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From the bestselling author of There Are No Children Here , a richly textured, heartrending portrait of love and death in Chicago's most turbulent neighborhood. The numbers are staggering: over the past twenty years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire. What does that do to the spirit of individuals and community? Drawing on his decades of experience, Alex Kotlowitz set out to chronicle one summer...
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On March 2, 1908, nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, a recent Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe to Chicago, knocked on the front door of the house of George Shippy, the chief of Chicago police. When Shippy came to the door, Averbuch offered him what he said was an important letter. Instead of taking the letter, Shippy shot Averbuch twice, killing him. When Shippy released a statement casting Averbuch as a would-be anarchist assassin and agent...
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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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"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 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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"At the heart of the story are two teenagers: Marshal Mariot, an introverted video gamer and bike rider, and Frankie Paul, who leaves foster care to direct his cousin's drug business while he's in prison. Frankie devises a plan to attack Marshall and his friends--it is his best chance to showcase his toughness and win respect for his crew. Catching wind of the plan, Marshall and his friends decide they must preemptively go after Frankie's crew to...
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My bloody life volume 2
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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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"Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel have touted and promoted Chicago as a "world class city." The skyscrapers kissing the clouds, the billion-dollar Millennium Park, Michelin-rated restaurants, pristine lake views, fabulous shopping, vibrant theater scene, downtown flower beds and stellar architecture tell one story. Yet, swept under the rug is the stench of segregation that compromises Chicago. The Manhattan Institute dubs Chicago as one of...
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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 first comprehensive behind-the-scenes look at the tumultuous single term of Mayor Lightfoot and the chaos that roiled the city and City Hall as she fought to live up to her promises to change the city's culture of corruption and villainy, reform its long-troubled police department, and make Chicago the safest big city in America. -- adapted from jacket
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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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Meet the Evens family: three generations living together in a desolate neighborhood in Chicago's crime-ridden Southside.
Life has not turned out the way Dorothy Evens, the head of the clan, dreamed it would. Now she returns home from a dead-end job every night and seeks comfort in a bottle of vodka to numb the pain. Her children find other ways to deal life in the hood. Danny is on a paper chase, trying to make money and stay alive in spite of threats...
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This history and guide presents the significant sites and events of the Haymarket Square riot, a major turning point in the fight for workers’ rights.
On May 4th, 1886, a bomb exploded during a labor demonstration near Haymarket Square in Chicago. The ensuing gunfire and chaos brought a grisly end to what began as peaceful support for an eight-hour workday. With both officers and civilians dead, newspapers proclaimed...
On May 4th, 1886, a bomb exploded during a labor demonstration near Haymarket Square in Chicago. The ensuing gunfire and chaos brought a grisly end to what began as peaceful support for an eight-hour workday. With both officers and civilians dead, newspapers proclaimed...
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On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a Chicago labor rally, wounding dozens of policemen, seven of whom eventually died. Coming in the midst of the largest national strike Americans had ever seen, the bombing created mass hysteria and led to a sensational trial, which culminated in four controversial executions. The trial seized headlines across the country, created the nation's first Red scare and dealt a blow to the labor movement from which it would...
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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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Braids personal narratives, city politics, and national history to tell the timely and epic story of Chicago's Cabrini-Green, America's most iconic public housing project. Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to twenty-three towers and a population of 20,000--all of it packed onto just seventy acres a few blocks from Chicago's ritzy Gold Coast. Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of...
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