The flash of his camera sent Al Capone diving to the floor. He was asked to escort Bob Hope's wife to church and to hide John Barrymore from his mistress. Cary Grant demanded a shoeshine, Eleanor Roosevelt demanded an apology and Harry Truman demanded a bourbon. Photographer Mike Rotunno was the man on the scene when Chicago's Midway Airport was the crossroads of the world and people walked its concourses just to catch a glimpse of Hollywood's brightest stars. Bump into Bud Abbott, John Wayne, Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe as Christopher Lynch pieces together the amazing story left behind in fifty years of photographs and journals.

Nestled in the middle of the southwest side of Chicago are the neighborhoods of Chicago Lawn, West Lawn, and Marquette Manor. All three border picturesque Marquette Park, which intertwines their histories. The pages of Legendary Locals of Chicago Lawn and West Lawn are filled with tales of people who make up the story, or, in some cases, add spice to the story of this section of the city of Chicago. Highlighted locals include the lady known as the "Witch of Wall Street" and the Roman Catholic priest who took her to court to save his parishioners from deadly disease, the gentlemen known as the "Dean of 63rd Street" and the "Mayor of 69th Street," as well as the "Polka King" and the "Father of Little League." Through their actions, the people featured have impacted the neighborhood. It may be due to acts of kindness or dedication to a cause; they might be builders; they might be gangsters; they might be store owners, but they are all interesting figures.

Albert Lambert was born in Missouri and went into his father's pharmaceutical business, but he found his true love in the air. While visiting Paris in 1906, he became interested in ballooning, then in airplanes. In 1907, Albert helped form the St. Louis Aero Club to promote aviation, then helped form the first airport in the area. In 1923, he opened Lambert-St. Louis Flying Field. He also helped raise money to build The Spirit of St. Louis for Charles Lindbergh.

Miriam Hopkins (1902--1972) first captured moviegoers' attention in daring precode films such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Story of Temple Drake (1933), and Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932). Though she enjoyed popular and critical acclaim in her long career -- receiving an Academy Award nomination for Becky Sharp (1935) and a Golden Globe nomination for The Heiress (1949) -- she is most often remembered for being one of the most difficult actresses of Hollywood's golden age. Whether she was fighting with studio moguls over her roles or feuding with her avowed archrival, Bette Davis, her reputation for temperamental behavior is legendary. In the first comprehensive biography of this colorful performer, Allan R. Ellenberger illuminates Hopkins's fascinating life and legacy. Her freewheeling film career was exceptional in studio-era Hollywood, and she managed to establish herself as a top star at Paramount, RKO, Goldwyn, and Warner Bros. Over the course of five decades, Hopkins appeared in thirty-six films, forty stage plays, and countless radio programs. Later, she emerged as a pioneer of TV drama. Ellenberger also explores Hopkins's private life, including her relationships with such intellectuals as Theodore Dreiser, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, and Tennessee Williams. Although she was never blacklisted for her suspected Communist leanings, her association with these freethinkers and her involvement with certain political organizations led the FBI to keep a file on her for nearly forty years. This skillful biography treats readers to the intriguing stories and controversies surrounding Hopkins and her career, but also looks beyond her Hollywood persona to explore the star as an uncompromising artist. The result is an entertaining portrait of a brilliant yet underappreciated performer.

Flash! presents a fascinating cultural history of flash photography, from its mid-nineteenth century beginnings to the present day. All photography requires light, but the light of flash photography is quite distinctive: artificial, sudden, shocking, intrusive, and extraordinarily bright. Associated with revelation and wonder, it has been linked to the sublimity of lightning. Yet it has also been reviled: it's inseparable from anxieties about intrusion and violence, it creates a visual disturbance, and its effects are often harsh and create exaggerated contrasts. Flash! explores flash's power to reveal shocking social conditions, its impact on the representation of race, its illumination of what would otherwise remain hidden in darkness, and its capacity to put on display the most mundane corners of everyday life. It looks at flash's distinct aesthetics, examines how paparazzi chase celebrities, how flash is intimately linked to crime, how flash has been used to light up - and interrupt - countless family gatherings, how flash can 'stop time' allowing one to photograph rapidly moving objects or freeze in a strobe, and it considers the biggest flash of all, the atomic bomb. Examining the work of professionals and amateurs, news hounds and art photographers, photographers of crime and of wildlife, the volume builds a picture of flash's place in popular culture, and its role in literature and film. Generously illustrated throughout, Flash! brings out the central role of this medium to the history of photography and challenges some commonly held ideas about the nature of photography itself.

"Detailed, deeply researched, and compelling." —Chicago Tribune Historian Leslie Zemeckis reveals the lost stories of Sally Rand and Faith Bacon—icons who each claimed to be the inventor of the notorious fan dance. Nearly one hundred years later, both women come alive again.

New York Times Bestseller Prizewinning bestselling author David Michaelis presents a “stunning” (The Wall Street Journal) breakthrough portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s longest-serving First Lady, an avatar of democracy whose ever-expanding agency as diplomat, activist, and humanitarian made her one of the world’s most widely admired and influential women. In the first single-volume cradle-to-grave portrait in six decades, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis delivers a stunning account of Eleanor Roosevelt’s remarkable life of transformation. An orphaned niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, she converted her Gilded Age childhood of denial and secrecy into an irreconcilable marriage with her ambitious fifth cousin Franklin. Despite their inability to make each other happy, Franklin Roosevelt transformed Eleanor from a settlement house volunteer on New York’s Lower East Side into a matching partner in New York’s most important power couple in a generation. When Eleanor discovered Franklin’s betrayal with her younger, prettier social secretary, Lucy Mercer, she offered a divorce and vowed to face herself honestly. Here is an Eleanor both more vulnerable and more aggressive, more psychologically aware and sexually adaptable than we knew. She came to accept FDR’s bond with his executive assistant, Missy LeHand; she allowed her children to live their own lives, as she never could; and she explored her sexual attraction to women, among them a star female reporter on FDR’s first presidential campaign, and younger men. Eleanor needed emotional connection. She pursued deeper relationships wherever she could find them. Throughout her life and travels, there was always another person or place she wanted to heal. As FDR struggled to recover from polio, Eleanor became a voice for the voiceless, her husband’s proxy in presidential ambition, and then the people’s proxy in the White House. Later, she would be the architect of international human rights and world citizen of the Atomic Age, urging Americans to cope with the anxiety of global annihilation by cultivating a “world mind.” She insisted that we cannot live for ourselves alone but must learn to live together or we will die together. Drawing on new research, Michaelis’s riveting portrait is not just a comprehensive biography of a major American figure, but the story of an American ideal: how our freedom is always a choice. Eleanor rediscovers a model of what is noble and evergreen in the American character, a model we need today more than ever.