Authors 2025

Bricks and bottles of acid through the windshield. Bullets shot from the running boards of racing cabs, passengers screaming in the backseat. Bombs exploding in garages, beneath parked cars, on the front porches of jurors’ homes. Accusations of favoritism and collusion with city leaders and law enforcement; bribery and extortion and grand jury investigations. Mysterious accidents and brutal attacks and devastating fires, leaving a trail of widows in their wake. These were Chicago’s Taxi Wars, a violent and deadly battle for supremacy of the city’s new and lucrative taxi industry during the Jazz Age.

 

In 1915, at the dawn of the automobile era, visionary car salesman John D. Hertz (better remembered today for his successful foray into rental cars) and his partner, Walden W. Shaw, founded Chicago’s Yellow Cab Company. This wildly successful venture would go on to inform and inspire the modern taxi industry as we know it today in Chicago and throughout the United States. But as the Roaring Twenties glamorized lawlessness on the city’s streets, Yellow Cab’s meteoric rise invited increasingly aggressive competitors. Cab drivers battled each other in the streets over fares, allegiances and turf claims, their skirmishes escalating from sophomoric pranks to cold-blooded murder, mass shootings, and acts of domestic terrorism. In the 1920s, one rival in particular ascended to pose a threat to Yellow Cab’s dominance: the Checker Taxi Company. Behind the scenes, pulling the strings at Checker, was Morris Markin, who was desperate to expand his influence even as Chicago’s gangsters attempted to wrest his control away.

 

Working from extensive research and interviews with descendants and experts, author Anne Morrissy vividly recreates Chicago’s Taxi Wars, bringing to print for the first time this deeply compelling but nearly forgotten story. Buffeted by a supporting cast of colorful combatants and larger-than-life Jazz Age characters — including Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Joe Kennedy, Gene Tunney, Jack Dempsey, and Chicago mayor William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson — Street Fight: The Chicago Taxi Wars of the 1920s restores to history these deadly wars that played out on the city’s streets a century ago, endangering the lives of passengers and passersby, while at the same time forming the regulatory foundation that still governs cab, limo and rideshare transportation in the 21st century.

 

Through the centuries-old history of performance magic, animals have often been the center of magicians’ tricks and illusions. They are as diverse as rabbits from hats, snakes in baskets, appearing birds and fish, mindreading dogs, and vanishing donkeys. Often the stories are entertaining; sometimes they are distressing. From Houdini to your local birthday party magician, their animals have had enduring connections with audiences. And the animals themselves have had to endure. Whether your interest is amusing animals, or animal rights, there are stories for you in Animal Wizards: A Short Critical History of Magicians’ Most Trusting Assistants.

 

We are facing an alarming upsurge in the spread of misinformation and attempts by powerful figures to discredit facts so they can seize control of narratives. These are threats American journalist Sigrid Schultz knew all too well. The Chicago Tribune’s Berlin bureau chief and primary foreign correspondent for Central Europe from 1925 to January 1941, Schultz witnessed Hitler’s rise to power and was one of the first reporters—male or female—to warn American readers of the growing dangers of Nazism.

In The Dragon From Chicago, Pamela D. Toler draws on extensive archival research to unearth the largely forgotten story of Schultz’s years spent courageously reporting the news from Berlin, from the revolts of 1919 through the Nazi rise to power and Allied air raids over Berlin in 1941. At a time when women reporters rarely wrote front-page stories and her male colleagues saw a powerful unmarried woman as a “freak,” Schultz pulled back the curtain on how the Nazis misreported the news to their own people, and how they attempted to control the foreign press through bribery and threats.

Tuesday, October , 2025 at 7 p.m.: Spencer Weber Waller, Justice John Paul Stephens Chair in Competition Law, Professor and Director of The Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, The Battle for Broadway: Competition and Collusion in the American Theater