Winner of 2006 Illinois State Historical Society Book Award-Certificate of Excellence

To some he was a humanitarian and builder. Others scorned him as a fake and friend of gangsters with "the carcass of a rhinoceros and the brain of a baboon." This rollicking history traces the rise of William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson, Chicago's famous reform mayor, from his upper class roots to his years as a teenaged cowboy, from his fame as a star athlete to the years as a master politician in a world where the ward boss ruled and whiskey for the voters cost a quarter a shot. Big Bill of Chicago profiles the whole brawling arena of city politics from the turn of the century to the Prohibition Era. It is a primer in the way American politics worked-and works-and a map along the countless winding ways even the dirtiest deal can lead to something great.

 

Combining the incisive pen of a newspaperman and the compassionate soul of a poet, Mike Royko became a Chicago institution—in Jimmy Breslin’s words, "the best journalist of his time." Early Royko: Up Against It in Chicago will restore to print the legendary columnist’s earliest writings, which chronicle 1960s Chicago with the moral vision, ironic sense, and razor-sharp voice that would remain Royko’s trademark.

This collection of early columns from the Chicago Daily News ranges from witty social commentary to politically astute satire. Some of the pieces are falling-down funny and others are tenderly nostalgic, but all display Royko’s unrivaled skill at using humor to tell truth to power. From machine politicians and gangsters to professional athletes, from well-heeled Chicagoans to down-and-out hoodlums, no one escapes Royko’s penetrating gaze—and resounding judgment. Early Royko features a memorable collection of characters, including such well-known figures as Hugh Hefner, Mayor Richard J. Daley, and Dr. Martin Luther King. But these boldfaced names are juxtaposed with Royko’s beloved lesser knowns from the streets of Chicago: Mrs. Peak, Sylvester "Two-Gun Pete" Washington, and Fats Boylermaker, who gained fame for leaning against a corner light pole from 2 a.m. Saturday until noon Sunday, when his neighborhood tavern reopened for business.

Accompanied by a foreword from Rick Kogan, this new edition will delight Royko’s most ardent fans and capture the hearts of a new generation of readers. As Kogan writes, Early Royko "will remind us how a remarkable relationship began—Chicago and Royko, Royko and Chicago—and how it endures."

Winner of 2006 Illinois State Historical Society Book Award-Certificate of Excellence

In the early twentieth century, John Coughlin and Mike Kenna ruled Chicago's First Ward, the lucrative lakefront territory and nerve center of the city. It was one of the most infamous havens for vice in the entire country, home to gambling palaces with marble floors and mahogany bars, to a mini-city of thugs and prostitutes and down-and-outers, to dives and saloons of every description and a few beyond description. In short, the First was a gold mine. In a city where money talked, it made boisterous Bathhouse John and the laconic Hinky Dink Kenna the most powerful men in town. This classic of Chicago-style journalism traces the careers of these two operators as they rose to the top of the city's political world.

"A wonderful book that tells you the basic truths of our city." —Studs Terkel

Few people know Chicago as do Rick Kogan and Charles Osgood, and their "Sidewalks" column for the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine is a tour of the city like no other, taking readers to the off-beat and quintessential spots that give Chicago its character—that make its inhabitants feel at home and tell its visitors that they have arrived.

Accompanied by evocative color photographs by Charles Osgood, Kogan's pieces revisit the lost places and people of Chicago, and take readers down the quiet byways and thriving thoroughfares, pointing out the characters and cornerstones, the oddities and institutions that make the city what it is. In this collection you will find an elegy for Maxwell Street, the marketplace that pulsed with city life for more than 100 years; a remembrance of a disturbing advertisement ("Are you a slave to housework?") on the side of a building on Irving Park Road; a cross marking a deadly intersection; a magical miniature golf course; as well as ballad singer Fred Holstein, the denizens of the World Gym and memories of Bensinger's pool hall, the day-camp kids of summer, bike couriers, the creatures of the beach, and much, much more. Here is Chicago, past, present, and—let's hope—future, captured in the unique archive of Sidewalks.