My Kind Of Town

In the thrilling sequel to One for Our Baby, the Chicago mob is looking for Al Capone’s lost treasure—and former ace fighter pilot Joe Buonomo holds the key to finding it. When Joe Buonomo returned from World War II, he chose to settle in California rather than go back home to Chicago—and he didn’t plan on revisiting his old stomping grounds any time soon. But when Frank Sinatra asks you to fly him to the Windy City for a gig, you don’t refuse. And so, reluctantly, Joe finds himself strolling down memory lane and rekindling relationships with his estranged family. But where Joe goes, trouble tends to follow. Rumor has it that a man named Butch O’Hare was in charge of hiding Al Capone’s fortune, but Butch is long dead, and warring mob bosses seem to believe his old war buddy Joe knows more than he’s letting on. Joe is forced to join the ridiculous quest to find the gold, but the more the search of Chicago’s seedy underground drags on, the more Joe thinks the treasure might not be a myth after all—and he may be the only one who can uncover the truth. For fans of historical fiction, action, and noir, My Kind of Town is a hardboiled crime thriller that captures the beat of Chicago in the sixties, complete with gangsters, hot dogs, and bocce.

"Hank lived by the credo, 'first listen, then design'." --Scott Bernstein, Founder and Chief Strategy + Innovation Officer, Center for Neighborhood Technology Hank Dittmar was a globally recognized urban planner, advocate, and policy advisor. He wrote extensively on a wide range of topics, including architectural criticism, community planning, and transportation policy over his long and storied career. In My Kind of City, Dittmar has organized his selected writings into ten sections with original introductions. His observations range on scale from local ("My Favorite Street: Seven Dials, Covent Garden, London") to national ("Post Truth Architecture in the Age of Trump") and global ("Architects are Critical to Adapting our Cities to Climate Change"). Andrés Duany writes of Hank in the book foreword, "He has continued to search for ways to engage place, community and history in order to avoid the tempting formalism of plans." The range of topics covered in My Kind of City reflects the breadth of Dittmar's experience in working for better cities for people. Common themes emerge in the engaging prose including Dittmar's belief that improving our cities should not be left to the "experts"; his appreciation for the beautiful and the messy; and his rare combination of deep expertise and modesty. As Lynn Richards, CEO of Congress for the New Urbanism expresses in the preface, "Hank's writing is smart without being elitist, witty and poetic, succinct and often surprising." My Kind of City captures a visionary planner's spirit, eye for beauty, and love for the places where we live.

Internationally traveled and familiar with salons and personalities of the dance world, we find a stroll through the years as Dorothy Dean Stevens gives us glimpses of personal encounters with leading dancers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She begins by tracing her ancestors settling in the west; on through her early years, then to her entrance into the hallowed halls of European Ballet and the continued ties with leading dancers. Early in her life she studied at Cornish School of the Arts and later with Eugene Lorin. Such notables as Adolf Bolm, and Dimitri Romanoff, instructed in her dance studio in Monterey California. Sucessful dancers such as Frank Bourman, and Michael Smuin, who later founded the Smuin Ballet in San Francisco, taught for a time at Dorothy's studio. She also covers the development of the cultural arts, tracing theater and talent that existed in the central California region of the Monterey Peninsula. But there is more to her life than this; travel and adventure, business and pleasure all woven into a tale of her life. Dorothy dances through joys and sorrows to the encore years in which her family, once again, takes the spot light.

New Yorker writer and author of The Library Book takes readers on a series of remarkable journeys in this uniquely witty, sophisticated, and far-flung travel book. In this irresistible collection of adventures far and near, Orlean conducts a tour of the world via its subcultures, from the heart of the African music scene in Paris to the World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Illinois—and even into her own apartment, where she imagines a very famous houseguest taking advantage of her hospitality. With Orlean as guide, lucky readers partake in all manner of armchair activity. They will climb Mt. Fuji and experience a hike most intrepid Japanese have never attempted; play ball with Cuba’s Little Leaguers, promising young athletes born in a country where baseball and politics are inextricably intertwined; trawl Icelandic waters with Keiko, everyone’s favorite whale as he tries to make it on his own; stay awhile in Midland, Texas, hometown of George W. Bush, a place where oil time is the only time that matters; explore the halls of a New York City school so troubled it’s known as “Horror High”; and stalk caged tigers in Jackson, New Jersey, a suburban town with one of the highest concentrations of tigers per square mile anywhere in the world. Vivid, humorous, unconventional, and incomparably entertaining, Susan Orlean’s writings for The New Yorker have delighted readers for over a decade. My Kind of Place is an inimitable treat by one of America’s premier literary journalists.

Patrick Riordan always thought that nothing could match the adrenaline rush he gets from his job as a Navy pilot. But this Christmas, Patrick's pulse is "really" racing after he meets Angie LeCroix. Original.

"The book also delves into how the Chicago Police Department battles gangs, guns, drugs, and murder; how Hillard exhibited leadership in good times and in bad times; how Hillard dealt with politicians, the community, cops on the street and the media; how the department handled difficult crimes and their investigations; and how Hillard led, what he learned in the process, and what he accomplished. The book also discusses contemporary police issues including police corruption and brutality, use of force by police, police pursuits, police shootings and deaths, community policing, police accountability, and the use of emerging technologies in the fight against crime."--BOOK JACKET.

This is a collection of editorial and political cartoons focused on the highs and lows of the Chicago and Illinois politics that produced both the first African American president and a string of corrupt gubernatorial administrations.

Cities are not made only of stone: they harbor ways of life, practices, movements, moods, atmospheres, feelings. Yet the ineffable nature of affects has long deprived human passions of a meaningful role when it comes to observing urban space and envisioning its future transformation. With this book, we explore the contemporary city and its transitional conditions from a different perspective: a quest to understand how the space of collective life and the feelings this engenders are connected, how they mutually give form to each other. In an interdisciplinary collection of essays, The Affective City means to open a discussion on the “soft” presences animating the world of urban objects: beyond the city built out of mere things, this book’s focus is on the forces that make urban life emerge, thrive, flourish, but also wither, and sometimes die. A task crucial for the survival of cities as human habitats, in an urban world that – with every passing day – seems to draw closer a crisis.