Download or read book Stateway s Garden written by Jasmon Drain and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • A blazingly original story collection about the interconnected lives of the residents of a public housing project on the South Side of Chicago “The residents and their buoyant dreams are documented, celebrated, honored. I bow to this writer in gratitude.”—Sandra Cisneros NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY CHICAGO TRIBUNE Before being torn down in 2007, the Stateway Gardens public housing projects on Chicago’s South Side were ridden with deprivation and crime. But for some, like Tracy, the shy, intelligent young boy at the center of this enthralling collection of linked stories, they are simply home. Set in the mid-1980s and taking readers up to the point of the destruction of the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects—a set of buildings similar in design to Stateway Gardens to the south—this collection gives an intimate look at the hopes, dreams, failures, and fortunes of a group of people growing up with the deck always stacked against them. Through Jasmon Drain’s sensitive and often playful prose, we see another side of what we have come to know as “the projects.” Stateway’s Garden is a coming-of-age story told in short stories, through the lens of a childhood made rough by the crush of poverty and violence, with the crack epidemic a looming specter ahead. And yet, through the experiences and ambitions of Tracy and other young characters, Drain reveals a vibrant community that creates its own ecosystem, all set in a series of massive, seemingly soulless concrete buildings. Not shying away from the darkness of life for his characters, Drain shows the full complexity of their human experiences. Exquisitely detailed and novelistic in scope, this collection of stories will linger in your mind long after you have turned the final page.
Download or read book High Rise Stories written by Audrey Petty and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2013-09-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the gripping first-person accounts of High Rise Stories, former residents of Chicago’s iconic public housing projects describe life in the now-demolished high-rises. These stories of community, displacement, and poverty in the wake of gentrification give voice to those who have long been ignored, but whose hopes and struggles exist firmly at the heart of our national identity.
Download or read book Nothing More Dangerous written by Allen Eskens and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Missouri native Allen Eskens' "stunning small-town mystery" (New York Times Book Review) is a necessary exploration of family, loyalty, and racial tension in America and "a coming-of-age book to rival some of the best, such as Ordinary Grace" (Library Journal, starred review). In a small Southern town where loyalty to family and to "your people" carries the weight of a sacred oath, defying those unspoken rules can be a deadly proposition. After fifteen years of growing up in the Ozark hills with his widowed mother, high-school freshman Boady Sanden is beyond ready to move on. He dreams of glass towers and cityscapes, driven by his desire to be anywhere other than Jessup, Missouri. The new kid at St. Ignatius High School, if he isn't being pushed around, he is being completely ignored. Even his beloved woods, his playground as a child and his sanctuary as he grew older, seem to be closing in on him, suffocating him. Then Thomas Elgin moves in across the road, and Boady's life begins to twist and turn. Coming to know the Elgins -- a black family settling into a community where notions of "us" and "them" carry the weight of history -- forces Boady to rethink his understanding of the world he's taken for granted. Secrets hidden in plain sight begin to unfold: the mother who wraps herself in the loss of her husband, the neighbor who carries the wounds of a mysterious past that he holds close, the quiet boss who is fighting his own hidden battle. But the biggest secret of all is the disappearance of Lida Poe, the African-American woman who keeps the books at the local plastics factory. Word has it that Ms. Poe left town, along with a hundred thousand dollars of company money. Although Boady has never met the missing woman, he discovers that the threads of her life are woven into the deepest fabric of his world. As the mystery of her fate plays out, Boady begins to see the stark lines of race and class that both bind and divide this small town -- and he will be forced to choose sides. Best Book of the Year: Florida Sun-Sentinel and Library Journal Finalist for the Minnesota Book Award
Download or read book Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs written by Ann Durkin Keating and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""Which neighborhood?" It's one of the first questions you're asked when you move to Chicago. And the answer you give - be it Bucktown, Bronzeville, or Bridgeport - can give your inquisitor a good idea of who you are, especially in a metropolis with so many different neighborhoods and suburbs to choose from." "Many of us know little of the neighborhoods beyond those where we work, play, and live. This is particularly true in Chicagoland, a region that spans over 4,400 square miles and is home to more than 9.5 million residents. Now, historian Ann Durkin Keating's compact guide, drawn largely from the bestselling Encyclopedia of Chicago, brings the history of Chicago neighborhoods to life."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Spatializing Blackness written by Rashad Shabazz and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-08-30 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 277,000 African Americans migrated to Chicago between 1900 and 1940, an influx unsurpassed in any other northern city. From the start, carceral powers literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment to contain these African Americans within the so-called Black Belt on the city's South Side. A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with--and resist--spacial containment. A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.
