Marco d'Eramo stalks the streets of Chicago, leaving no myth unturned in his exploration of the familiar stink of modernity in one of its most exemplorary sites. Much more the heart of America than New York or Los Angeles, he sees with a European's detached gaze what has become of the stage for some of modernity's key episodes: the birth of the skyscraper, the rise of urban sociology, the world's first atomic reactor, the economic school of the Chicago Boys. Long gone are the slaughterhouses, railroads, and lumber and cereal-crop trades that made Chicago great and in their wake we witness the revolutionary, subversive power of capitalism at its purest and the features and contradictions of American society at large.