The Mart

Focuses on common word families for beginning readers featuring a picture glossary, rebus sentences, word family words, and a story section.

A huge complex spanning two city blocks, the Merchandise Mart is the largest wholesale design center in the world. The brainchild of James Simpson of Marshall Field & Company, it was planned to house Field's huge wholesale division and prop up sagging sales. Executed by the architectural firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White--of Opera House and Field Museum fame--the Mart was the world's most complex mixed-use structure: a warehouse, a department store, and a commercial office tower. All this was presented in a successful blend of elements from the Chicago School, classicism, and Art Deco, built on former Chicago & North Western Railway property and air space over the tracks. Unfortunately, Field's suffered from the Great Depression, and so the Mart stood almost empty during World War II. In 1946 Joseph P. Kennedy purchased the Merchandise Mart for $16 million (it had cost $32 million to build). Under Kennedy's managerial flair; the Mart thrived. Renovations between 1986 and 1991 injected new life into the building and today the Marchandise Mart is an enduring monument to the brash, inventive, and successful Chicago spirit.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself” (NPR). • CELEBRATING OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.