Book cover for Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family and Commitment

The numbers can’t be the current generation of young Americans is delaying marriage longer than any other generation in history. But while the media trumpets this fact in a way that seems designed to scare us, until now no one has really taken the time to understand what people are doing instead.

Driven by his personal desire to understand why his single life stretched far into his thirties, Ethan Watters explores the cultural and social forces that have steered his generation away from the altar-and discovers many reasons to be optimistic about the course his generation has chosen. Central to his thinking is the idea of Urban the closely knit communities of friends that spring up during the ever-increasing period of time between college and married life. Tribes are revealed to be the key to understanding this generation, explaining not only why its members are putting off marriage, but also why singles often live outside of families so happily. In the end, Watters makes the case that the tribe years engender the self-respect critical to successful partnerships.

A funny, deeply insightful, and compulsively readable book that dares to suggest that the generation in question just might be interested in more than buying the latest SUV and drinking lattes at the local coffeehouse, Urban Tribes is destined to become one of the most talked-about books of the year.

Book cover for Why Vegans Have Smaller Brains and How Cows Reverse Climate Change

A provocative and timely book that questions current thinking about diet, health and the environment. The authors challenge the ideas that meat is bad and plant-based is good, and that livestock farming is causing climate change.

An Oxford University study found that the less animal food you eat, the more your brain shrinks (atrophies) with age. Brain scans from breast-fed babies of vegan mothers also show brain atrophy, owing to deficiency of vitamin B12. This vitamin, which is vital for normal brain health, is not found in any plant food.

Many people have become resigned to the idea that heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s or another degenerative disease will kill them. This book shows that these illnesses were not our fate in pre-history and they need not be our destiny in the future. It explains how we can prevent and reverse chronic disease by eating the diet that drove human evolution, a diet based on meat, animal fat and offal.

What about the other reasons to eat meat? Readers will discover that plant-based eating is not only harming human health, it is also harming the planet. The authors show how crop farming is causing climate change, soil destruction, and ecological disaster. The flawed logic that we should replace meat with plant foods means that environmental destruction will continue, along with the socio-economic costs of diet-related disease. In contrast, regeneratively-grazed livestock mitigate climate change, enrich soils, support wildlife and provide nutritious food. This book firmly anchors the health benefits of an all-meat diet with farming and the environment.

Written in an accessible and engaging way, this book will appeal to everyone interested in diet, health, evolution and the environment.

Book cover for How Sex Changed The Internet and the Internet Changed Sex

From the moment there was an “online,” there was sex online. The famous test image used by software engineers to develop formats like the jpeg was “Lena,” taken from Playboy’s November 1972 centerfold. Early bulletin boards and multi-user domains quickly came to serve their members sexual musings. Facebook started as a way to rate “hot or not” Harvard co-eds. In fact, virtually every significant development that defines the Internet we know and love (and hate) today—privacy issues, online payments and online banking, dating, social media, streaming technology, mass data collection—came out the meeting of sexuality and technology.

Not only did sexuality vastly influence the internet, but the internet arguably changed modern sexuality by giving every imaginable non-heteronormative community a safe place to explore, fantasize, thrive, and be accepted. Which of course only led to more exploring, more fantasizing, more thriving.

A lively, highly visual history, filled with broad themes and backstories, pioneering personalities and eureka-moments, How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex covers everything from Jennicam (remember her?) to deep fakes. And most of what came in between, including “A Brief History of Online Dating” and the promise that VR spaces like the metaverse hold for the future of human sexual interactions.

Porn is just one part of the story. Rather, this is a story about human nature during the digital gold rush of the last fifty years.

Book cover for Unguarded Scottie Pippen

This unflinching “master class” ( The New York Times ) of a memoir from two-time Olympic gold medalist and NBA Hall of Famer reveals how Scottie Pippen, the youngest of twelve, overcame two family tragedies and universal disregard by college scouts to become an essential component of the greatest basketball dynasty of the last fifty years.

Scottie Pippen has been called one of the greatest NBA players for good reason.

Simply put, without Pippen, there are no championship banners—let alone six—hanging from the United Center rafters. There’s no Last Dance documentary. There’s no “Michael Jordan” as we know him. The 1990s Chicago Bulls teams would not exist as we know them.

So how did the youngest of twelve go from growing up poor in the small town of Hamburg, Arkansas, enduring two family tragedies along the way, to become a revered NBA legend? How did the scrawny teen, overlooked by every major collegiate basketball program, go on to become the fifth overall pick in the 1987 NBA Draft? And, perhaps most compelling, how did Pippen set aside his ego (and his own limitless professional ceiling) in order for the Bulls to become the most dominant basketball dynasty of the last half century?

