The Cab Driver Sees All

One of the valuable, if unsung, roles of the university press is to publish local history, works about the state or city of their host institution. Often enough, these are staid books -- diaries of pioneer women or biographies of little-known governors. But with Dmitry Samarov's Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab, the University of Chicago Press has produced a work about the Windy City that could not be grittier or more up-to-the-minute -- so much so that it draws on material originally published by Samarov on Twitter and his blog. These vignettes, organized according the schedule of a typical driver's week -- from the Monday doldrums to the bacchanal of Saturday night -- constitute a work of ground-level urban sociology, showing parts of Chicago life that few novelists or academics could access.