With roots in the Civil War, the Union League Club of Chicago grew up, prospered, and suffered alongside its city. "Glory, Darkness, Light: A History of the Union Club of Chicago" tells an honest story of how the Club and its members have built, boosted, and squabbled with their city for 125 years.
The Union League Club of Chicago is unique among the country's 2,000 city clubs in its rich mix of civic, artistic, and charitable missions. In 1893, Club leaders saved and then presented the incomparable World's Columbian Exposition to 27 million awed visitors. Today the walls of its 23-story...

Persistent problems have left Illinois the butt of jokes and threatened it with fiscal catastrophe. In "Fixing Illinois," James D. Nowlan and J. Thomas Johnson use their four decades of experience as public servants, Springfield veterans, and government observers to present a comprehensive program of almost one hundred specific policy ideas aimed at rescuing the state from its long list of problems.
Nowlan and Johnson start with the history of how one of the most prosperous states of the 1950s became a present-day mess riven by debt and discord and increasingly abandoned by both...