Michael Madigan rose from the Chicago machine to hold unprecedented power as Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. In his thirty-six years wielding the gavel, Madigan outlasted governors, passed or blocked legislation at will, and outmaneuvered virtually every attempt to limit his reach. Veteran reporter Ray Long draws on four decades of observing state government to provide the definitive political analysis of Michael Madigan. Secretive, intimidating, shrewd, power-hungry--Madigan mesmerized his admirers and often left his opponents too beaten down to oppose him. Long vividly recreates the battles that defined the Madigan era, from stunning James Thompson with a lightning-strike tax increase, to pressing for a pension overhaul that ultimately failed in the courts, to steering the House toward the Rod Blagojevich impeachment. Long also shines a light on the machinery that kept the Speaker in power. Head of a patronage army, Madigan ruthlessly used his influence and fundraising prowess to reward loyalists and aid his daughter’s electoral fortunes. At the same time, he reshaped bills to guarantee he and his Democratic troops shared in the partisan spoils of his legislative victories. Yet Madigan’s position as the state’s seemingly invulnerable power broker could not survive scandals among his close associates and the widespread belief that his time as Speaker had finally reached its end. Unsparing and authoritative, The House That Madigan Built is the page-turning account of one the most powerful politicians in Illinois history.

Former State Senator William Arrington revolutionized the political climate of Illinois, leaving behind the legacy of its modern-day legislature. Today, almost two decades after having dictated his memoirs from his death bed, his story is told.

Presenting religion as journalism's silent partner, From Yahweh to Yahoo! provides a fresh and surprising view of the religious impulses at work in the typical newsroom by delving into the largely unexamined parallels between religious and journalistic developments from the "media" of antiquity to the electronic idolatry of the Internet.

Hardly shy about himself or his work, Theodore Dreiser knew the value of publicity. Over four decades he often consented to interviews, answering questions about his fiction, his politics, and even previous interviews. Throughout his life Dreiser raised a storm of protest with his realistic novels, blistered public figures and other authors with untempered criticism, scorned pieties masking brutality in law and economics, and expressed a few contradictions of his own. This volume collects for the first time more than seventy interviews. As a group, they show Dreiser dealing with an array of literary and social issues, as well as his lifelong incapacity to mince words. Dreiser is revealed in these interviews as a public figure of epic proportions.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Max Frankel characterized Unsecular Media as a book that "leaves you thinking about the saintly role that religion has acquired in our allegedly irreligious media." Mark Silk's book is the first to offer a comprehensive description and analysis of how American news media cover religion.

Porchlight’s Best Leadership & Strategy Book of The Year An inspiring memoir from the CEO of DICK’s Sporting Goods that is “not only entertaining but will be of great value to any entrepreneur” (Phil Knight, New York Times bestselling author of Shoe Dog), this book shows how a trailblazing business was created by giving back to the community and by taking principled, and sometimes controversial, stands—including against the type of weapons that are too often used in mass shootings and other tragedies. It’s How We Play the Game tells the story of a complicated founder and an ambitious son—one who transformed a business by making it about more than business, conceiving it as a force for good in the communities it serves. In 1948, Ed Stack’s father started Dick’s Bait and Tackle in Binghamton, New York. Ed Stack bought the business from his father in 1984, and grew it into the largest sporting goods retailer in the country, with 800 locations and close to $9 billion in sales. The transformation Ed wrought wasn’t easy: economic headwinds nearly toppled the chain twice. But DICK’s support for embattled youth sports programs earned the stores surprising loyalty, and the company won even more attention when, in the wake of yet another school shooting—at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—it chose to become the first major retailer to pull all semi-automatic weapons from its shelves, raise the age of gun purchase to twenty-one, and, most strikingly, destroy the assault-style-type rifles then in its inventory. With vital lessons for anyone running a business and eye-opening reflections about what a company owes the people it serves, It’s How We Play the Game is “a compelling narrative…In a genre that can frequently be staid, Mr. Stack’s corporate biography is deeply personal…[Features] surprising openness [and] interesting and humorous anecdotes” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Brigham Young comes to life in this superlative biography that presents him as a Mormon leader, a business genius, a family man, a political organizer, and a pioneer of the West. Drawing on a vast range of sources, including documents, personal diaries, and private correspondence, Leonard J. Arrington brings Young to life as a towering yet fully human figure, the remarkable captain of his people and his church for thirty years, who combined piety and the pursuit of power to leave an indelible stamp on Mormon society and the culture of the Western frontier. From polygamy to the Mountain Meadows Massacre to the attempted preservation of Young’s Great Basin Kingdom, we are given a fresh understanding of the controversies that plagued Young in his contentious relations with the federal government. Brigham Young draws its subject out of the marginal place in history to which the conventional wisdom has assigned him, and sets him squarely in the American mainstream, a figure of abiding influence in our society to this day.