For decades now, the story of art in America has been dominated by New York. It gets the majority of attention, the stories of its schools and movements and masterpieces the stuff of pop culture legend. Chicago, on the other hand . . . well, people here just get on with the work of making art. Now that art is getting its due. Art in Chicago is a magisterial account of the long history of Chicago art, from the rupture of the Great Fire in 1871 to the present, Manierre Dawson, László Moholy-Nagy, and Ivan Albright to Chris Ware, Anne Wilson, and Theaster Gates. The first single-volume history of art and artists in Chicago, the book—in recognition of the complexity of the story it tells—doesn’t follow a single continuous trajectory. Rather, it presents an overlapping sequence of interrelated narratives that together tell a full and nuanced, yet wholly accessible history of visual art in the city. From the temptingly blank canvas left by the Fire, we loop back to the 1830s and on up through the 1860s, tracing the beginnings of the city’s institutional and professional art world and community. From there, we travel in chronological order through the decades to the present. Familiar developments—such as the founding of the Art Institute, the Armory Show, and the arrival of the Bauhaus—are given a fresh look, while less well-known aspects of the story, like the contributions of African American artists dating back to the 1860s or the long history of activist art, finally get suitable recognition. The six chapters, each written by an expert in the period, brilliantly mix narrative and image, weaving in oral histories from artists and critics reflecting on their work in the city, and setting new movements and key works in historical context. The final chapter, comprised of interviews and conversations with contemporary artists, brings the story up to the present, offering a look at the vibrant art being created in the city now and addressing ongoing debates about what it means to identify as—or resist identifying as—a Chicago artist today. The result is an unprecedentedly inclusive and rich tapestry, one that reveals Chicago art in all its variety and vigor—and one that will surprise and enlighten even the most dedicated fan of the city’s artistic heritage. Part of the Terra Foundation for American Art’s year-long Art Design Chicago initiative, which will bring major arts events to venues throughout Chicago in 2018, Art in Chicago is a landmark publication, a book that will be the standard account of Chicago art for decades to come. No art fan—regardless of their city—will want to miss it.

The inside story of Chicago, one of the most successful and enduring rock bands ever With their distinctive blending of soulful rock and horn-infused urban jazz, Chicago has thrilled music fans for more than forty years with their lyrical brilliance. In this no-holds-barred memoir, legendary rocker Danny Seraphine shares his dramatic—and often shocking—experiences as the popular supergroup's cofounder and longtime drummer. He reveals behind-the-scenes anecdotes about Chicago’s beginnings as the house band at Los Angeles's legendary Whisky A Go Go, where they were discovered by music icons Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, and personal insights about the group’s many comebacks and reinventions over the years. Offers a lively inside account of the music and history of the perennially popular band Chicago, one of the most successful American bands ever with over 122 million albums sold, by the band’s cofounder and longtime drummer Danny Seraphine Includes riveting tales and rare photographs from Seraphine's time on the road touring with performers including Dennis and Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Bruce Springsteen Candidly tackles many rumors about Chicago, including Mafia ties, accounting and payola scandals, and major drug abuse Discusses the mysterious circumstances surrounding Seraphine's 1990 firing from the band as well as his comeback with his critically acclaimed new band, California Transit Authority Whether you're a diehard Chicago fan or just love a well-told rock-and-roll memoir, Street Player will entertain and surprise you.

Covid-19 was my reason for writing this book. I'm not a published author, but because of the quarantine for months, I decided to relive my past and put it in print. My only experience with writing was when I was in school. I made up book reports and got good grades on all my work. Hope you enjoy my past as I lived it.

Vividly told and richly illustrated with more than 160 photos, this fascinating history of the cultural, religious, fraternal, economic, and everyday life of Chicago's Jews brings to life the people, events, neighborhoods, and institutions that helped shape today's Jewish communities. 15 maps. Graphs & tables.

Growing Up Chicago is a collection of coming-of-age stories written by Chicagoland authors that reflects the diversity of the city and its metropolitan area. Primarily memoir, the book asks, What characterizes a Chicago author?

Police, the press, and the public all see the kind of violence that besets the inner city today as irrational and basically about turf, revenge, or drugs. Renowned criminologist and expert on gangs, John Hagedorn here tells a very different and little-known story centered on the dramatic rise and fall of a Mafia-like Latino organization in Chicago called "Spanish Growth & Development." Hagedorn's main informant is 'Sal Martino, ' an Italian Mafioso who became intimately involved with the "In$ane Family," one of the factions of Spanish Growth & Development. Through Sal's first-hand account, Hagedorn shows that the violence was not a result of "disorganized crime" but rather the outcome of SGD's prolonged demise. He gives us for the first time a detailed the history of SGD-the reasons for its creation, the uneasy alliances between gang families, the organization's reliance on bottom-up police corruption, and its ultimate collapse in a pool of blood at a 1999 "peace" conference. Revealing the hidden and riveting stories of Chicago gangs' efforts to build structures ostensibly to reduce violence and to organize crime, of the integration of gang and mafia history, and of the central role of police corruption in Chicago's gangland, "The In$ane Chicago Way" makes a powerful argument for the need to regard corruption as the bedrock of gang power. It dispels the notion that gang violence can be explained solely by ecological, neighborhood-based processes and sheds light on the current gang situation in Chicago by laying bare its history while raising disturbing questions for researchers, policy-makers, and the public.

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 had failed, leaving residents without electricity for up to two days. By July 20, over seven hundred people had perished—twenty times the number of those struck down by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Heat waves kill more Americans than all other natural disasters combined. Until now, no one could explain either the overwhelming number or the heartbreaking manner of the deaths resulting from the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Meteorologists and medical scientists have been unable to account for the scale of the trauma, and political officials have puzzled over the sources of the city’s vulnerability. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct what he calls a “social autopsy,” examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been. He investigates why some neighborhoods experienced greater mortality than others, how city government responded, and how journalists, scientists, and public officials reported and explained these events. Through years of fieldwork, interviews, and research, he uncovers the surprising and unsettling forms of social breakdown that contributed to this human catastrophe as hundreds died alone behind locked doors and sealed windows, out of contact with friends, family, community groups, and public agencies. As this incisive and gripping account demonstrates, the widening cracks in the social foundations of American cities made visible by the 1995 heat wave remain in play in America’s cities today—and we ignore them at our peril. Includes photos and a new preface on meeting the challenges of climate change in urban centers “Heat Wave is not so much a book about weather, as it is about the calamitous consequences of forgetting our fellow citizens. . . . A provocative, fascinating book, one that applies to much more than weather disasters.” —Chicago Sun-Times “It’s hard to put down Heat Wave without believing you’ve just read a tale of slow murder by public policy.” —Salon “A classic. I can’t recommend it enough.” —Chris Hayes