Chicago Daily Observer

Just before Christmas in 2005 an FBI informant, posing as an al-Qaeda member, met with Narseal Batiste and discussed plans to build an Islamic army. Batiste, a former FedEx truck driver, wanted to wage a jihad “just as good or greater than 9/11.” His targets: the FBI building in Miami and Chicago’s Sears Tower. The most iconic symbol of Chicago’s ingenuity, innovation, and prosperity is a fitting sign of human progress––one that seemed to beg an attack from the jihadists. Just as the World Trade Centers stood at the center of American economic power, the Sears Tower is filled with some of the best Midwestern marketers of global capitalism.

Had the Tower on 233 South Wacker Drive been demolished by these American jihadists, it would have hearkened back to Chicago’s perseverance in October of 1871. The ... Read More...

A girl can dream, can’t she?

So I thought as I read the just released “The Cubs: The Complete Story of Chicago Cubs Baseball” by Glenn Stout (photographs by Richard Johnson), Houghton Mifflin press.

Stout opens by recounting that as the 20th century opened, the Chicago Cubs was, in fact, THE powerhouse baseball team. They had won three straight National League Pennants and two consecutive world championships. “The Cubs were kings.”

“So,” Stought asks, “. . . what the hell happened?”

What indeed? As I write, we are two down to the Diamond Backs. I just asked a knowledgeable friend if any team has come back from this far down in post-season playoffs to still win. “Yes” he said. “Against the Cubs.”

Or at least mostly against the Cubs. (One instance? 1984, the Padres. The Cubs were up 2 games in the post-season play offs, the Padres came back ... Read More...

The really marvelous thing about “The Dangerous Book for Boys” (HarperCollins 2007) isn’t that it is—in a word and as its British adherents might say of its British authors—“brilliant.”

It’s that in four months it has taken the American market by storm.

This in a market in which we seem routinely bent on turning our boys into. . . girls.

And let me be clear: Unlike what I suspect is my feminist sister’s predilection – I don’t think this is a good thing.

“Dangerous,” by British brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden (I long thought it impossible to improve on “The Brothers Grimm” when it comes to names, but I think they’ve done it) have written a book for boys and their cringing mothers everywhere.

(As a mother of 4 young kids, the oldest a 13-year-old boy, I’m convinced, by the way, that we mothers are generally supposed to cringe when ... Read More...