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The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. This is the full story of how Venkatesh managed to gain entrée into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment. When first-year grad student Venkatesh walked into one of Chicago's most notorious housing projects, he was looking for people...
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My bloody life volume 1
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Looking for an escape from childhood abuse, Reymundo Sanchez turned away from school and baseball to drugs, alcohol, and sex. He was left to fend for himself before the age of 14. The Latin Kings, one of the largest and most notorious street gangs in America, became his refuge and his world, but its violence cost him friends, freedom, self-respect, and nearly his life. This is a raw and powerful odyssey through the ranks of the new mafia, where the...
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"Jane Addams, the co-founder of Hull House, the famous settlement home, writes about her experiences and insights in her autobiography, 'Twenty Years at Hull House.' As a child growing up in Illinois, Addams suffered from Pott's Disease, which was a rare infection in her spine. This disease caused her to contract many other illnesses, then because of these aliments, Addams was self-conscious of her appearance. She explains that she could not play...
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Winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2013 Heartland Prize
A critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture
Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago...
A critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture
Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago...
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My bloody life volume 2
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English
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This riveting sequel to My Bloody Life traces Reymundo Sanchez's struggle to create a "normal" life outside the Latin Kings, one of the nation's most notorious street gangs, and to move beyond his past. Sanchez illustrates how the Latin King motto "once a king, always a king" rings true and details the difficulty and danger of leaving that life behind. Filled with heart-pounding scenes of his backslide into drugs, sex, and violence, Once...
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Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago — and cities across the nation
The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true
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The "compelling" story behind the 1995 Chicago weather disaster that killed hundreds-and what it revealed about our broken society (Boston Globe).
On July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index-how the temperature actually feels on the body-would hit 126. When the heat wave broke a week later, city streets had buckled; records for electrical use were shattered; and power grids...
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When Jonathan Foiles was a graduate student in social work, he had to choose between a mental health or policy track. But once he began working, he found it impossible to tell the two apart. While helping poor patients from the South and West sides of Chicago, he realized individual therapy could not take into account the importance unemployment, poverty, lack of affordable housing and other policy decisions that impact the well-beings of both individuals...
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In the 1920s, the South Side was looked on as the new Black Metropolis, but by the turn of the decade that vision was already in decline-a victim of the Depression. In this timely book, Christopher Robert Reed explores early Depression-era politics on Chicago's South Side. The economic crisis caused diverse responses from groups in the black community, distinguished by their political ideologies and stated goals. Some favored government intervention,...
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A collection of ten short stories set largely on Chicago's West Side, written over a span of twenty years (1975-1995), that focus on residents of a part of the city whose day-to-day lives have rarely if ever been immortalized in fiction. The anthology features the eponymous "Candle in the Dark," winner of the 1975 Triton College New Writer's Workshop Award for best short story, published in the Fall 1980 issue of AIM Magazine, and the story "Beatitude"...
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It was a time of unregulated madness. And nowhere was it madder than in Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. As Model Ts rumbled down Michigan Avenue, gang war shootings announced Al Capone's rise to underworld domination. Bedecked partygoers thronged to the Drake Hotel's opulent banquet rooms, corrupt politicians held court in thriving speakeasies, and the frenzy of stock market gambling was rampant. Enter a slick, smooth-talking, charismatic...
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"William Elliot Hazelgrove provides the exciting and sprawling history behind the 1933 World's Fair, the last of the golden age. He reveals the story of the six millionaire businessmen, dubbed the Secret Six, who beat Al Capone at his own game, ending the gangster era as Prohibition was repealed. He also details the story of an intriguing woman, Sally Rand, who embodied the ideals of the World's Fair with her own rags-to-riches story and brought sex...
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"Now a documentary narrated by Common, produced by Grant Hill, Dwyane Wade, and 9th Wonder, from filmmaker Mary Mazzio The moving true story of a group of young men growing up on Chicago's West side who form the first all-black high school rowing team in the nation, and in doing so not only transform a sport, but their lives. Growing up on Chicago's Westside in the 90's, Arshay Cooper knows the harder side of life. The street corners are full of gangs,...
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"Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, Redlined exposes the racist lending rules that refuse mortgages to anyone in areas with even one black resident. As blacks move deeper into Chicago's West Side during the 1960s, whites flee by the thousands. But Linda Gartz's parents, Fred and Lil choose to stay in their integrating neighborhood, overcoming previous prejudices as they meet and form friendships with their African American neighbors....
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A trip through the history of the Windy City's lawless districts where you could lose your money and your life-from the author of Haunted Illinois.
From the very beginning, Chicago thrived on its reputation as a wide-open town. After the Great Fire, no part of the city was rebuilt more quickly than the vice districts, where bribed cops and brutal force emboldened professional wickedness to celebrate itself with gala events like the First Ward Ball,...
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"In his magisterial Great American City, Robert J. Sampson puts social scientific data behind an argument that we all feel and experience everyday: the neighborhood you live in has a big effect on your life and the city you live in. Not only does your neighborhood determine where your nearest hospital is, what kind of schools your children can attend, or how many police officers you might encounter (and how they respond to you), it affects how you...
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One of the surprise bestsellers of 1991, this is the moving & powerful account of two remarkable boys struggling to survive in Chicago's Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex disfigured by crime & neglect. "Alex Kotlowitz joins the ranks of the important few writers on the subject of urban poverty."
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As early-twentieth-century Chicago swelled with an influx of at least 250,000 new black urban migrants, the city became a center of consumer capitalism, flourishing with professional sports, beauty shops, film production companies, recording studios, and other black cultural and communal institutions. Davarian Baldwin argues that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the...
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Ground-breaking when first published in 1945, Black Metropolis remains a landmark study of race and urban life. Few studies since have been able to match its scope and magnitude, offering one of the most comprehensive looks at black life in America. Based on research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers, it is a sweeping historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side from the 1840s through the 1930s....
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"Jane Addams's narrative of life in an immigrant urban neighborhood provides students with an introduction to the issues of the Progressive era and the tenets of social activism. This new teaching edition reduces Addams's original text by about 35 percent, trimming illustrative detail to focus on the ideological underpinnings of the original work. The author sketches a brief biographical portrait of Addams, outlines the decisions and convictions that...
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