In Unguarded , the six-time champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist finally opens up to offer pointed and transparent takes on Michael Jordan, Phil Jackson, and Dennis Rodman, among others. Pippen details how he cringed at being labeled Jordan’s sidekick, and discusses how he could have (and should have) received more respect from the Bulls’ management and the media.

Pippen reveals never-before-told stories about some of the most famous games in league history, including the 1994 playoff game against the New York Knicks when he took himself out with 1.8 seconds to go. He discusses what it was like dealing with Jordan on a day-to-day basis, while serving as the facilitator for the offense and the anchor for the defense.

Pippen is finally giving millions of adoring basketball fans what they crave; an unvarnished, “closely observed, and uncommonly modest” ( Kirkus Reviews ) look into his life and role within one of the greatest, most popular teams of all time.

Book cover for Michael Jordan The Life

The Shrug. The Shot. The Flu Game. Michael Jordan is responsible for sublime moments so ingrained in sports history that they have their own names. When most people think of him, they think of his beautiful shots with the game on the line, his body totally in sync with the ball — hitting nothing but net.

But for all his greatness, this scion of a complex family from North Carolina’s Coastal Plain has a darker side: he’s a ruthless competitor and a lover of high stakes. There’s never been a biography that encompassed the dual nature of his character and looked so deeply at Jordan on and off the court — until now.

Basketball journalist Roland Lazenby spent almost thirty years covering Michael Jordan’s career in college and the pros. He witnessed Jordan’s growth from a skinny rookie to the instantly recognizable global ambassador for basketball whose business savvy and success have millions of kids still wanting to be just like Mike. Yet Lazenby also witnessed the Michael Jordan whose drive and appetite are more fearsome and more insatiable than any of his fans could begin to know.

Michael Jordan: The Life explores both sides of his personality to reveal the fullest, most compelling story of the man who is Michael Jordan. Lazenby draws on his personal relationships with Jordan’s coaches; countless interviews with Jordan’s friends, teammates, and family members; and interviews with Jordan himself to provide the first truly definitive study of Michael Jordan: the player, the icon, and the man.

Book cover for The Great Plant-Based Con

Plant-based is best for health, go vegan to help save the planet, eat less meat… Almost every day we are bombarded with the seemingly incontrovertible message that we must reduce our consumption of meat and dairy – or eliminate them from our diets altogether.

But what if the pervasive message that the plant-based diet will improve our health and save the planet is misleading – or even false? What if removing animal foods from our diet is a serious threat to human health, and a red herring in the fight against climate change.

In THE GREAT PLANT-BASED CON, Jayne Buxton demonstrates that each of these ‘what-ifs’ is, in fact, a reality. Drawing on the work of numerous health experts and researchers, she uncovers how the separate efforts of a constellation of individuals, companies and organisations are leading us down a dietary road that will have severe repercussions for our health and wellbeing, and for the future of the planet.

THE GREAT PLANT-BASED CON is neither anti-plant nor anti-vegan – it is a call for us to take an honest look at the facts about human diets and their effect on the environment. Shocking and eye-opening, this book outlines everything you need to know to make more informed decisions about the food you choose to eat.

Book cover for The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. Will it be fast food tonight, or something organic? Or perhaps something we grew ourselves? The question of what to have for dinner has confronted us since man first discovered fire. But, as Michael Pollan explains in this revolutionary book, how we answer it now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may determine our survival as a species. Packed with profound surprises, The Omnivore’ s Dilemma is changing the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.

Book cover for Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind

Combine the surprising truth about brain food with the cutting-edge science of brain metabolism to achieve extraordinary emotional, cognitive, and physical health.

Are you struggling with attention problems, mood swings, food obsession, or depression? Whatever the issue, you have far more control over your thoughts, feelings, and behavior than you realize. Although medications may bring some relief, in Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind , Dr. Georgia Ede reveals that the most powerful way to change brain chemistry is with food, because that’s where brain chemicals come from in the first place.

In this provocative, illuminating guide, Dr. Ede explains why nearly everything we think we know about brain-healthy diets is wrong. We’ve been told the way to protect our brains is with superfoods, supplements, and plant-based diets rich in whole grains and legumes, but the science tells a different not only do these strategies often fail, but some can even work against us. The truth about brain food is that meat is not dangerous, vegan diets are not healthier, and antioxidants are not the answer.

Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind will empower you Drawing on a wide range of scientific disciplines including biochemistry, neuroscience, and botany, Dr. Ede will ignite your curiosity about the fascinating world of food and its role in nourishing, protecting, and energizing your brain.

Book cover for "Gentleman Pirate, Major Stede Bonnet"

An heir to an established land-owning aristocratic family in Barbados, Major Stede Bonnet enjoyed luxuries equal to those of the finest houses in London. “A Gentleman of good Reputation” and a “Master of a plentiful Fortune,” he was given “the Advantage of a liberal Education,” but the call of the sea-and perhaps more significantly, the push of his obligations as a father and husband-cast Major Bonnet onto an unlikely and deliberate course toward piracy.

Book cover for The Case Against Sugar

Among Americans, diabetes is more prevalent today than ever; obesity is at epidemic proportions; nearly 10% of children are thought to have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. And sugar is at the root of these, and other, critical society-wide, health-related problems. With his signature command of both science and straight talk, Gary Taubes delves into Americans’ history with sugar: its uses as a preservative, as an additive in cigarettes, the contemporary overuse of high-fructose corn syrup. He explains what research has shown about our addiction to sweets. He clarifies the arguments against sugar, corrects misconceptions about the relationship between sugar and weight loss; and provides the perspective necessary to make informed decisions about sugar as individuals and as a society.

Book cover for Rethinking Diabetes

An eye-opening investigation into the history of diabetes research and treatment by the award-winning journalist and best-selling author of Why We Get Fat

Before the discovery of insulin, diabetes was treated almost exclusively through diet, from subsistence on meat, to reliance on fats, to repeated fasting and near-starvation regimens. After two centuries of conflicting medical advice, most authorities today believe that those with diabetes can have the same dietary freedom enjoyed by the rest of us, leaving the job of controlling their disease to insulin therapy and other blood-sugar-lowering medications. Rather than embark on “futile” efforts to restrict sugar or carbohydrate intake, people with diabetes can lead a normal life, complete with the occasional ice-cream cake, side of fries, or soda.

These guiding principles, however, have been accompanied by an explosive rise in diabetes over the last fifty years, particularly among underserved populations. And the health of those with diabetes is expected to continue to deteriorate inexorably over time, with ever-increasing financial, physical, and psychological burdens. In Rethinking Diabetes, Gary Taubes explores the history underpinning the treatment of diabetes, types 1 and 2, elucidating how decades-old research that is rife with misconceptions has continued to influence the guidance physicians offer—at the expense of their patients’ long-term well-being.

The result of Taubes’s work is a reimagining of diabetes care that argues for a recentering of diet—particularly, fewer carbohydrates and more fat—over a reliance on insulin. Taubes argues critically and passionately that doctors and medical researchers should question the established wisdom that may have enabled the current epidemic of diabetes and obesity, and renew their focus on clinical trials to resolve controversies that are now a century in the making.

Book cover for Stealing MySpace

A fast-paced and deeply reported look at the unlikely success of MySpace, the Web 2.0 phenomenon, and the drama surrounding one of the biggest deals of the Internet age. Barely funded, technologically inept, conceptually derivative, and driven by rivalries, the company that was to morph into the biggest Internet site in the world had an unlikely beginning. This is the fascinating and surprising story that includes all the elements of a great business obsessive characters from co-founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe to Rupert Murdock, relentless and unlikely innovation, and dizzying back room deal-making; all centered around an epic battle for control.

Book cover for The Lady and her Monsters

The Lady and Her Monsters by Roseanne Motillo brings to life the fascinating times, startling science, and real-life horrors behind Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.

Montillo recounts how—at the intersection of the Romantic Age and the Industrial Revolution—Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein was inspired by actual scientists of the period: curious and daring iconoclasts who were obsessed with the inner workings of the human body and how it might be reanimated after death.

With true-life tales of grave robbers, ghoulish experiments, and the ultimate in macabre research—human reanimation—The Lady and Her Monsters is a brilliant exploration of the creation of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s horror classic.

Book cover for Good Calories Bad Calories

Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight, and Disease

In this groundbreaking book, the result of seven years of research in every science connected with the impact of nutrition on health, award-winning science writer Gary Taubes shows us that almost everything we believe about the nature of a healthy diet is wrong.

