Cafe Indiana is both a guide to Indiana’s hometown mom-and-pop restaurants and a reclamation and celebration of small-town Midwest culture. The hungry diner looking for adventure and authenticity can use Cafe Indiana simply as a guide to the state’s quintessential eats: the best fiddlers, macaroni and cheese, soup beans, and beef Manhattan. But Stuttgen also captures the spirit of the locals, bringing to life the people whose stories give the book—and the food—its soul.
     Over plates of chicken and noodles, fried bologna sandwiches, and sugar cream pie, folks are crafting community at the Main Street eatery. In Cafe Indiana, Hoosiers and out-of-staters alike are invited to pull out a chair and sit a spell.

Joanne Raetz Stuttgen’s cafe guides showcase popular regional diner traditions. In her companion book Cafe Indiana she introduces travelers to the state’s top mom-and-pop restaurants. Now, Cafe Indiana Cookbook allows you to whip up local cafe classics yourself. Breakfast dishes range from Swiss Mennonite eier datch (egg pancakes) to biscuits and gravy; entree highlights include chicken with noodles (or with dumplings) and the iconic Hoosier breaded pork tenderloin sandwich. For dessert, try such Indiana favorites as apple dapple cake or rhubarb, coconut cream, or sugar cream pie . All 130 recipes have been kitchen-tested by Jolene Ketzenberger, food writer for the Indianapolis Star.
    Cafe Indiana Cookbook reveals the favorite recipes of Indiana’s Main Street eateries, including some rescued for publication before a diner’s sad closure, and documents old-fashioned delicacies now fading from the culinary landscape—like southern Indiana’s fried brain sandwiches.

Finalist, Cookbook, Midwest Book Awards
 

     Joanne Stuttgen's popular book Cafe Wisconsin guides travelers to Wisconsin's best home-style cafes. Now, continue the journey with the Cafe Wisconsin Cookbook, a compilation of more than one hundred cherished recipes that showcase the distinct culinary and cultural traditions of Wisconsin. From classic pot roasts and country-style pies to long-simmering soups and heritage specialties, the whole soul-satisfying spectrum of Wisconsin cafe fare is here. 
     Stuttgen tracked down Wisconsin's best small town cafes, from Boscobel to Sturgeon Bay, chatted with owners and customers, took notes, and recorded the history, anecdotes, and recipes behind the food. Tested and fine-tuned by Wisconsin food writer and former chef Terese Allen, these favorite recipes will bring an authentic slice of Wisconsin into your home kitchen.

Covering topics as diverse as economic modeling, craft specialization, settlement patterns, agricultural and subsistence systems, and the development of social ranking, Cahokia and the Hinterlands explores cultural interactions among Cahokians and the inhabitants of other population centers, including Orensdorf and the Dickson Mounds in Illinois and Aztalan in Wisconsin, as well as sites in Minnesota, Iowa, and at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Proposing sophisticated and innovative models for the growth, development, and decline of Mississippian culture at Cahokia and elsewhere, this volume also provides insight into the rise of chiefdoms and stratified societies and the development of trade throughout the world.
 

“Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren’s writing that “you should not read it if you cannot take a punch.” The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. In this sixtieth anniversary edition, Algren presents 120 years of Chicago history through the lens of its “nobodies nobody knows”: the tramps, hustlers, aging bar fighters, freed death-row inmates, and anonymous working stiffs who prowl its streets.

Upon its original publication in 1951, Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make was scorned by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and local journalists for its gritty portrayal of the city and its people, one that boldly defied City Hall’s business and tourism initiatives. Yet the book captures the essential dilemma of Chicago: the dynamic tension between the city’s breathtaking beauty and its utter brutality, its boundless human energy and its stifling greed and violence.

The sixtieth anniversary edition features historic Chicago photos and annotations on everything from defunct slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, “the best book about Chicago.”

Chicago has been called the “most American of cities” and the “great American city.” Not the biggest or the most powerful, nor the richest, prettiest, or best, but the most American. How did it become that? And what does it even mean? At its heart, Chicago is America’s great hub. And in this book, Chicago magazine editor and longtime Chicagoan Whet Moser draws on Chicago’s social, urban, cultural, and often scandalous history to reveal how the city of stinky onions grew into the great American metropolis it is today.