Download or read book Chicago written by Dominic A. Pacyga and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chicago has been called by many names. Nelson Algren declared it a “City on the Make.” Carl Sandburg dubbed it the “City of Big Shoulders.” Upton Sinclair christened it “The Jungle,” while New Yorkers, naturally, pronounced it “the Second City.” At last there is a book for all of us, whatever we choose to call Chicago. In this magisterial biography, historian Dominic Pacyga traces the storied past of his hometown, from the explorations of Joliet and Marquette in 1673 to the new wave of urban pioneers today. The city’s great industrialists, reformers, and politicians—and, indeed, the many not-so-great and downright notorious—animate this book, from Al Capone and Jane Addams to Mayor Richard J. Daley and President Barack Obama. But what distinguishes this book from the many others on the subject is its author’s uncommon ability to illuminate the lives of Chicago’s ordinary people. Raised on the city’s South Side and employed for a time in the stockyards, Pacyga gives voice to the city’s steelyard workers and kill floor operators, and maps the neighborhoods distinguished not by Louis Sullivan masterworks, but by bungalows and corner taverns. Filled with the city’s one-of-a-kind characters and all of its defining moments, Chicago: A Biography is as big and boisterous as its namesake—and as ambitious as the men and women who built it.
Download or read book A Game of Birds and Wolves written by Simon Parkin and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As heard on the New Yorker Radio Hour: The triumphant and "engaging history" (The New Yorker) of the young women who devised a winning strategy that defeated Nazi U-boats and delivered a decisive victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. By 1941, Winston Churchill had come to believe that the outcome of World War II rested on the battle for the Atlantic. A grand strategy game was devised by Captain Gilbert Roberts and a group of ten Wrens (members of the Women's Royal Naval Service) assigned to his team in an attempt to reveal the tactics behind the vicious success of the German U-boats. Played on a linoleum floor divided into painted squares, it required model ships to be moved across a make-believe ocean in a manner reminiscent of the childhood game, Battleship. Through play, the designers developed "Operation Raspberry," a counter-maneuver that helped turn the tide of World War II. Combining vibrant novelistic storytelling with extensive research, interviews, and previously unpublished accounts, Simon Parkin describes for the first time the role that women played in developing the Allied strategy that, in the words of one admiral, "contributed in no small measure to the final defeat of Germany." Rich with unforgettable cinematic detail and larger-than-life characters, A Game of Birds and Wolves is a heart-wrenching tale of ingenuity, dedication, perseverance, and love, bringing to life the imagination and sacrifice required to defeat the Nazis at sea.
Download or read book Ghosts in the Schoolyard written by Eve L. Ewing and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-02-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.” That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt. But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike? Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools—schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs—as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.
Download or read book Start Shooting written by Charlie Newton and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The best way I can describe the Four Corners neighborhood of Chicago is find a length of rebar, scratch a big cross into the concrete, set your feet solid in the quadrant you like best, lean back, and start shooting.” Officer Bobby Vargas is hard-edged but idealistic, a Chicago cop who stands at the epicenter of a subterranean plot that will have horrific ramifications for both himself and the entire city. Twenty-five years earlier, a gruesome murder rocked the unforgiving streets of Four Corners. Now, suddenly, a dying Chicago paper is running a serial exposé on new evidence in that old case, threatening to implicate Bobby and his older brother, Ruben—a decorated, high-ranking detective and cop- prince of the streets. The smear campaign stirs up decades-old bad blood, leading the Vargas brothers down an increasingly twisted and terrifying path, where the sins of the past threaten to destroy what remains of the truth. As readers and critics discovered in his first novel, Calumet City, Charlie Newton’s Chicago is a landscape as brutal and poignant as any in modern crime fiction—a multi-faceted, shockingly violent labyrinth of gangland politics, political backstabbing, corporate malfeasance, and, possibly, hope. Start Shooting is a riveting read.
Download or read book I Feel So Good written by Bob Riesman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major figure in American blues and folk music, Big Bill Broonzy (1903–1958) left his Arkansas Delta home after World War I, headed north, and became the leading Chicago bluesman of the 1930s. His success came as he fused traditional rural blues with the electrified sound that was beginning to emerge in Chicago. This, however, was just one step in his remarkable journey: Big Bill was constantly reinventing himself, both in reality and in his retellings of it. Bob Riesman’s groundbreaking biography tells the compelling life story of a lost figure from the annals of music history. I Feel So Good traces Big Bill’s career from his rise as a nationally prominent blues star, including his historic 1938 appearance at Carnegie Hall, to his influential role in the post-World War II folk revival, when he sang about racial injustice alongside Pete Seeger and Studs Terkel. Riesman’s account brings the reader into the jazz clubs and concert halls of Europe, as Big Bill's overseas tours in the 1950s ignited the British blues-rock explosion of the 1960s. Interviews with Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, and Ray Davies reveal Broonzy’s profound impact on the British rockers who would follow him and change the course of popular music. Along the way, Riesman details Big Bill’s complicated and poignant personal saga: he was married three times and became a father at the very end of his life to a child half a world away. He also brings to light Big Bill’s final years, when he first lost his voice, then his life, to cancer, just as his international reputation was reaching its peak. Featuring many rarely seen photos, I Feel So Good will be the definitive account of Big Bill Broonzy’s life and music.
