The Art of Backscratching in Chicago

The Art of Backscratching in Chicago PDF Author: Neil Steinberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022614691X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 29

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Book Description
“Ed McElroy, clear of eye, sound of mind, and eighty-three years of age . . . guides his black Cadillac down Halsted Street.” So begins longtime Chicago journalist Neil Steinberg’s nuanced homage to Ed McElroy: an old-school, behind-the-scenes backscratcher who has driven the rich, powerful, and well-connected around the city, doing favors and calling them in, for decades. Helping a young Steinberg understand the city, McElroy and his take on how a Mayor’s son gets to be Mayor and how a wily up-and-comer marries the daughter of a powerful alderman and later becomes governor would enthrall even the most seasoned Chicagoan. In this drive around town and through time, Steinberg ultimately serves up audacious and funny anecdotes about how it helps to stay connected, to know a guy, and to help people out when you can.

The Art of Backscratching in Chicago

The Art of Backscratching in Chicago PDF Author: Neil Steinberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022614691X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 29

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Ed McElroy, clear of eye, sound of mind, and eighty-three years of age . . . guides his black Cadillac down Halsted Street.” So begins longtime Chicago journalist Neil Steinberg’s nuanced homage to Ed McElroy: an old-school, behind-the-scenes backscratcher who has driven the rich, powerful, and well-connected around the city, doing favors and calling them in, for decades. Helping a young Steinberg understand the city, McElroy and his take on how a Mayor’s son gets to be Mayor and how a wily up-and-comer marries the daughter of a powerful alderman and later becomes governor would enthrall even the most seasoned Chicagoan. In this drive around town and through time, Steinberg ultimately serves up audacious and funny anecdotes about how it helps to stay connected, to know a guy, and to help people out when you can.

Wild Justice

Wild Justice PDF Author: Marc Bekoff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226041662
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. Yet what are we to make of a female gorilla in a German zoo who spent days mourning the death of her baby? Or a wild female elephant who cared for a younger one after she was injured by a rambunctious teenage male? Or a rat who refused to push a lever for food when he saw that doing so caused another rat to be shocked? Aren’t these clear signs that animals have recognizable emotions and moral intelligence? With Wild Justice Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce unequivocally answer yes. Marrying years of behavioral and cognitive research with compelling and moving anecdotes, Bekoff and Pierce reveal that animals exhibit a broad repertoire of moral behaviors, including fairness, empathy, trust, and reciprocity. Underlying these behaviors is a complex and nuanced range of emotions, backed by a high degree of intelligence and surprising behavioral flexibility. Animals, in short, are incredibly adept social beings, relying on rules of conduct to navigate intricate social networks that are essential to their survival. Ultimately, Bekoff and Pierce draw the astonishing conclusion that there is no moral gap between humans and other species: morality is an evolved trait that we unquestionably share with other social mammals. Sure to be controversial, Wild Justice offers not just cutting-edge science, but a provocative call to rethink our relationship with—and our responsibilities toward—our fellow animals.

Chicago Scene

Chicago Scene PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chicago (Ill.)
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description


The Cult of Smart

The Cult of Smart PDF Author: Fredrik deBoer
Publisher: All Points Books
ISBN: 1250200385
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.

Introducing Aunt Dimity, Paranormal Detective

Introducing Aunt Dimity, Paranormal Detective PDF Author: Nancy Atherton
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110166505X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
An irresistible introduction to everyone's favorite bestselling cozy mystery series. Watch out for Nancy Atherton's latest, Aunt Dimity and the King's Ransom, coming in July 2018 from Viking! Over the course of her New York Times bestselling series, Nancy Atherton's Aunt Dimity has become enormously popular. Now, with the first two mysteries in one volume, Introducing Aunt Dimity, Paranormal Detective makes it easy to get a taste of the ghostly sleuth's delightful debut. In Aunt Dimity's Death, Aunt Dimity's American niece, Lori Shepherd, had long thought her mother's childhood tales of Aunt Dimity were merely comforting bedtime stories. But when a pair of lawyers informs her that her mysterious aunt has just died and made the down-on-her-luck Lori a rich woman, she finds a reason to believe. Aunt Dimity and the Duke finds the benevolent spirit helping Emma Porter--forty, fat, and frumpy--tame a Duke's overgrown garden and discover romance along the way. These two tales continue to enchant Atherton's devoted fans and, packaged together, are sure to attract even more new readers to the series.

Robert B. Parker's Kickback

Robert B. Parker's Kickback PDF Author: Ace Atkins
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698161211
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
PI Spenser, knight-errant of the Back Bay, takes on corruption in the justice system in this stellar New York Times bestselling thriller in Robert B. Parker’s series. What started out as a joke landed seventeen-year-old Dillon Yates in a lockdown juvenile facility in Boston Harbor. When he set up a prank Twitter account for his vice principal, he never dreamed he could be brought up on criminal charges, but that’s exactly what happened. This is Blackburn, Mass., where zero tolerance for minors is a way of life. Leading the movement is tough-as-nails judge Joe Scali, who gives speeches about coming down hard on today’s wild youth. But Dillon’s mother, who knows other Blackburn kids who are doing hard time for minor infractions, isn’t buying Scali’s line. She hires Spenser to find the truth behind the draconian sentencing. From the Harbor Islands to a gated Florida community, Spenser and trusted ally Hawk follow a trail through the Boston underworld with links to a shadowy corporation that runs New England’s private prisons. They eventually uncover a culture of corruption and cover-ups in the old mill town, where hundreds of kids are sent off to for-profit juvie jails.

