Quotable Fri Mar 21 2008
Quotable Friday
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Lake Effect, a memoir by Rich Cohen:
In the autumn of 1972, my family moved to Glencoe from Libertyville, a farming town in northern Illinois. We were the only Jewish family in Libertyville. When I asked my father if he had met with much anti-Semitism, he smiled and said, "Are you kidding? When we moved in, the neighbors shook my hand and said, 'Thank God, we were afraid they would sell to Catholics.' They hadn't even worked their way down to us yet."
- Alice
Bigger Thomas is a young black man in 1940s Chicago who accidentally kills Mary, the daughter of the wealthy, white Dalton family, for whom he works as a chauffeur. Bigger's attempts to preserve his innocence go horribly awry when the public and the press decide his guilt even before he is caught and tried.