Download or read book Blueprint for Disaster written by D. Bradford Hunt and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now considered a dysfunctional mess, Chicago’s public housing projects once had long waiting lists of would-be residents hoping to leave the slums behind. So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, D. Bradford Hunt traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord. Challenging explanations that attribute the projects’ decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These massive high-rise complexes housed unprecedented numbers of children but relatively few adults, engendering disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge. Blueprint for Disaster, then,is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.
Download or read book God Believes in Love written by Gene Robinson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the IX Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church, the first openly gay person elected to the episcopate and the world’s leading religious spokesperson for gay rights and gay marriage—a groundbreaking book that persuasively makes the case for same-sex marriage using a commonsense, reasoned, religious argument. Robinson holds the religious text of the Bible to be holy and sacred and the ensuing two millennia of church history to be relevant to the discussion. He is equally familiar with the secular and political debate about gay marriage going on in America today, and is someone for whom same-sex marriage is a personal issue; Robinson was married to a woman for fourteen years and is a father of two children and has been married to a man for the last four years of a twenty-five-year relationship. Robinson has a knack for taking complex and controversial issues and addressing them in plain direct language, without using polemics or ideology, putting forth his argument for gay marriage, and bringing together sacred and secular points of view.
Download or read book River of Eden written by Glenna McReynolds and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sanchez Travers seemed more scoundrel than scientist, but Dr. Annie Parrish needs the help of the Harvard-educated ethnobiologist to head up the Amazon in search of an extraordinary discovery.
Download or read book Invisible Americans written by Jeff Madrick and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2020 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clarion call to address this most unjust blight upon the American landscape. Madrick has provided a valuable service in presenting a highly readable and cogent argument for change.--Mark R. Rank, The Washington Post By official count, more than one out of every six American children live beneath the poverty line. But statistics alone tell little of the story. In Invisible Americans, Jeff Madrick brings to light the often invisible reality and irreparable damage of child poverty in America. Keeping his focus on the children, he examines the roots of the problem, including the toothless remnants of our social welfare system, entrenched racism, and a government unmotivated to help the most voiceless citizens. Backed by new and unambiguous research, he makes clear the devastating consequences of growing up poor: living in poverty, even temporarily, is detrimental to cognitive abilities, emotional control, and the overall health of children. The cost to society is incalculable. The inaction of politicians is unacceptable. Still, Madrick argues, there may be more reason to hope now than ever before. Rather than attempting to treat the symptoms of poverty, we might be able to ameliorate its worst effects through a single, simple, and politically feasible policy that he lays out in this impassioned and urgent call to arms.
Download or read book Cy s Perfect Day written by John Walters and published by Ascend Books. This book was released on 2021-09 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iowa State fans are incredible! Cy is the joyful mascot of the Iowa State Cyclones. Cy's Perfect Day tells the story of Cy enjoying the company of friends before Cyclone football games. All is well when the Cyclones win. But Cy is concerned, after a loss, about how his friends will react. Will they still come back the following week? Cy finds out that Iowa State fans always come back. Nobody likes to lose a game. But if the team is showing great hustle and effort, they will be rewarded with unconditional loyalty from the fan base. Those shared experiences, in both wins and losses, are what connect the fans to each other and the teams - and what makes the celebration of the victories that much more special. Young Iowa State fans will read this book over and over. And parents and grandparents are sure to share in the fun.
Download or read book Big Time written by Jen Spyra and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debut collection of raucous, dark, strange, satirical stories from the former Late Show with Stephen Colbert writer and New Yorker contributor, featuring a foreword by Stephen Colbert “Jen Spyra’s stories are shocking, silly, smart, and absurdly funny. Underline both those words, I don’t care how much it costs!”—Tina Fey A bride so desperate to get in shape for her wedding that she enrolls in a new kind of workout program that promises the moon but costs more than she bargained for. A snowman who, on the wish of a child, comes to life in a decidedly less savory way than in the childhood classic. And in the title story, a time-hopping 1940s starlet tries to claw her way to the top in modern-day Hollywood, despite being ridiculously unwoke. In this uproarious, addictive debut, Jen Spyra takes a culture that seems almost beyond parody and holds it up to a funhouse mirror, immersing the reader in a world of prehistoric influencers, woodland creatures plagued by millennial neuroses, and an all-out birthday bash determined to be the most lavish celebration of all time, by any means necessary. Welcome, brave soul, to the world of Jen Spyra.
Download or read book Affordable Housing in New York written by Nicholas Dagen Bloom and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly illustrated history of below-market housing in New York, from the 1920s to today A colorful portrait of the people, places, and policies that have helped make New York City livable, Affordable Housing in New York is a comprehensive, authoritative, and richly illustrated history of the city's public and middle-income housing from the 1920s to today. Plans, models, archival photos, and newly commissioned portraits of buildings and tenants by sociologist and photographer David Schalliol put the efforts of the past century into context, and the book also looks ahead to future prospects for below-market subsidized housing. A dynamic account of an evolving city, Affordable Housing in New York is essential reading for understanding and advancing debates about how to enable future generations to call New York home.