Chicago began as a trading post, which grew into a market for goods from the west, sprouting the still-largest rail hub in America. As people began to trade virtual representations of those goods—futures—the city became a hub of finance and law. And as academics studied the city’s growth and its economy, it became a hub of intellect, where the University of Chicago’s pioneering sociologists shaped how cities at home and abroad understood themselves. Looking inward, Moser explores how Chicago thinks of itself, too, tracing the development of and current changes in its neighborhoods. From Boystown to Chinatown, Edgewater to Englewood, the Ukrainian Village to Little Village, Chicago is famous for them—and infamous for the segregation between them.

With insight sure to enlighten both residents and anyone lucky enough to visit the City of Big Shoulders, Moser offers an informed local’s perspective on everything from Chicago’s enduring paradoxes to tips on its most interesting sights and best eats. An affectionate, beautifully illustrated urban portrait, his book takes us from the very beginnings of Chicago as an idea—a vision in the minds of the region’s first explorers—to the global city it has become.

Carl Sandburg was an ardent champion of Chicago, famously issuing the challenge: “Show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and strong and cunning.” For pianist Otis Spann, it was the “mother of the blues,” and a beacon to “every good musician who ever left the South.” But the union leader Eugene V. Debs had harsher words for the city, calling it “unfit for human habitation,” and Rudyard Kipling claimed it was “inhabited by savages” and hoped never to see it again.
           
Whether you look upon the city with admiration, disgust, or an incongruous combination of the two, Chicago has captured the imagination of generations of poets, novelists, journalists, and commentators who have visited or called it home. Chicago in Quotations offers a compendium of the most colorful impressions that citizens of—or visitors to—the Second City will appreciate.

“The river has seen it all, done it all, carried it all,” writes David Solzman. “Its current whispers of the past even as it rushes into the future. Those who know the river and its connected streams know Chicago in an elemental way. In a strong sense, the river is Chicago. Follow the river and travel into the soul of the city.”

The river is indeed the soul of the city—it runs through the heart of downtown, and it is a vehicle for both pleasure and the industry that keeps Chicago humming. With The Chicago River, Solzman has succeeded in writing an encyclopedic work—at once guidebook and history—that explores the river’s physical character and natural history. Examining the river’s past, contemplating its present, and forecasting its future, Solzman draws on his unparalleled knowledge to point out places of scientific and historic interest—involving everything from infamous murder cases to invasive zebra mussels. The book’s 200 photographs and maps perfectly complement Solzman’s vivid prose, leading readers on a visual journey as sinuous as the river it celebrates—a journey interspersed with plenty of river lore, facts, and literary quotations. 

Solzman, a veteran Chicago River tour guide, has also compiled a diverse collection of easy and enjoyable tours for anyone who wants to experience the river by foot, boat, canoe, or car. And he provides an appendix that lists river-related organizations, museums, tours, and riverfront restaurants and clubs. 

With practical tips, evocative language, and an astonishing array of anecdotes, TheChicago River is the most comprehensive guide to the river and its waterways, the perfect companion for everyone from the active river enthusiast to the armchair traveler.

The latest edition of the original and best guide to Chicago architecture for tourists and residents.

 

One of the premier architectural cities of the United States—if not the world—Chicago boasts a breathtaking skyline, dozens of architectural monuments, and a historic legacy few other cities can equal. And it's still growing! Since its first appearance in 1965, Chicago's Famous Buildings has been the standard and bestselling guide to the city's architectural riches. Now thoroughly revised and updated, this fifth edition will remain the leading pocket guide to some of the world's greatest urban architecture.

Chicago's Famous Buildings, fifth edition, completely updated and revised by Franz Schulze and Kevin Harrington, covers more than a decade of extraordinary new architecture and takes a fresh look back at the city's classical legacy of Adler, Sullivan, Burnham, Root, Wright, and Mies van der Rohe. The authors have added many new descriptions and images of the most important projects in Chicago since the fourth edition, including the massive reconstruction of Grant Park around Frank Gehry's Music Pavilion, and they cover as well the current status of older buildings—some destroyed, others, such as Burnham's Reliance Building, marvelously restored and brought back to life. Chicago's Famous Buildings, fifth edition, also includes expanded sections on the city's future and the development of its diverse neighborhoods, presented with new maps to serve as an even more effective walking guide. A glossary of architectural terms, an extensive index, and more than sixty new photographs of both old and new buildings bring this guide completely up-to-date.

