The bone-chilling breeze off Lake Michigan carries unnerving whispers of days gone by. Sinister Chicago chronicles the unknown, unusual, or otherwise unexplained events that have occurred in Chicago’s short history. Author Kali Joy Cramer uncovers the sinister foundations of Chicago’s urban legends and unravels the facts around its most notorious murder cases. She looks below the superficial stories of Chicago’s most infamous characters and chronicles the tragic accidents that left their mark on the city.

Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged. But our modern conception of yoga derives much from nineteenth-century European spirituality, and the true story of yoga’s origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and more entertaining than most of us realize. To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on yoga’s practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asia’s vast and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilities—which can include raising the dead, possession, and levitation—to acquire power, wealth, and sexual gratification. As White shows, even those yogis who aren’t downright villainous bear little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. At turns rollicking and sophisticated, Sinister Yogis tears down the image of yogis as detached, contemplative teachers, finally placing them in their proper context.

New Poetry

A dark street curves around Lake Michigan to a cemetery. A cold wind blows. Mist rises from the lake. Suddenly, you feel you are not alone. Is somebody—or something—hiding in the mist? Get ready to read four chilling tales about Chicago’s spookiest spots. This 24-page book features controlled, narrative nonfiction text with age-appropriate vocabulary and simple sentence construction. The colorful design and spooky art will engage and terrify emergent readers.

Among this country's many treasures is the city of Chicago, an area filled with creativity and culture. Haunted Chicago, a collection of stories of ghosts, mysteries, and paranormal happenings in Chi-Town, will leave readers delightfully frightened.

Long before corner bars stitched the social fabric of Chicago's neighborhoods together, raucous pioneers like Mark Beaubien were fermenting over the untapped potential of the unbroken prairie. Take a determined saunter from the clamor of Chicago's first breweries, through the hidden passages of thousands of speakeasies and then back into the current of the contemporary craft beer revival. Follow a path plastered with portraits of infamous saloonkeepers and profiles of historic bars. Author June Sawyers serves as an expert guide, stopping every so often to collect a vintage beer label, explain an original recipe or salute the heady history that sits atop the City of Big Shoulders.

Film history is merged with psychiatric history seamlessly, to show how and why bad depictions of mind doctors (especially hypnotists) occur in early film, long before Hannibal Lecter burst upon the scene. The German Expressionist Dr. Caligari is not cinema's first psychotic charlatan, but he launches the stereotype of screen psychiatrists who are sicker than their patients. Many film psychiatrists function as political metaphors, while many more reflect real life clinical controversies. This book discusses films with diabolical drugging, unethical experimentation, involuntary incarceration, sexual exploitation, lobotomies, "shock schlock," conspiracy theories and military medicine, to show how fact informs fantasy, and when fantasy trumps reality. Traditional asylum thrillers changed after hospital stays shortened and laws protected people against involuntary commitment. Except for six short "golden years" from 1957 to 1963, portrayals of bad psychiatrists far outnumber good ones and this book tells how and why that was.