Ranging from the dawn of the silent era to today's blockbusters and independent films, this revamped second edition chronicles the significant contributions by Chicago and Chicagoans to more than a century of American filmmaking. Among the Windy City's unique honors in this history are the development of film technology by early major players Essanay Film Manufacturing Company and the Selig Polyscope Company; the first African American–owned and operated film studios; the birthplace of gor...

"With the meticulous attention to detail of a historian and a storyteller's eye for human drama, Bernstein shines a beam of truth on a forgotten American tragedy. Heartbreaking and riveting."---Gregg Olsen, New York Times best-selling author of Starvation Heights"A chilling and historic character study of the unfathomable suffering that desperation and fury, once unleashed inside a twisted mind, can wreak on a small town. Contemporary mass murderers Timothy...

The new edition of this Michigan Notable Book includes a new introduction and stories from interviews with two additional survivors, Myrna (Gates) Coulter and Ralph Witchell, which took place after the first edition was published in 2009.On May 18, 1927, the small town of Bath, Michigan, was forever changed when Andrew Kehoe set off a cache of explosives concealed in the basement of the local school. Thirty-eight children and six adults were dead, among them Kehoe, who had literall...

The stunning Hunger Games trilogy is complete! The extraordinary, ground breaking New York Times bestsellers The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, along with the third book in The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay, are available for the first time ever in e-book. Stunning, gripping, and powerful.

This mesmerizing companion book to the award-winning film, The Butler traces the Civil Rights Movement and explores crucial moments of twentieth century American history through the eyes of Eugene Allen—a White House butler who served eight presidents over the course of thirty-four years.During the presidencies of Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, Eugene Allen was a butler in the most famous of residences: the White House. An African American who came of age ...

Step into the perfumed parlors of the Everleigh Club, the most famous brothel in American history–and the catalyst for a culture war that rocked the nation. Operating in Chicago’s notorious Levee district at the dawn of the last century, the Club’s proprietors, two aristocratic sisters named Minna and Ada Everleigh, welcomed moguls and actors, senators and athletes, foreign dignitaries and literary icons, into their stately double mansion, where thirty stunning Everleigh “butterflies” awai...

A collection of strange-but-true crime tales featuring cops, lawyers, and some very unusual suspects . . .The fact-finding folks at Bathroom Readers' Institute have rounded up the best cops-and-robber articles we've ever done, plus a rogues' gallery of new offenders. You'll read about dumb crooks and criminal masterminds, mafia henchmen and low-level goons, ancient warriors and Old West gunslingers, crazed cops and jovial judges, and even a few loony lawyers and cr...

The man who revolutionized the way we think about baseball now examines our cultural obsession with murder—delivering a unique, engrossing, brilliant history of tabloid crime in America.Celebrated writer and contrarian Bill James has voraciously read true crime throughout his life and has been interested in writing a book on the topic for decades. Now, with Popular Crime, James takes readers on an epic journey from Lizzie Borden to the Lindbergh b...

For seventy-five years, it’s been Manhattan’s richest apartment building, and one of the most lusted-after addresses in the world. One apartment had 37 rooms, 14 bathrooms, 43 closets, 11 working fireplaces, a private elevator, and his-and-hers saunas; another at one time had a live-in service staff of 16. To this day, it is steeped in the purest luxury, the kind most of us could only imagine, until now.The last great building to go up along New York’s Gold Coast, construction on 7...

From the co-creator of the landmark series Twin Peaks, the story millions of fans have been waiting to get their hands on for more than 25 long years.The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost enlarges the world of the original series, placing the unexplained phenomena that unfolded there into a vastly layered, wide-ranging history, beginning with the journals of Lewis and Clark and ending with the shocking events that closed the finale. The perfect wa...

This "outstanding history" of the 1911 disaster that changed the course of 20th-century politics and labor relations "is social history at its best" (Kevin Baker, The New York Times Book Review).New York City, 1911. As the workday was about to end, a fire broke out in the Triangle shirtwaist factory of Greenwich Village. Within minutes it consumed the building's upper three stories. Firemen were powerless to rescue those trapped i...

Jack Warner epitomized the great Hollywood studio chief. He was admired as much as he was feared, engaged in battles with some of Hollywood's greatest legends from Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney to Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis. Under his tutelage Warner Bros. gave us some of the most memorable and iconic movies, including The Jazz Singer, Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Damn Yankees and My Fair Lady. Warner was an astute businessman and a prodigious gambler; his footfa...