This collection of 19 essays examine the role of baseball's Cubs in the history and politics of Chicago. They focus on topics such as the rise of a nationwide fan base through the long reach of superstation WGN; the local uses and views of icons Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, and Ryne Sandberg; historical divides along lines of race (on the field) and class (in the stands); Wrigley Field as a public space both sacred and cursed; the importance of local and nationwide media coverage; and the Cubs' impact on Chicago music and literature.

A historic Houston barrio provides an illuminating lens on neighborhood reputation. Neighborhoods have the power to form significant parts of our worlds and identities. A neighborhood’s reputation, however, doesn’t always match up to how residents see themselves or wish to be seen. The distance between residents’ desires and their environment can profoundly shape neighborhood life. In A Good Reputation, sociologists Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga delve into the development and transformation of the reputation of Northside, a predominantly Latinx barrio in Houston. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with residents, developers, and other neighborhood stakeholders, the authors show that people’s perceptions of their neighborhoods are essential to understanding urban inequality and poverty. Korver-Glenn and Mayorga’s empirically detailed account of disputes over neighborhood reputation helps readers understand the complexity of high-poverty urban neighborhoods, demonstrating that gentrification is a more complicated and irregular process than existing accounts of urban inequality would suggest. Offering insightful theoretical analysis and compelling narrative threads from understudied communities, A Good Reputation will yield insights for scholars of race and ethnicity, urban planning, and beyond.

Professional baseball is full of arcane team names. The Los Angeles Dodgers, for instance, owe their nickname to the trolley tracks that honeycombed Brooklyn in the early 1880s. (Residents were "trolley dodgers.") From the Negro Leagues, there were the Pittsburgh Crawfords (sponsored early by the Crawford Bath House and Recreation Center); from the minors, the Tucson Waddies (slang for cowboy) and, later, the Montgomery Biscuits (for the would-be concessions staple); from overseas, the Adelaide, Australia, Bite (a shark reference but also a pun for bight) and the Bussum, Netherlands, Mr. Cocker HCAW (the sponsoring restaurant chain, followed by the acronym for the official team name, Honkbalclub Allan Weerbaar). This comprehensive reference book explains the nicknames of thousands of major and minor league franchises, Negro League and early independent black clubs, and international teams--from 1869 through 2011.

A tribute to the unique wit of Dublin written by Ireland's most prolific joke book and humor writer.

This book is about the holy grail and God passing judgment on mankind and the father of this holy divine story being dragged to the gates of Hell and leaving his begotten son with the sword of destiny. This book also tells about angels and demons and saints and the movement of the reaper among the humans on Earth. At the end of this eternal dark world of destiny the divine son finds the redemption of his father with his sword of destiny at the end of the road.

James Joyce is located between, and constructed within, two worlds: the national and international, the political and cultural systems of colonialism and postcolonialism. Joyce's political project is to construct a postcolonial contra-modernity: to write the incommensurable differences of colonial, postcolonial, and gendered subjectivities, and, in doing so, to reorient the axis of power and knowledge. What Joyce dramatizes in his hybrid writing is the political and cultural remainder of imperial history or patriarchal canons: a remainder that resists assimilation into the totalizing narratives of modernity. Through this remainder - of both politics and the psyche - Joyce reveals how a minority culture can construct political and personal agency. Joyce: Feminism / Post / Colonialism, edited by Ellen Carol Jones, bears witness to the construction of that agency, tracing the inscription of the racial and sexual other in colonial, nationalist, and postnational representations, deciphering the history of the possible. Contributors are Gregory Castle, Gerald Doherty, Enda Duffy, James Fairhall, Peter Hitchcock, Ellen Carol Jones, Ranjana Khanna, Patrick McGee, Marilyn Reizbaum, Susan de Sola Rodstein, Carol Shloss, and David Spurr.

An Irish Catholic neighborhood of the 1960s on Chicago's Southside that nurtured camaraderie, religion and racial fury; the frequently illegal antics of teenaged boys; the broadening experiences of college and the Army; an assortment of jobs from brutally boring factory work, to business in foreign embassies, to fighting fires; people met and befriended from the super rich to inept Korean golfers who feared tigers; religion, and how confusing it can be.