Read Plug

Honest book picks for real life. Curated by readers, not algorithms.

James Whitfield

James Whitfield

James is 58 years old. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in the part of Englewood that real estate listings now call "up-and-coming" in the way that phrases say more about who is doing the writing than the place being written about. He knows the neighborhood in the way you only know a place when you have watched it change over sixty years — what it was, what it became, and what it lost in the becoming. He still lives there. That is a choice he has made repeatedly, and he knows it is a cho