20180128

CLOSED for inventory February 11, 2018


Just a reminder, we are not buying books from our customers again until February 12, 2018 and we will be CLOSED on February 11, 2018 for our inventory.

20180117

January 24 6pm Christian Picciolini White American Youth: My Descent into America's Most Violent Hate Movement --and How I Got Out



Christian Picciolini will be discussing his autobiography, Q&A after. 


Free and open to the public.  Food and drink provided. RSVPs appreciated.
White American Youth: My Descent into America's Most Violent Hate Movement
--and How I Got Out

after-words event space 23 E. Illinois St., 6pm

A stunning look inside the world of violent hate groups by a onetime white supremacist leader. Shaken by a personal tragedy he realized the error of his ways and abandoned his destructive life to become an anti-hate activist.

As he stumbled through high school, struggling to find a community among other fans of punk rock music, Christian Picciolini was recruited by a now notorious white power skinhead leader and encouraged to fight with the movement to "protect the white race from extinction." Soon, he had become an expert in racist philosophies, a terror who roamed the neighborhood, quick to throw fists. When his mentor was arrested and sentenced to eleven years in prison, sixteen-year-old Picciolini took over the man's role as the leader of an infamous neo-Nazi skinhead group.

Seduced by the power he accrued through intimidation, and swept up in the rhetoric he had adopted, Picciolini worked to grow an army of extremists. He used music as a recruitment tool, launching his own propaganda band that performed at white power rallies around the world. But slowly, as he started a family of his own and a job that for the first time brought him face to face with people from all walks of life, he began to recognize the cracks in his hateful ideology. Then a shocking loss at the hands of racial violence changed his life forever, and Picciolini realized too late the full extent of the harm he'd caused.

Raw, inspiring, and heartbreakingly candid, White American Youth tells the fascinating story of how so many young people lose themselves in a culture of hatred and violence and how the criminal networks they forge terrorize and divide our nation.

Meet the author and help us explore ways to curb racial hatred and violence.

Just a reminder, we are not buying books from our customers again until February 12, 2018 and we will be CLOSED on February 11, 2018 for our inventory.

20180109

January 16 AJ Finn and Gillian Flynn at the American Writer’s Museum



180 N. Michigan Avenue, Second Floor, at 6pm

A.J. Finn will be in conversation with Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, The Grownup). They will be discussing his first novel The Woman in the Window

Anna Fox lives alone—a recluse in her New York City home, unable to venture outside. She spends her day drinking wine (maybe too much), watching old movies, recalling happier times …and spying on her neighbors.

Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, a mother, their teenage son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble—and its shocking secrets are laid bare.
What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this diabolically gripping thriller, no one—and nothing—is what it seems.

Twisty and powerful, ingenious and moving, The Woman in the Window is a smart, sophisticated novel of psychological suspense that recalls the best of Hitchcock.

Reader’s Hall. General public.
We will be on hand to sell books before and after the event.