For decades we have been taught that fat is bad for us, carbohydrates better, and that the key to a healthy weight is eating less and exercising more. Yet with more and more people acting on this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Taubes argues persuasively that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates (white flour, sugar, easily digested starches) and sugars–via their dramatic and longterm effects on insulin, the hormone that regulates fat accumulation–and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the number. There are good calories, and bad ones.

Good Calories
These are from foods without easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars. These foods can be eaten without restraint.
Meat, fish, fowl, cheese, eggs, butter, and non-starchy vegetables.

Bad Calories
These are from foods that stimulate excessive insulin secretion and so make us fat and increase our risk of chronic disease—all refined and easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars. The key is not how much vitamins and minerals they contain, but how quickly they are digested. (So apple juice or even green vegetable juices are not necessarily any healthier than soda.)
Bread and other baked goods, potatoes, yams, rice, pasta, cereal grains, corn, sugar (sucrose and high fructose corn syrup), ice cream, candy, soft drinks, fruit juices, bananas and other tropical fruits, and beer.

Taubes traces how the common assumption that carbohydrates are fattening was abandoned in the 1960s when fat and cholesterol were blamed for heart disease and then –wrongly–were seen as the causes of a host of other maladies, including cancer. He shows us how these unproven hypotheses were emphatically embraced by authorities in nutrition, public health, and clinical medicine, in spite of how well-conceived clinical trials have consistently refuted them. He also documents the dietary trials of carbohydrate-restriction, which consistently show that the fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be.

With precise references to the most significant existing clinical studies, he convinces us that there is no compelling scientific evidence demonstrating that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, that salt causes high blood pressure, and that fiber is a necessary part of a healthy diet. Based on the evidence that does exist, he leads us to conclude that the only healthy way to lose weight and remain lean is to eat fewer carbohydrates or to change the type of the carbohydrates we do eat, and, for some of us, perhaps to eat virtually none at all.

The 11 Critical Conclusions of Good Calories, Bad Calories:

  1. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, does not cause heart disease.
  2. Carbohydrates do, because of their effect on the hormone insulin. The more easily-digestible and refined the carbohydrates and the more fructose they contain, the greater the effect on our health, weight, and well-being.
  3. Sugars—sucrose (table sugar) and high fructose corn syrup specifically—are particularly harmful. The glucose in these sugars raises insulin levels; the fructose they contain overloads the liver.
  4. Refined carbohydrates, starches, and sugars are also the most likely dietary causes of cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease, and the other common chronic diseases of modern times.
  5. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating and not sedentary behavior.
  6. Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter any more than it causes a child to grow taller.
  7. Exercise does not make us lose excess fat; it makes us hungry.
  8. We get fat because of an imbalance—a disequilibrium—in the hormonal regulation of fat tissue and fat metabolism. More fat is stored in the fat tissue than is mobilized and used for fuel. We become leaner when the hormonal regulation of the fat tissue reverses this imbalance.
  9. Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. When insulin levels are elevated, we stockpile calories as fat. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and burn it for fuel.
  10. By stimulating insulin secretion, carbohydrates make us fat and ultimately cause obesity. By driving fat accumulation, carbohydrates also increase hunger and decrease the amount of energy we expend in metabolism and physical activity.
  11. The fewer carbohydrates we eat, the leaner we will be.

Good Calories, Bad Calories is a tour de force of scientific investigation–certain to redefine the ongoing debate about the foods we eat and their effects on our health.

Book cover for The Truth about The Titanic

Here is a survivor’s vivid account of the greatest maritime disaster in history. The information contained in Gracie’s account is available from no other source. He provides details of those final moments, including names of passengers pulled from the ocean and of those men who, in a panic, jumped into lifeboats as they were being lowered, causing injury and further danger to life. Walter Lord, author of ‘A Night to Remember’, comments that Gracie’s book – written shortly before he died from the exposure he suffered on the night – is “invaluable for chasing down who went in what boat”, and calls Gracie “an indefatigable detective”.

Book cover for The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

Two young women, living centuries apart, both accused of madness, communicate across time to fight a common enemy… their doctors.

“It was the dog who found me.”

Such is the stark confession launching the harrowing scene that begins The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls as Emilie Autumn, a young musician on the verge of a bright career, attempts suicide by overdosing on the antipsychotics prescribed to treat her bipolar disorder. Upon being discovered, Emilie is revived and immediately incarcerated in a maximum-security psych ward, despite her protestations that she is not crazy, and can provide valid reasons for her actions if someone would only listen.

