Reviews for Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

The average rating for Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-05 00:00:00 Jesse Yandow As a general rule of thumb, I like all books about Chicago history because there's really no way to go wrong with tales about our city. So I'd been wanting to read this book since it was released, and finally, my most excellent book club the Literary Brats got down to it. So I also think you'd really have to screw up to write a bad book about Chicago history. This book is about professional screwing and Karen Abbott is some screwball kinda writer. How difficult is it to write a great book about shenanigans in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century and the whoring high life? Corruption, vice, horse manure, tawdry sex, lots of mirrors -- this should be a book that writes itself. I was expecting sordid tales about what went on in the brothels of the Levee District (at least in the Everleigh Club, which the book centres on), more concrete histories about the Everleigh sisters who owned the brothel (or at least, Abbott's opinion on what may have been their rightful biography), life histories of the more prominent harlots at the club and more detailed descriptions of services tendered. What you end up getting are cursory chaptered details on the above, with too much emphasis on the puritanical fight to eradicate the Levee District and vice in Chicago. Sure, that is part of the neighbourhood's history, but we know how that story ends -- but why don't we know more about Suzy Poon Tang, the exotic courtesan from China who arrived in Chicago via Singapore (!)? Why aren't we offered an opinion on whether or not Abbott believes the Everleigh sisters were prostitutes themselves before they made their fortune? Why is the most extraordinary sexual favour in the book a millionaire patron who enjoys tossing gold coins onto a harlot's pundendum? Truly, reading this book is like having sex without orgasm as someone pounds a bible on your head. To make matters worse, Abbott lifts many passages and facts from a subjective biography of the Everleigh sisters, "Come to My Parlor." And, she has no ties to Chicago apart from the fact that a great-great-grandmother moved here from Eastern Europe and was never heard of again. The book launch party was in New York, for god's sakes. I felt like the book was a chick lit version of a history book, and for book clubs who met in cute Bohemian cafes sipping chai teas and noshing on cupcakes, not book clubs who meet online and like pizza. Still, I enjoyed the moments of Chicago life in the 1900s and loved the descriptions of the city then -- we were some kind of piece of work. I appreciate new trivia, such as the term "lay" coming from the Everleigh moniker. I also found it extremely fascinating that 100 years later, us and our world has changed so much, but the basest of human nature remains unchanged and just as repulsive. But please, can someone just tell me more about Suzy Poon Tang?

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-27 00:00:00 Michael Southwick Instagram || Twitter || Facebook || Amazon || Pinterest Get ready to clutch your pearls, because this tawdry piece of history is something you didn't learn in high school. SIN IN THE SECOND CITY, in case its title wasn't warning enough, is about prostitution in turn-of-the-century Chicago, specifically the Everleigh Club, which was a brothel run by two gently-bred sisters, Minna and Aida Everleigh. One of the criticisms of this book is that the author, Karen Abbott, takes a lot of liberties with the narrative. It reads like one of those trashy but epic sagas from the 1970s, with its purple prose, sensationlist writing, and scandalous content. I personally like those kinds of novels, so that was pure heaven for me and kept the tone from being too dry (something I hate when reading nonfiction, because it makes me feel like I'm being lectured at, and then I get bored and inevitably lose interest), but if that is a peeve for you, then yes, you will probably not like this book. The saga spun these pages is too complicated to recollect completely, but the gist is that the Everleigh Club was the best place to go if you wanted to sleep with a woman who was not your wife. Minna and Aida wanted to be the best damn madams in Chicago, and they were willing to spend money to do this. They hired doctors to check out the girls and make sure they were healthy and free of disease; they fed the girls and the guests well, with totally sumptuous feasts that made me drool a little just from the description; and the decor was, literally, out of this world - think fountains that gush scented oil, and entire rooms done completely in gold leaf, with a gold piano, to boot! Also of note is a prostitute from China named Suzy Poon Tang (apparently where the slang "poon tang" comes from) who was so good at her job, that she ended up getting married to one of her clients after just a few sessions of working at the Everleigh Club. There was also some brouhaha when a black boxer, Jack Johnson, wanted to come into the club. Because segregation was still active at this time, the sisters were highly reluctant, but his manager basically forced them into relenting; it worked out, though - he was hot, the prostitutes - "butterflies," they were called in Everleigh - adored him, everybody had a great time, and segregation got to suck it...literally (one would assume). You can probably guess how the story ends. People in power decided that vice was becoming too unpopular and they began systematically cracking down on pleasure houses as tales of "white slavery" (read: middle or upper-middle-class girls getting tricked into the sex industry by mustache-twirling con-artists) began saturating the papers, and putting fear into decent folk. Everleigh Club was one of the last to go, and signified the downfall of an era. Some of the names in here you will probably recognize, because when some of the bigwigs lost their hand at prostitution, they turned their attentions to the big, booming industry of crime started by Al Capone and Jim Colosimo. SIN IN THE SECOND CITY was a fun book to carry around with me in public. I had a lot of people ask me what it was about, and their reactions were quite priceless in some cases. I enjoyed learning more about an era that I didn't really know much about before this, and it was cool to learn where the phrase "poon tang" actually came from. I do feel like the book was longer than it needed to be, especially towards the end, it felt like the content was being stretched thin. But if you like history, and if you like trashy historical romance novels, you and this book will get on like a house on fire. 3 stars!