Authoritative, informative, and easier to use than ever before, this fifth edition of Chicago's Famous Buildings will serve tourists and residents alike as the leading architectural guide to the treasures of this marvelous city.

Inspired by August Derleth’s seminal book The Wisconsin, Richard D. Cornell traveled the Chippewa River from its two sources south of Ashland to where it joins the Mississippi. Over several decades he returned time and again in his red canoe to immerse himself in the stories of the Chippewa River and document its valley, from the Ojibwe and early fur traders and lumbermen to the varied and hopeful communities of today. Cornell shares tales of such historical figures as legendary Ojibwe leader Chief Buffalo, world famous wrestler Charlie Fisher, and supercomputer innovator Seymour Cray, along with the lesser-known stories of local luminaries such as Dr. John "Little Bird" Anderson. Cornell gathered firsthand stories from diners and dives, local museums and landmarks, quaint small-town newspaper offices, and the homes of old-timers and local historians. Through his conversations with ordinary people, he gets at the heart of the Chippewa and shares a history of the river that is both one of a kind and deeply personal.

The American Civil War was a crucial event in the development of Chicago as the metropolis of the heartland. Not only did Chicagoans play an important role in the politics of the conflict, encouraging emancipation and promoting a “hard war” policy against Southern civilians, but they supported the troops materially through production of military supplies and foodstuffs as well as morally and spiritually through patriotic publications and songs. The Civil War transformed Chicago from a mere commercial center to an industrial power as well as the nation’s railroad hub and busiest port. The war also divided Chicago, however, between Lincoln supporters and Copperheads, whites and blacks, workers and owners, natives and newcomers.

The city played a key role in elevating Abraham Lincoln to the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, yet only four years later a Chicago politician’ s influence was key in declaring the war a failure and promoting a platform of peace with the Confederacy. Using seldom seen or newly uncovered sources, this book tells the story of the Civil War through the eyes of those who lived that history. Photographs throughout the book effectively convey the geography of events in this pivotal period of Chicago’s history, and the editors have provided a useful driving guide to Civil War sites in and around the city.

Rich in science and case studies, it examines the latest climate change impacts, scenarios, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity and offers decision makers and stakeholders a substantial basis from which to make informed choices that will affect the well-being of the region’s inhabitants in the decades to come.

•an updated introduction by George J. Pokorny and new photographs by Eric Andre
•a summary of the geologic and natural history of the Baraboo hills by Patricia K. Armstrong
•locations and updated descriptions of nearly 1,800 climbs
•landmark photographs from most major climbing areas
•GPS waypoints, map coordinates, altimeter readings, and approach information
•detailed diagrams locating climbing routes at most major climbing areas
•6 new diagrams, 5 new climbing areas, and 120 new routes

The Driftless Area is the land the glaciers missed, an ancient landscape of bluffs, ridgetops, and steep valleys that long ago was a seabed. Covering much of southwestern Wisconsin, its contours were deeply carved from bedrock, not by ice but by many rivers.
            Crossing the Driftless is both a traveler’s tale and an exploration of this dramatic environment, following the streams of geologic and human history. Lynne Diebel and her husband, Bob, crossed the Driftless Area by canoe, journeying 359 river miles (and six Mississippi River locks and five portages) from Faribault, Minnesota, where her family has a summer home on Cedar Lake, to their Wisconsin home in Stoughton, one block from the Yahara River. Traveling by river and portage, they paddled downstream on the Cannon and Mississippi rivers and upstream on the Wisconsin River, in the tradition of voyageurs. Lynne tells the story of their trip, but also the stories of the rivers they canoed and the many tributaries whose confluences they passed.

Finalist, Travel, Foreword Reviews IndieFab Book of the Year Awards

Honorable mention, Nonfiction book, Council for Wisconsin Writers

Winner, Recreation/Sports/Travel, Midwest Book Awards

Best books for public & secondary school libraries from university presses, American Library Association