Slaughterhouse

An engrossing and startling history of Chicago’s Union Stock Yard, Dominic Pacyga’s meticulous and fresh book addresses more than the rise and fall of the industrial district that for so long was a critical part of what defined Chicago, its immigrants, its economy, its environmental health (or lack thereof), and its politics. While Pacyga knows those aspects like few others do—having grown up in the Back of the Yards neighborhood and worked in the stockyards himself as a young man—he has here unearthed a history of gruesome spectacle amid the flowering of industrial modernity. A tourist attraction, an industrial marvel, and the crucible of our industrialized food system, the stockyards have long been a critical part of what made Chicago Chicago—and even today, innovation continues to flourish there, as new forms of agriculture and industry take shape on this charmed site.