Treated as a criminal, heavily medicated, and stripped of all freedoms, Emilie is denied communication with the outside world, and falls prey to the unwelcome attentions of Dr. Sharp, head of the hospital’s psychiatry department. As Dr. Sharp grows more predatory by the day, Emilie begins a secret diary to document her terrifying experience, and to maintain her sanity in this environment that could surely drive anyone mad. But when Emilie opens her notebook to find a desperate letter from a young woman imprisoned within an insane asylum in Victorian England, and bearing her own name and description, a portal to another world is blasted wide open.

As these letters from the past continue to appear, Emilie escapes further into this mysterious alternate reality where sisterhoods are formed, romance between female inmates blossoms, striped wallpaper writhes with ghosts, and highly intellectual rats speak the Queen’s English.

But is it real? Or is Emilie truly as mad as she is constantly told she is?

The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls blurs harsh reality and magical historical fantasy whilst issuing a scathing critique of society’s treatment of women and the mental health care industry’s treatment of its patients, showing in the process that little has changed throughout the ages.

Welcome to the Asylum. Are you committed?

Book cover for Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty

Then look no further. Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty is the book for you. Here, at last, for the first time, are the full scripts of one of British television’s funniest comedies. Follow the hilarious misadventures of the despicable Edmund Blackadder and his dimwitted sidekick Baldrick through four centuries of hopelessly mangled English history: from medieval nastiness through English history: from medieval nastiness through Elizabethan and Regency glory, to the mud and sauteed rats of the First World War. Aside from the ball-bouncingly funny scripts themselves, Blackadder also features special bonus sections: “Instruments of Torture in the Late Middle Ages”; “Medieval Medicine” (“1. Herbs; 2. Leeches; 3. Saw It Off”); and an indispensable “Index of Blackadder’s Finest Insults”.

When single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in a 100-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, it’s an opportunity to start over with her three daughters–Luna, Sapphire, and Clover. When two of her daughters go missing, she’s frantic. She learns that the cave beneath the lighthouse was once a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The locals warn her about wildlings, supernatural beings who mimic human children, created by witches for revenge. Liv is told wildlings are dangerous and must be killed.

Twenty-two years later, Luna has been searching for her missing sisters and mother. When she receives a call about her youngest sister, Clover, she’s initially ecstatic. Clover is the sister she remembers–except she’s still seven years old, the age she was when she vanished. Luna is worried Clover is a wildling. Luna has few memories of her time on the island, but she’ll have to return to find the truth of what happened to her family. But she doesn’t realize just how much the truth will change her.

Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a society priced beyond their means. Twentysomethings, brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, and scarred by the 80s fall-out of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan, they represent the new generation – Generation X.
Fiercely suspicious of being lumped together as an advertiser’s target market, they have quit dreary careers and cut themselves adrift in the California desert. Unsure of their futures, they immerse themselves in a regime of heavy drinking and working at no-future McJobs in the service industry.
Underemployed, overeducated, intensely private and unpredictable, they have nowhere to direct their anger, no one to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie. So they tell stories; disturbingly funny tales that reveal their barricaded inner world. A world populated with dead TV shows, ‘Elvis moments’ and semi-disposable Swedish furniture…

An incendiary examination of burnout in millennials—the cultural shifts that got us here, the pressures that sustain it, and the need for drastic change

Do you feel like your life is an endless to-do list? Do you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through Instagram because you’re too exhausted to pick up a book? Are you mired in debt, or feel like you work all the time, or feel pressure to take whatever gives you joy and turn it into a monetizable hustle? Welcome to burnout culture.

While burnout may seem like the default setting for the modern era, in Can’t Even, BuzzFeed culture writer and former academic Anne Helen Petersen argues that burnout is a definitional condition for the millennial generation, born out of distrust in the institutions that have failed us, the unrealistic expectations of the modern workplace, and a sharp uptick in anxiety and hopelessness exacerbated by the constant pressure to “perform” our lives online. The genesis for the book is Petersen’s viral BuzzFeed article on the topic, which has amassed over eight million reads since its publication in January 2019.

Can’t Even goes beyond the original article, as Petersen examines how millennials have arrived at this point of burnout (think: unchecked capitalism and changing labor laws) and examines the phenomenon through a variety of lenses—including how burnout affects the way we work, parent, and socialize—describing its resonance in alarming familiarity. Utilizing a combination of sociohistorical framework, original interviews, and detailed analysis, Can’t Even offers a galvanizing, intimate, and ultimately redemptive look at the lives of this much-maligned generation, and will be required reading for both millennials and the parents and employers trying to understand them.

