In the short span of twenty minutes, more than six hundred people were asphyxiated, burned, or trampled to death in a panicked mob’s failed attempt to escape. In Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903, Nat Brandt provides a detailed chronicle of this horrific event to assess not only the titanic tragedy of the fire itself but also the municipal corruption and greed that kindled the flames beforehand and the political cover-ups hidden in the smoke and ash afterwards.Advertised as “absolutely fireproof,” the Iroquois was Chicago’s most modern playhouse when it opened in the fall of 1903. With the approval of the city’s building department, theater developers Harry J. Powers and William J. Davis opened the theater prematurely to take full advantage of the holiday crowds, ignoring flagrant safety violations in the process.The aftermath of the fire proved to be a study in the miscarriage of justice. Despite overwhelming evidence that the building had not been completed, that fire safety laws were ignored, and that management had deliberately sealed off exits during the performance, no one was ever convicted or otherwise held accountable for the enormous loss of life.Lavishly illustrated and featuring an introduction by Chicago historians Perry R. Duis and Cathlyn Schallhorn, Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903 is rich with vivid details about this horrific disaster, captivatingly presented in human terms without losing sight of the broader historical context.

     Learn to monitor, analyze, and optimize. Packed with tips and strategies to improve the quality of your advertising. This book explains the latest Amazon Advertising tools since significant upgrades throughout 2019. Last updated January 2020.

    But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationships social, cultural, political, economic, and legal were established during America s first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of America s first cities."Eden on the Charles" explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a city upon a hill to the process of urbanization and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of Boston s distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the city s development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In Boston s history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships that for better or worse have defined urban America to this day.

    In The Immortal Class, Culley takes us inside the heart and soul of an American urban icon: the bicycle messenger. In describing his own history and those of his peers, he evokes a classic American maverick, deeply woven into the fabric of society—from the pits of squalor to the highest reaches of power and privilege—yet always resolutely, exuberantly outside. Culley’s voice is at once earthy and soaringly poetic—a Gen-X Tom Joad at hyperspeed. The Immortal Class is a unique personal and political narrative of a cyclist’s life on the street.

    More than a decade's worth of essays by the Pulitzer Prize winning syndicated columnist capture the essence of big city American life, from neighborhood taverns to backroom politics.

    ... what emotions really influence where your cross goes on the ballot paper? ... whether people are claiming to vote when they haven't? ... which party's supporters are the kinkiest in bed? In the run-up to the most hotly contested and unpredictable election in a generation, this exhilarating read injects some life back into the world of British electoral politics. Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box sheds light on some of our more unusual voting trends, ranging from why people lie about voting to how being attractive can get you elected. Each of the fifty accessible and concise chapters, written by leading political experts, seeks to examine the broader issues surrounding voting and elections in Britain. It is not just about sexual secrets and skewed surveys: it illustrates the importance of women and ethnic minorities; explains why parties knock on your door (and why they don't); and shows how partisanship colours your views of everything, even pets. This fascinating volume covers everything you need to know (and the things you never thought you needed to know) about the bedroom habits, political untruths and voting nuances behind the upcoming election

    They want more. But no matter what they do, those sales remain elusive. Worse, the publishing environment is getting harder every year, crushing their dreams day by day.But somehow, some authors succeed. How do they do it? Is there a secret? Is it blind luck? Do they all have teams of ghostwriters behind them churning out novels while one person claims the glory?It’s none of those things. It’s a combination of hard work and correct knowledge.This book gives you that knowledge. You’ll learn things like: How professional marketers write blurbs How to decode Amazon webpages for clues to buyer behavior Why great books sink into oblivion and ordinary books sell How to go beyond accepted practice and find best practice This book gives you the knowledge to sell, and to sell at a high scale. Much of it will surprise you, even if you’re a veteran of indie publishing.You’ll never look at publishing the same way again. Are you ready to unleash your author career?

    In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. In Satter's riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers—the author's father, Mark J. Satter. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country's shameful "dual housing market"; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable population. A monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America.

    

    Some of the stories motivate, some are spiritual, and some provide strategies for excellence. All promote positive feelings, encouraging confidence, direction and vision. The stories contained in The Magic of Metaphor focus on values, responsibility, and leadership in all its forms. Specially selected to promote change in people's ideas, attitudes, beliefs, visions and behaviours they act as reframes, challenging and disturbing our existing frames of reference, recharting our accustomed maps of the world, and shifting us away from our limited thinking towards new learning and discovery through the use of effective metaphor. Containing sixteen suggestions (or tips) for effective story telling, advice on organisation, style and story telling skills, and a selection of stories that can be adapted and developed, The Magic of Metaphor is an inspirational sourcebook for counsellors, health workers, psychologists, professional speakers, managers, leaders and NLP practitioners, as well as for teachers, trainers, therapists. Providing tools that assist people in making beneficial changes in their lives, the stories contained in this book will bring pleasure and power to all those that listen to or read them.

