Chicago Books!

This isn't your average travel book--
and these aren't your average tourist destinations!

Take a wild ride through hidden Windy City history--often dark, sometimes inexplicable, and occasionally glamorous. Meet the gangsters, ghosts, serial killers and celebrities that only Chicago could produce. This journey into eclectic Chicago lore includes: 19 spine-tingling creepy sites (Resurrection Mary, Lonely Ghost of Lake Forest, St. Rita's and so many more); all things Al Capone (seven notable Scarface sites and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre); other Outfit bigshot hangouts, graves and hit locations; Monsters of the Midway like Holmes, Gacy, Speck and more; murder and mayhem featuring 12 killers; and literally dozens of celebrity homes and hangouts from downtown to the suburbs and beyond!

In early November 1913, not quite 19 months after the loss of the Titanic in midatlantic, an autumn gale descended on the Great Lakes. Gales of November - like the one that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald in the 1970s - are a fact of life for Great Lakes mariners, but this one was anything but ordinary. Meteorologists now believe that a blast of cold polar air met a warm, moist air mass entrained in a low-pressure cell moving up from the Gulf of Mexico through the U.S. heartland, and the result was a violent weather bomb and the worst recorded storm in Great Lakes history. The storm lasted four days, with sustained winds as high as 75 miles per hour, freezing temperatures, white-out blizzard conditions, and mountainous seas. U.S. Weather Bureau) issued storm warnings on Friday morning, November 7, the warnings contained no hint of anything more than 50-mile-per-hour winds for Friday and Saturday. Most ships were making their final trips of the season; their captains knew that as autumn turned to winter the weather would only get worse, and then the lakes would freeze. Across the Great Lakes, hundreds of ships left port that weekend, heading directly into the jaws of what became a survival storm. On the ocean, with sea room, a well-found ship can often survive by running off before a storm until it blows out. On the Great Lakes there is never sufficient sea room. In the driving snow, ship masters could only guess where the treacherous shores lay. Ships iced up and became topheavy; some turned turtle. By Monday evening 19 ships had sunk, another two dozen were driven ashore, and at least 238 sailors had lost their lives. second-story eaves, and facing shortages of milk, bread, and meat, was confronting the worst natural disaster in its history. White Hurricane recreates the four-day storm with narrative intensity and factual depth. To make sense of this big, sprawling, multifaceted story, author David Brown develops it chronologically and focuses on the most exciting human dramas. One or two ships in each of the four hardest hit lakes - Superior, Huron, Michigan, and Erie - carry the narrative, while other disasters are reported more briefly as they occur. original and secondary sources the richest, most exciting, most mysterious, and most humanly moving stories. The destructive impacts ashore - especially the privations in Cleveland - weave another narrative strand. The U.S. Weather Bureau and the U.S. Coast Guard owe their existence in part to the Storm of 1913. Like Isaac's Storm and The Heart of the Sea, White Hurricane is both thrilling narrative and scrupulous history. This is the book that carries The Perfect Storm to the heart of America, and David Brown, a Great Lakes mariner and writer and the author of The Last Log of the Titanic, is the ideal guide.

A vividly illustrated collaboration between two of Chicago's most celebrated architecture critics casts a wise and unsparing eye on inequities in the built environment and attempts to rectify them.

From his high-profile battles with Donald Trump to his insightful celebrations of Frank Lloyd Wright and front-page takedowns of Chicago mega-projects like Lincoln Yards, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin has long informed and delighted readers with his illuminating commentary. Kamin's newest collection, Who Is the City For?, does more than gather fifty-five of his most notable Chicago Tribune columns from the past decade: it pairs his words with striking new images by photographer and architecture critic Lee Bey, Kamin's former rival at the Chicago Sun-Times. Together, they paint a revealing portrait of Chicago that reaches beyond its glamorous downtown and dramatic buildings by renowned architects like Jeanne Gang to its culturally diverse neighborhoods, including modest structures associated with storied figures from the city's Black history, such as Emmett Till.

At the book's heart is its expansive approach to a central concept in contemporary political and architectural discourse: equity. Kamin argues for a broad understanding of the term, one that prioritizes both the shared spaces of the public realm and the urgent need to rebuild Black and brown neighborhoods devastated by decades of discrimination and disinvestment. "At best," he writes in the book's introduction, "the public realm can serve as an equalizing force, a democratizing force. It can spread life's pleasures and confer dignity, irrespective of a person's race, income, creed, or gender. In doing so, the public realm can promote the social contract -- the notion that we are more than our individual selves, that our common humanity is made manifest in common ground." Yet the reality in Chicago, as Who Is the City For? powerfully demonstrates, often falls painfully short of that ideal.

For more than a decade, Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin has been writing fiery, intelligent essays on the state of contemporary architecture. His subjects range from high-rises to highways, parks to public housing, Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry. Why Architecture Matters collects the best of Kamin's acclaimed columns, offering both a look at America's foremost architectural city and a taste of Kamin's penetrating, witty style of critique.

After 15 years on the air and a thousand stories on everything from the Ancient Astronaut Society to Zoe the Barbie Doll collector, the extremely popular public television series "Wild Chicago"""now has its own companion guidebook. Curious natives and intrepid tourists seeking a slightly skewed take on the Windy City and its surrounding communities need look no further than this irreverent yet authoritative guide.
Host Will Clinger, producer Harvey Moshman, and correspondent Mindy Bell have collected their 500 favorite offbeat and unusual people and places that have been featured on the show. They know their viewers--people who will drive an hour to find that one artist who taxidermies the heads of turkeys and dresses them in doll clothes; who would rather see a sock puppet version of "Titanic "than a production of "Macbeth "at the Goodman; who love to explore and discover--and show off their knowledge to friends. They wrote this book for them and for countless others with a taste for the bizarre and unconventional.
This indispensable tool reveals seldom seen corners and little known wonders of Chicago, such as:
*American Pet Motel (more than just a place to board bowser)
*Lava Lamp Factory (cosmic illumination on the northwest side)
*Cut-rate Caskets (for sale to the public)
*Foot polo (without the horses)
*House of Whacks (latex & leather fashions)
*Those Darn Accordions! (must see to believe)
*Lee Watson's Reptile Swamp (need we say more?)
*Perry's Deli (when you're hungry for food--and abuse)
As they say on "Wild Chicago"," " "to navigate the urban jungle, you need a wild guide!"