Book cover for "Meme Wars"

A groundbreaking investigation into the digital underworld, where far-right operatives wage wars against mainstream America, from a masterful trio of experts in media and tech.

Memes have long been dismissed as inside jokes with no political importance. Nothing could be further from the truth. Memes are bedrock to the strategy of conspiracists such as Alex Jones, provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, white nationalists like Nick Fuentes, and tacticians like Roger Stone. While the media and most politicians struggle to harness the organizing power of the internet, the “redpill right” weaponizes memes, pushing conspiracy theories and disinformation into the mainstream to drag people down the rabbit hole. These meme wars stir strong emotions, deepen partisanship, and get people off their keyboards and into the streets–and the steps of the US Capitol.

Meme Wars is the first major account of how “Stop the Steal” went from online to real life, from the wires to the weeds. Leading media expert Joan Donovan, PhD, veteran tech journalist Emily Dreyfuss, and cultural ethnographer Brian Friedberg pull back the curtain on the digital war rooms in which a vast collection of antiesablishmentarians bond over hatred of liberal government and media. Together as a motley reactionary army, they use memes and social media to seek out new recruits, spread ideologies, and remake America according to their desires.

A political thriller with the substance of a rigorous history, Meme Wars is the astonishing story of how extremists are yanking our culture and politics to the right. And it’s a warning that if we fail to recognize these powerful undercurrents, the great meme war for the soul of America will soon be won.

What if you could live forever—but without your one true love? Reincarnation Blues is the story of a man who has been reincarnated nearly 10,000 times, in search of the secret to immortality so that he can be with his beloved, the incarnation of Death. Neil Gaiman meets Kurt Vonnegut in this darkly whimsical, hilariously profound, and wildly imaginative comedy of the secrets of life and love. Transporting us from ancient India to outer space to Renaissance Italy to the present day, is a journey through time, space, and the human heart.

In this lively and engaging history, Madelon Powers recreates the daily life of the barroom, exploring what it was like to be a “regular” in the old-time saloon of pre-prohibition industrial America. Through an examination of saloongoers across America, her investigation offers a fascinating look at rich lore of the barroom—its many games, stories, songs, free lunch customs, and especially its elaborate system of drinking rituals that have been passed on for decades.

Mrs. Dawes used to work at the Danvers Mental Hospital for the Insane during the 1980’s, and she thought it was all in the past. Now, in 1999, she’s a workaholic psychiatrist doting on troubled teens, but she’s so busy with her career, that her own teenage son, Rudger, is rebelling and spinning out of control. After an incident that flooded the entire floor of his junior high school, he’s been suspended, seemingly for good. His mother thinks that by traveling to the abandoned mental hospital from her university days in Massachusetts, it’ll be a chance to reconnect with Rudger and recover her own lost memories from many years back. Of course, the sinister old Victorian pillars and arches have absorbed the horrors of previous eras, from lobotomies to electroshock therapy, and things won’t be going as planned. After all, some places are better left alone…

The 26 women who tell their stories here were incarcerated against their will, often by male family members, for holding views or behaving in ways that deviated from the norms of their day. The authors’ accompanying history of both societal and psychiatric standards for women reveals the degree to which the prevailing societal conventions could reinforce the perception that these women were mad.

For more than half the nation’s history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients.

The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendent Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas.

Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings–and the patients who lived in them–neglected and abandoned.

Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors (some designed by such prominent architects as H. H. Richardson and Samuel Sloan) and crumbling interiors–chairs stacked against walls with peeling paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home.

Accompanying Payne’s striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks (who described his own experience working at a state mental hospital in his book Awakenings). Sacks pays tribute to Payne’s photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, “where one could be both mad and safe.”

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she’d never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele–Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles–as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.

Kaysen’s memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a “parallel universe” set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching documnet that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

SLIMED! An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age tells the surprisingly complex, wonderfully nostalgic, and impressively compelling story of how Nickelodeon — the First Kids’ Network — began as a DIY startup in the late 70s, and forged ahead through the early eighties with a tiny band of young artists and filmmakers who would go on to change everything about cable television, television in general, animation, and children’s entertainment, proving just what can be done if the indie spirit is kept alive in the corporate world. Get the real back story about all of your favorite Golden Age Nick shows: Everything from such classics as You Can’t Do That On Television, Out of Control and Double Dare to early 90s faves like The Adventures of Pete & Pete, the original three Nicktoons, Clarissa Explains It All and more … All from those who made it happen!