This slim, elegantly produced book is what its author, Jim Redd, a Chicago writer and photographer, calls it — a "perspective" on the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Completed in 1848, the canal linked 100 miles of Illinois landscape before being closed to navigation in 1933. Redd's 13 chapters, called "essays," take us along the route of the canal from Chicago westward to LaSalle, though they are far from similar or systematic in their treatment. Some, like "The Summit Division," are mainly topographical, but others, like "Leo," report conversations with the old residents along the corridor.

Lock No. 14 in LaSalle, with its restored gates, is the only example of how the Illinois and Michigan Canal's locks appeared when the canal was at its peak operation. Huge wooden gates opened to let in or discharge water to raise or lower boats to the required level. Photo by Jim Redd

Many different types of material are grist to this author's mill; he is equally at home describing his trips among the rotting remains of the canal or recounting its history. His photographs add greatly to the text, allowing him to express his admiration for the craftsmanship with which the canal and particularly its locks were constructed; the photographs also comment eloquently upon his frequent ecological reflections. Here and there we come across fresh information, as in the passage about "state barns." A few misprints have crept in; it is "Conzen" and not "Kontzen," and "Claude" rather than "Calude." A more general criticism is that the author could have made his case more powerfully by including a wider range of visual material. The photograph of the site of the canal junction with the Chicago River, for instance, cries out for a map to elucidate it, and the photograph of the site of Dresden ought surely to be accompanied by the corresponding

early water color from the Chicago Historical Society. Still, what we have here is a very personal perspective: one man's evocation of a monument that powerfully caught his fancy .

David Buisseret, author of Historic Illinois from the Air, directs the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

March 1994/Illinois Issues/29