during world war ii in lost in shangri-la. completing the list is through my eyes by nathan whitaker which examines the lives of nfl quarterback tim tivo. for more information go to amazon.com. >> your book is titled "randhurst: suburban chicago's grandest shopping center". what inspired you to write this book? >> when i started writing for the historical society was one of the topics that i got the most interesting and questions about and tell what it meant to people and how important it was to people and the timing worked out because of ongoing renovation that is close to being done today. the interest was at a fever pitch. >> can you describe the shopping center as well as its importance to chicago and suburbs in the 1960s? >> it was a big first. there were a lot of unique features and shopping centers built on such a grand scale with so much attention to aesthetic detail and really just imposing architecture. it was important to the northwest suburbs that the condition of the fact that this area was a boom town. just growing so rapidly and one of the more important areas of chicago at that time. the case i make in the book is it represented a lot of firsts in shopping center buildings. it is meant to be a case study to talk about all shopping centers and all malls and how they developed. the best analogy is it was the floodgate. >> victor bruin has been referred to as the father of the shopping mall. what features or design elements were considered unique at the time of the construction? >> victor drew in was an amazing story. there is a biography of him where i obtained my permission called lawmaker. he was a holocaust refugee who came from vienna in 1939 to america and one of the things that influenced him the most on his arrival was central park and broadway. it was a juxtaposition about things that one was used by the public free of charge and broadway was used by the public to said the capitalism -- so he married these two elements in the shopping center design and rand hearst -- brandhurst was a triangular design. it was supposed to minimize the walking distance the tween the stores. first time there were more than two enter stores in the center and also the amount of sculpture, the aesthetic pieces. you literally invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into the public art. it was supposed to be a public space in addition to buying and selling that would be going on. >> what made this the local destination and attraction in chicago in the 1960s and 70s? you mentioned public art, size and scope but anything in particular that really drew visitors to it? >> building on the same things, the sheer size of 200 ton bom -- if you visit now it would not appear to be a very impressive place but in 1962 it was literally making headlines all over the country. the public art was a big drop as well as the sheer size. >> the political embellish and the chicago support or promote development of the shopping mall? >> didn't really find much about the political establishment in chicago. i would say it happened at all they would have had to someone to give it their blessing but i can't tell you the political status was very supportive of it. they still are. it is the biggest taxpayer and a lot of the prospect at a time of the construction to kind of ride ahead of all the competing suburbs in this area to really provide a lot of service to people to lower the property tax which was a big point for anyone going to the suburbs. you had your choice in the suburbs and the prospect was to stand out. >> what impact if any of did the would field mall have on the shopping center surrounding chicago communities beginning in 1971 and for the remainder of the 1970s into the 1980s as well? >> whitfield serves as the foil for the villain in the book. it was built five miles away from ranchers and wasn't just whitfield that had an impact but malls and shopping centers springing up everywhere in the 70s and 80s. what my research let me to was going back to when i said it was the biggest taxpayer -- was able to provide services because of additional tax revenues. other communities saw this and we're very jealous. their solution was to build their own shopping centers and their own malls, whether huge like

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