[PDF] Windy City Nocturne eBook

Author : Ronald Brueckmann
Publisher : Author House
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 43,86 MB
Release : 2008-03-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1452054789

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The place: Chicago, Illinois. The year: 1937. A city struggles to recover from the lawless legacy of Prohibition and the destructive aftermath of the Great Depression. The inequities of race and social class are vast and growing. In a rigidly segregated society, the average citizen keeps to his own kind, keeps his head down, and toils just to make ends meet. During this turbulent time, a young European immigrant labors in obscurity, deep within the teeming confines of the Pilsen district. He dreams of being a professional prizefighter. The young man’s prospects are few until he befriends an elderly African American boxer who operates a small gym on the city’s west side. The old man recognizes championship potential in the boy and agrees to coach him, molding him into a first class athlete. Together, the unlikely pair chase the elusive goal of a Middleweight Crown. Across town, another young man has a mentor of a different sort. One who schools him in the fine art of the “quick buck”. This boy, rescued from abject poverty, pursues wealth and power with ruthless zeal, surrendering to the darker side of human nature. Abandoning all compassion, he eagerly embraces a life of crime and brutality. A disillusioned Detective, grappling with a deep personal grief has become obsessed with fighting crime. His work has become his solace, his only virtue, his redemption. Exceeding the bounds of his authority, he fanatically persecutes the criminals of his precinct, setting him on a dangerous path of confrontation and violence. When these worlds collide, loyalty is forsaken and heartfelt dreams are crushed. A life is taken. This is a tale of good versus evil, of sacrifice and righteousness and love. This is a story of happiness and heartbreak and darkness. This Windy City Nocturne.

Author : Evan Friss
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 39,13 MB
Release : 2015-11-04
Category : History
ISBN : 022621107X

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Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old. The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycle’s rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world. Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today’s car-centric cities—and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built.

Author : Carl Sandburg
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 42,30 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780156003964

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"What Sandburg knew and said was what America knew from the beginning and said from the beginning and has not yet, no matter what is believed of her, forgotten how to say," wrote Archibald MacLeish about Carl Sandburg - that most American of poets - and his connection to the American psyche.

Author : John Moehring
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 24,29 MB
Release : 2016-04-21
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0786483954

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This unique biography details the life of magician Marshall Brodien, most remembered for his long-running career as television's Wizzo the Wizard on WGN-TV's Bozo's Circus and The Bozo Show. Coverage begins in the late 1940s, when Brodien was a young magician in his first job as a Chicago magic shop demonstrator, then recounts Brodien's steady rise to show-business success, including details of his work as a performer at the Magic Lounge in Cicero and, as a nightclub hypnotist in Chicago's posh Cairo Supper Club. The work concludes with an examination of Brodien's current career as one of the most successful marketers of magic sets in the U.S.

Author : Ryan G. Van Cleave
Publisher : Pearson
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 25,44 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN :

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Features a collection of poetry from some of America's best poets and provides original commentaries and suggested exercises to help the reader explore the meaning behind these poets' works.

Author : Ed McBain
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 37,4 MB
Release : 2009-05-30
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0446560278

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Just in case anybody thought the 47 earlier novels in the 87th precinct were a fluke, McBain's gone and revitalized the routine with Nocturne"". -- The New York Times Book Review In Isola, the hours between midnight and dawn are usually a quiet time. But for 87th Precinct detectives Carella and Hawes, the murder of an old woman makes the wee hours anything but peaceful -- especially when they learn she was one of the greatest concert pianists of the century long vanished. Meanwhile 88th Precinct cop Fat Ollie Weeks has his own early morning nightmare: he's on the trail of three prep school boys and a crack dealer who spent the evening carving up a hooker.