Making Love to the Minor Poets of Chicago

Making Love to the Minor Poets of Chicago PDF Author: James Conrad
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
ISBN: 031227372X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Set against the vibrant backdrop of Chicago, this is a story of science and poetry, manipulation and intrigue, and the lengths to which people will go for their passions. The Yucca Mountain Project deep in the Nevada desert is the first planned long-term nuclear storage facility. The project is designed to contain nuclear waste for ten-thousand years, the amount of time it will take for the waste to no longer be radioactive. It is an ambitious project, especially in light of the fact that in this century alone we lacked the foresight to anticipate Y2K. Given this daunting responsibility, the project employs an artist, a botanist and an architect to contribute visual warnings to the site, in a manner decipherable to future generations. Conrad imagines an influential poetry professor who insists that the project also include a poem, a great poem, an epic poem. It is this poem that brings us to the center of an extended circle of minor poets who are continually upstaging, back-stabbing and falling in and out of love with one another. "... Conrad’s novel recalls another comic first work: John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces." - Nashville Scene

What Next, Chicago?

What Next, Chicago? PDF Author: Matt Rosenberg
Publisher: Bombardier Books
ISBN: 1642939099
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Our nation’s big cities are broken. Urban progressive government badly undermines those it claims to lift up. Matt Rosenberg lived in Chicago for thirty years, and came back to live there again amidst the turmoil of 2020. What Next, Chicago? Notes of a Pissed-Off Native Son exposes the roots of Chicago’s violent crime, failing courts and schools, rotten finances, and ongoing Black exodus, and proposes a rescue plan for this emblematic American city. “What has happened to Chicago? That’s Matt Rosenberg’s question, and mine as well. His loving tribute to our hometown is a moving, sensitive, humane, and trenchant critical assessment. Read it and weep.” —Glenn C. Loury, Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University, and author of One By One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America “Matt Rosenberg writes about the Chicago Way in the Chicago Style of a Mike Royko…. It’s a coherent, honest, and balanced tour of the city’s perpetual corruption, unsafe streets, gawd-awful schools, ghost neighborhoods, financial legerdemain, and the false Unified Theory of Systemic Racism that cloaks it all. Yet, What Next, Chicago? is no helpless, hopeless wail, but a powerful and useful roadmap for a rebirth of a once-great city, based on the voices of Black families and others who don’t need academia to know what to do. Must reading for Chicago lovers.” —Dennis Byrne, former Chicago Sun-Times editorial board member

The Search for Reagan

The Search for Reagan PDF Author: Craig Shirley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Never before has anyone explored the mind, soul, and heart of Ronald Reagan. The Search for Reagan explores the challenges and controversies in Reagan’s life and how he successfully dealt with each, depicting a man who was never as conservative as some conservatives wanted him to be, but rather as conservative as he was comfortable being—a man who wanted to win on his own terms and integrity. Ronald Reagan was a singularly unique man and conservative who championed a wildly successful revolution—leading to more freedom and less government for the American people and to the fall of communism, while boosting American morale, which had been his three big goals. He was the first president in many years who believed optimism from the Oval Office had a direct bearing on the affairs of the nation. As a consequence, he left office more popular than when he entered with a whopping 73 percent approval. He is beloved even today as his presidential library is visited far more than any other presidential library, by more than five million people each year. He understood that American conservatism was based upon the individual and not the group. He is still regarded as one of the most admired men in America. The range of Reagan scholarship by virtue of books sold about him continues to grow. In his presidency, he solved the mystery of high inflation that had bedeviled his predecessor, high interest rates, and high gas prices. He created over twenty million new jobs, and the number of American millionaires grew from 4,414 to 34,944. He quite literally changed our world for the better and is considered by most historians to be one of our four greatest presidents, alone with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt.

George Michael: Freedom

George Michael: Freedom PDF Author: David Nolan
Publisher: Carlton Books
ISBN: 9781780979793
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This lavishly illustrated volume pays tribute to George Michael, the brilliant songwriter who went from teen idol to activist. When George Michael's death was announced on Christmas Day in 2016, the world mourned the loss of a huge talent who left us far too soon. Blessed with a dramatic, soulful voice, Michael was a charismatic pop star . . . and far more. With his keen social conscience, he worked tirelessly for charity, became a gay icon who fought for sexual rights and education, and took on the record industry and media. George Michael: Freedom tells his story, from the fun and sunshiny tunes of Wham to the dark lyricism of his solo work. Featuring informative and insightful text from a prominent music journalist and a variety of photographs from many of the best contemporary photographers--including rarely seen images and some taken during his final appearances--this beautiful tribute paints an intimate portrait of the world-famous musician.