By SIU Press

Most people do not realize it, but Chicago is home to many diverse, artistic, fascinating, and architecturally and historically important fountains.
In this attractive volume, Greg Borzo reveals more than one hundred outdoor public fountains of Chicago with noteworthy, amusing, or surprising stories about these gems.
Complementing Borzo’s engagingly written text are around one hundred beautiful fine-art color photos of the fountains, taken by photographer Julia Thiel for this book, and a smaller number of historical photos.

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Posted on May 16, 2017

By Hooplaha

“Open Books is a nonprofit social venture that operates an extraordinary bookstore, provides community programs, and mobilizes passionate volunteers to promote literacy in Chicago and beyond.
“Open Books’ award-winning social enterprise model combines book donations, a retail bookstore, e-commerce, and volunteers to help support our literacy programs.”

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Posted on May 11, 2017

By Katherine Mooney/The Conversation

When the horses entered the gate for the 143rd Kentucky Derby, the jockeys hailed from Louisiana, Mexico, Nebraska and France. None were African American. That’s been the norm for quite a while. When Marlon St. Julien rode the Derby in 2000, he became the first black man to get a mount since 1921.

It wasn’t always this way. The Kentucky Derby, in fact, is closely intertwined with black Americans’ struggles for equality, a history I explore in my book on race and thoroughbred racing.
From 1921 to 2000, no black jockeys competed/Wikimedia Commons

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Posted on May 8, 2017

By Kelly Lytle Hernandez/The Conversation

It was not always a crime to enter the United States without authorization.
In fact, for most of American history, immigrants could enter the United States without official permission and not fear criminal prosecution by the federal government.

That changed in 1929. On its surface, Congress’s new prohibitions on informal border crossings simply modernized the U.S. immigration system by compelling all immigrants to apply for entry. However, in my new book, City of Inmates, I detail how Congress outlawed border crossings with the specific intent of criminalizing, prosecuting and imprisoning Mexican immigrants.

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Posted on May 1, 2017

By Hunger Free America

Hey Chicago! Our CEO Joel Berg is heading your way to talk about his new book, America We Need to Talk: A Self-Help Book for the Nation.
Watch him share a few words about the Kennedy Expressway, hockey, and how his book relates to Trump’s first 100 days.

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Posted on April 21, 2017

By Richard Tofel and Stephen Engelberg/ProPublica

We are honored to report that the daughter and son-in-law of David Halberstam, one of the greatest reporters of the 20th century, have decided to donate to ProPublica the royalties for 2017 from increased sales of Halberstam’s landmark book, The Best and the Brightest.
Julia Halberstam told us she was moved to do this by reaction to a story in the New York Times reporting that White House assistant Stephen Bannon was reading the book during the presidential transition and recommending it to colleagues.

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Posted on February 24, 2017

By David Varel/The Conversation

When black historian Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week in 1926 (expanded to Black History Month in 1976), the prevailing sentiment was that black people had no history. They were little more than the hewers of wood and the drawers of water who, in their insistence upon even basic political rights, comprised an alarming “Negro problem.”
To combat such ignorance and prejudice, Woodson worked relentlessly to compile the rich history of black people. He especially liked to emphasize the role of exceptional African Americans who made major contributions to American life. At the time, that was a radical idea.
W. Allison Davis (1902-1983) came of age in the generation after Woodson, but he was precisely the type of exceptional black person whom Woodson liked to uphold as evidence of black intelligence, civility and achievement.
Davis was an accomplished anthropologist and a trailblazer who was the first African American appointed full-time to the faculty of a predominantly white university – the University of Chicago in 1942. But Davis has faded from popular memory. In my forthcoming book The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought, 1902-1983, I make the case that he belongs within the pantheon of illustrious African American – and simply, American – pioneers.

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Posted on February 10, 2017

By Ibram X. Kendi/The Conversation

Donald Trump proclaimed during his inaugural address that “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.”
Opening our hearts to patriotism will not solve the problem of racist ideas. Some of the nation’s proudest patriots have also been the nation’s most virulent racists. The organizing principle of the Ku Klux Klan has always been allegiance to the red, white and blue flag.
Lacking patriotism is not the root of racist ideas. But neither is ignorance and hate, as Americans are taught so often during Black History Month.

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Posted on February 7, 2017

By John Broich/The Conversation

A week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s 1984 is the best-selling book on Amazon.
The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.
Orwell set his story in Oceania, one of three blocs or mega-states fighting over the globe in 1984. There has been a nuclear exchange, and the blocs seem to have agreed to perpetual conventional war, probably because constant warfare serves their shared interests in domestic control.

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Posted on January 30, 2017

By SIU Press

“In this stunning poetry debut, Charif Shanahan explores what it means to be fully human in our wounded and divided world. Queer and light-skinned, with a Black mother from Morocco and a white father from the United States, Shanahan’s speaker navigates the constructs of race and gender, through the lenses of colonialism and immigration, exposing, with nuance and complexity, the instability of those constructs and emphasizing the divisiveness inherent in the naming of any one thing.
“With poems that weave from Marrakesh to Zurich to London, and through history to the present day, this book is, on its surface, an unrelenting exploration of identity in personal and collective terms. Yet the collection is, most deeply, about intimacy and love, the inevitability of human separation and the challenge of human connection. Urging us to reexamine our own place in the broader human tapestry, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing announces the arrival of a powerful and necessary new voice.”

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Posted on January 20, 2017