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The Kansas City Star -- Sunday October 2, 2005 --
Washington takes vivid look at Chicago -- By Connie Ogle -- The
Washington Story, Adam Langer’s delightful sequel to Crossing
California, is not an exposé about the nation’s capital but a
remarkably vivid and descriptive portrait of Chicago in the 1980s,
when Harold Washington managed to defeat the Daley Democratic
machine to become the city’s first black mayor. As seen through the
eyes of Langer’s sprawling, multiracial cast, Chicago — specifically
the conservative Jewish neighborhood of West Rogers Park — evolves
as its intricately crafted, fascinating residents try to adjust to
the inevitable change...
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Los Angeles Times -- September 7, 2005 -- The
idealism of youth as persistent beacon --
The Washington Story A Novel in Five Spheres, Adam Langer -- By Michael
Harris --
For a sturdily Midwestern, realistic writer, Adam Langer has a penchant
for off-center titles. The title of his first novel, "Crossing
California," doesn't refer to the Golden State but to a street that
divides the richer from the poorer side of West Rogers Park, a
mostly Jewish suburb of Chicago. The sequel, "The Washington Story,"
isn't about our nation's capital but about the continuing lives of
younger members of the Wasserstrom, Wills and Rovner families from
1982 to 1987, shadowing the period when Harold Washington was
Chicago's first African American mayor...
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The Miami Herald -- August 28, 2005 -- Portrait of
Chicago on brink of change -- The witty sequel to Crossing
California captures the evolution of a city and its people. --
BY CONNIE OGLE -- Adam Langer's delightful sequel to Crossing
California is not an exposé about the nation's capital but a
remarkably vivid and descriptive portrait of Chicago in the 1980s,
when Harold Washington managed to defeat the Daley Democratic
machine to become the city's first black mayor. As seen through the
eyes of Langer's sprawling, multiracial cast, Chicago --
specifically the conservative Jewish neighborhood of West Rogers
Park -- evolves as its intricately crafted, fascinating residents...
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Chicago Tribune – August 28, 2005 --Beyond
California - In his 2nd novel, Adam Langer follows his West Rogers
Park ensemble into college and adulthood --
By Samuel G. Freedman -- On New Year's Eve 1982, two college
freshmen climb the sledding hill in West Rogers Park that they call
Mt. Warren. They carry a shovel and a bowling bag, and on the summit
they set to work depositing a time capsule of their teenage years.
Between them, they inter a cassette tape of Heart, a copy of the
book "Our Town," a ticket stub for the movie "The Battle of
Algiers," a flier from the Youth Spartacist League, an empty flask
of Wild Turkey, a diaphragm, a piece of hot-dog-shaped bubblegum...
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The New York Sun -- August 24, 2005 -- A Taxonomy
Of Growing Up -- By Benjamin Lytal -- Armchair sociologists
often remark that the culture of the late 20th century has been
reduced to a fixed repertoire of genres from which American young
people now draw their wardrobes and styles. Themed dances refer to
the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and, increasingly, the 1990s. Many
adolescents can tell you which decade they prefer, and which they
loathe. DJ battles pit songs from 1979 against the 1981 batch. Adam
Langer's overtly nostalgic novels do the work of Balzac and VH1 in a
single blow...
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Baltimore Sun – August 14, 2005 -- The Washington
Story by Adam Langer. Riverhead. 416 pages. -- Set during the
Reagan era in the snug Chicago neighborhood of West Rogers Park,
Langer's second novel, a sequel to Crossing California (2004),
follows the same group of lively teenagers as they support Harold
Washington's mayoral campaign, record the trajectory of Halley's
Comet, fall in love, apply to college, and cope with their
complicated families. At the group's center is Jill Wasserstrom,
still mourning her dead mother and living in the shadow of her
fiercely sexy older sister; Jill's boyfriend...
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Chicago Sun Times -- August 7, 2005 -- Leaving the
'hood -- By Stephen J. Lyons -- For six long years in the late
1960s and early 1970s the nexus of my world was Devon Avenue in West
Rogers Park. My adolescent buddies and I ran our self-imposed
boundaries of that crowded street west from Western Avenue to
Thillens Stadium at Kedzie. We ate pizza at Il Forno and hot dogs at
Wolfy's, snuck into movies at the Nortown and surreptiously "read"
our first Playboys in the back of Rosen's Drugs. In the Eastern
European bakeries and delis, English was broken, not spoken. I was
one of the lone goyim...
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The Foreward – August 5, 2005 -- Windy City Offers
a Window Into the Heart of America -- The Washington Story, Adam
Langer -- Once may have been an honest mistake, but twice, it must
be a trend. Adam Langer's second novel is titled "The Washington
Story," though it has little to do with our nation's capital just as
his debut, "Crossing California," took place entirely outside the
confines of the Golden State. In fact, both books are intimately
tied to the gritty charm of the characters' hometown, Chicago.
Vividly chronicling a time and place now relegated to the
half-remembered past, Langer's novel is so distinctly...
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Publishers Weekly – July 7, 2005 The Washington
Story, Langer, Adam (Author) Riverhead Books, Published 2005-09,
Hardcover, $24.95 (416p) Langer's dense, sprawling follow up to
Crossing California features the same ambitious clutch of high-schoolers
on the cusp of Harold Washington's bid for Chicago mayor in 1982. In
the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of West Rogers Park, junior Jill
Wasserstrom works as a cub reporter for the Lane Leader and
entertains a crush on irreverent senior editor Wes Sullivan; Jill's
usual boyfriend, Muley Wills, is in Cape Canaveral working on the
space shuttle Columbia and bedding his seductive lab partner...
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Kirkus Starred Review – June 15, 2005 -- THE
WASHINGTON STORY by Adam Langer -- Langer’s young Chicagoans
take on the ‘80s with a vengeance.-- The kids who filled the pages
of Langer’s debut, Crossing California (2004), with their passions,
idiocies and dreams are leaving high school and stepping into the
world. This second installment of their story is set during the
Reagan years (1982-87). While the Iran hostage crises served as a
touchstone in Crossing California, here it’s the election of
Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington. The style is still
obsessively catalog-like, page after page...
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