In the heart of downtown, there was a palace of commerce, a jewel of Chicago history. It was Marshall Field & Company. Give the lady what she wants. The customer is always right. These generous policies are Marshall Field's legacy to the world of retail. Here is the department store's history, a love story, told with fun and flair. It include a very personal new preface by Rick Kogan, longtime Chicago newpaperman, radio personality, and eldest son of Herman Kogan.

In the early twentieth century, John Coughlin and Mike Kenna ruled Chicago's First Ward, the lucrative lakefront territory and nerve center of the city. It was one of the most infamous havens for vice in the entire country, home to gambling palaces with marble floors and mahogany bars, to a mini-city of thugs and prostitutes and down-and-outers, to dives and saloons of every description and a few beyond description. In short, the First was a gold mine. In a city where money talked, it made boisterous Bathhouse John and the laconic Hinky Dink Kenna the most powerful men in town. This classic of Chicago-style journalism traces the careers of these two operators as they rose to the top of the city's political world.

To some he was a humanitarian and builder. Others scorned him as a fake and friend of gangsters with the carcass of a rhinoceros and the brain of a baboon. This rollicking history traces the rise of William Hale Big Bill Thompson, Chicago's famous reform mayor, from his upper class roots to his years as a teenaged cowboy, from his fame as a star athlete to the years as a master politician in a world where the ward boss ruled and whiskey for the voters cost a quarter a shot. Big Bill of Chicago profiles the whole brawling arena of city politics from the turn of the century to the Prohibition Era. It is a primer in the way American politics worked-and works-and a map along the countless winding ways even the dirtiest deal can lead to something great.