    Based on a mass of research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers in the late 1930s, it is a historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side, the classic urban ghetto. Drake and Cayton's findings not only offer a generalized analysis of black migration, settlement, community structure, and black-white race relations in the early part of the twentieth century, but also tell us what has changed in the last hundred years and what has not. This edition includes the original Introduction by Richard Wright and a new Foreword by William Julius Wilson."Black Metropolis is a rare combination of research and synthesis, a book to be deeply pondered. . . . No one who reads it intelligently can ever believe again that our racial dilemma can be solved by pushing buttons, or by gradual processes which may reach four or five hundred years into the future."—Bucklin Moon, The Nation"This volume makes a great contribution to the building of the future American and the free world."—Louis Wirth, New York Times"By virtue of its range, its labor and its insight, the book seems certain to become a landmark not only in race studies but in the broader field of social anthropology."—Thomas Sancton, New Republic

    When her boss, the repulsive Coddles, heaps another new project on her department -- with no additional remuneration naturally -- she decides she's had enough. She spends her days battling with her roommate, Val Wayne Newton, about whether Black Sabbath or Neil Diamond will occupy the turntable and her nights beating her overeager suitor, Martin Lemming, away from the door of her boudoir. When she discovers a piece of vile pornography in Coddles's dry cleaning, she has the means to retaliate. Meanwhile, Fat Bald Jeff, the tech-support guy who has to cope with her mechanical self-sabotage, turns out to be even more disaffected than she, and they hatch the ultimate plan to give the pigs some of their own medicine. With a surreal wit and a keen eye that bring to mind Lily Tomlin set loose in Dilbert-world, Fat Bald Jeff is a sharp satire and a paean to the petty humiliations of workers everywhere.

    Ripley. Coming from Miramax Films in December 2003, Cold Mountain stars Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Natalie Portman, Giovanni Ribisi and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Directed by Academy Award®-winner Anthony Minghella who also wrote the screenplay, Cold Mountain is based on Charles Frazier's best-selling Civil War novel of the same name and tells the story of Inman (Law), a wounded confederate soldier who is on a perilous journey home to his mountain community, hoping to reunite with his pre-war sweetheart, Ada (Kidman). In his absence, Ada struggles to survive, and revive her father's farm with the help of intrepid young drifter Ruby (Zellweger).The Newmarket Pictorial Moviebook is annotated with illustrations, movie stills, production design sketches keyed to the screenplay, costume designs, sidebars, and commentary from the cast and crew.

    John McNally tells the story of two unlucky people who forge an improbable yet possibly life-saving connection in a world overshadowed by the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind -- a world in which hulking government bureaucracies and vast corporations join forces to numb the populace into apathy with various standardization and surveillance programs. But McNally sees hope in the daily experiences of his characters: sometimes, haphazardly, by going about their own very particular lives, people circumvent the official program and begin to actively claim lives of freedom and dignity. "America's Report Card" is an arresting and humane portrait of life taking place in the margins, outside the stunted imagination of government and media. As in his critically acclaimed novel "The Book of Ralph", McNally dazzles with characters like Jainey O'Sullivan -- a lonely, confused, purple-and-green-haired sometime truant, Jainey cares so little about high school that on her final standardized test, she writes an essay heaping scorn on the test administrators even as she asks her faceless reader for help. Charlie Wolf leads a fairy-tale graduate student life, with just enough money and clout to keep him in books, vodka, a threadbare apartment, and a beautiful, intellectual girlfriend. But the bohemian dream starts to crumble when Charlie takes a job scoring standardized tests and finds himself surrounded by people who are either plodding blindly along or caught up in wild conspiracy theories.When Charlie and Jainey stumble upon one another, they also stumble upon their own bravery and compassion. They try to protect each other from their habitual bad luck and the shadowy threats lurking at the edges of their lives, and what ensues doesn't follow any prescribed course.The official version of American life today may get the broad strokes and primary colors right, but "America's Report Card" reveals how the government and the media overlook the corners and shadows where our individual realities unfold all too often in chaotic, precarious, and bewildering ways. This wholly original, wildly entertaining novel mirrors our part in the dark but frequently redemptive comedy that is life.

    Which is why the authorities’ solution has been to ignore him, and let New Yorkers adapt to a world where death can strike at any moment. When Maniac Harry starts killing his way through the subway system, trauma-haunted political aide Gina Greene and disgraced NYPD detective Zelda Pettibone become determined to go rogue and destroy him. But how can they fight a monster when they can’t fight City Hall?From Emmy Award-winning writer Elliott Kalan (The Daily Show, MST3K, Spider-Man & The X-Men) and artist Andrea Mutti (Port of Earth, Hellblazer, BUNNY MASK) comes the horrifying story of what happens when terror becomes the new normal. A frightening, thought-provoking, sometimes funny, always timely tale of murder, obsession and urban living, this volume contains the first arc, issues #1-5.