CHICAGO — Big Shoulders Books are free. You can request one. They’ll send you one. You might even be in one. Big Shoulders Books, founded at DePaul University a decade ago, has been one of the more quietly ambitious projects in Midwest journalism, though, in practice, the work is not written by professional journalists and its architects are faculty in the English department. The goal, however, is elementally journalistic: to gather an oral record of contemporary Chicago. Its violence, war veterans, romances. And now, with its latest history, “Virus City,” a street-level, everyday accounting of the pandemic.
Somewhere, Studs Terkel is smiling.
As with most of the books from Big Shoulders — and much of the work of Terkel, the godfather of quotidian conversation arranged as a widescreen mural of daily life — the narration comes almost entirely through a cross section of little-known Chicagoans, written in their words. As with Terkel, their anecdotes gather into the specificity, insight and sometimes haunting afterthought that shapes the spine of a life. “We understand these are people who probably have never been interviewed in any media before, and this may be the only time someone records their words,” said Rebecca Johns-Trissler, director of DePaul’s graduate program in writing and publishing, and a co-editor of “Virus City.” “So we try to honor that and approach each person with a great respect.”
