Did you know Chicago is home to absolute scads of wonderful authors? We here at The Book Cellar love supporting local, and here you can find books written by your fellow Chicagoans in addition to titles that'll teach you The Windy City has a richer history than you'd even guess!
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Chicago Books!
BACKYARD BIRDS IS AN EXCITING SERIES of books that explores the top twenty-five backyard birds most commonly found in each state. It includes a profiled size scale that allows the reader to quickly identify the correct bird, and each bird entry is accompanied by a stunning color photograph and specific description, including identification marks, behavior, habitat, and nesting style-even the song the bird makes! As an added feature, author Bill Fenimore also provides expert tips for building the ultimate backyard bird sanctuary, from creating birdbaths and planting proper foliage to offering a bird's favorite foods.
Fenimore was awarded the Ludlow Griscom Award, the American Birding Association's highest honor.
Bird-watching is one of the most popular activities in the United States, with approximately fifty-one million bird-watchers nationwide.
Bird-watching is a $6 million business.
More than $400 million is spent each year on bird-related magazines and books.
The series will soon include all fifty states.
Author is a franchisee of Wild Bird Center, which has more than eighty locations in twenty-nine states.
Bill Fenimore is owner of the National Best Environmental Stewardship Award-winning Wild Bird Center franchise in Layton, Utah. He conducts seminars and workshops that educate the public about birds and their critical habitat needs, and he leads birding field trips for clients from around the globe.
In 1993, after more people had fled Chicago for the suburbs than in any other city in America, Ed Zotti and his wife, Mary, chose not only to stay but to gamble their future fixing up a dilapidated Victorian home in a dicey neighborhood on Chicagoas North Side.
Two doors up from a murder/arson scene and across the alley from a former drive- up drug mart, the Barn House (as the Zottisa unimpressed daughter dubbed it) was a rehabberas nightmare. Ed and his family had to contend not just with collapsed ceilings and shorted-out wiring but burglars, gunshots, and the trumpet-playing homeless guy in the basement.
But THE BARN HOUSE is more than just the story of a home-renovation project from hell. Ultimately it's a celebration of cities, chronicling not just a house but a decaying town come back to life. Along the way Ed offers some shrewd observations about gentrification, urban decline and revival, and what it means to be a city guy. His book is timely and a great read and will appeal to anyone with a soft spot for old houses or old towns.
As a state abounding with broad farmlands, Illinois has depended heavily on its barns. At once imposing and humble, the barns of Illinois are much more than simply a place to store equipment and livestock. As gathering places for friends and family, they have become focal points of local communities, an enduring link between the present day and the traditions of the past. With these iconic structures as our guideposts, we find our way across the open landscape of the geography and history of the Midwest.
In this magnificent new collection, renowned photographer Larry Kanfer documents the diversity of barns throughout the Prairie State, from weathered, abandoned shelters in the countryside to proudly well-preserved landmarks featured in barn tours and even Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo. Kanfer presents barns from every angle, inside and out, from a distance and up close, to capture the many reasons why they fascinate, inspire, and reassure.
With engaging prose, Alaina Kanfer recounts the histories of many of the barns featured, revealing each barn's unique character and tracing its distinctive imprint on the land and on people's lives. While many of the buildings continue to function within family farms for storage and shelter, others have been rescued and restored and put to a wide array of new uses, such as schools and gymnasiums in Kane and Effingham Counties, an animal rescue organization in McLean County, a winery in St. Clair County, and workshops in Sangamon and Union Counties.
With more than one hundred full color photographs of dozens of barns from across the state, Barns of Illinois presents these proud emblems of the heartland as never before--a unique chronicle of a state and its evolving way of life.
"A brief, cogent analysis of gentrification in Chicago ... an incisive and useful narrative on the puzzle of urban development."--Kirkus Reviews
In the years after World War II, a movement began to bring the middle class back from the Chicago suburbs to the Lincoln Park neighborhood on the city's North Side. In place of the old, poorly maintained apartments and dense streetscapes of taverns and butchers, "rehabbers" imagined a new kind of neighborhood--a renovated, modern community that held on to the convenience, diversity, and character of a historic urban quarter, but also enjoyed the prosperity and privileges of a new subdivision.
But as the old buildings came down, cheap studios were combined to create ever more spacious, luxurious homes. Property values swiftly rose, and the people who were being evicted to make room for progress began to assert their own ideas about the future of Lincoln Park. Over the course of the 1960s, divisions within the community deepened. Letters and picket lines gave way to increasingly violent strikes and counterstrikes as each camp tried to settle the same existential questions that beguile so many cities today: Who is a neighborhood for? And who gets to decide?
A riveting historical look at gentrification and urban renewal projects that still resonates across every American city today.
Lake Claremont Press's 2004 award-winner, "The Streets & San Man's Guide to Chicago Eats," delivered tongue-in-cheek style and food-in-mouth expertise by a certified expert of the City of Chicago's Department of Lunch: streets & sanitation department electrician Dennis Foley.
Now, Sgt. David J. Haynes of the Chicago Police Department, and his partner-in-crime, humorist and blogger Christopher Garlington, want to take on Foley's street-level guide to the best mom-and-pop food bargains in Chicago with their follow-up: "The Beat Cop's Guide to Chicago Eats": "We're funnier, better-looking, and have the street smarts, girth, and weaponry to meet him in any alley, taqueria, or rib joint."
