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Horror films have been around for more than 100 years, and they continue to make a large impact on popular culture as they reflect their contemporary zeitgeist. Between the mid-1950s and mid-1980s, drive-in theaters were at their peak of popularity, and each decade brought forward new challenges and themes. This book explores 60 B horror films, divided into 12 fun and uniquely-themed categories. Chapters discuss how the Atomic Age, the Vietnam War, the women’s liberation movement and other current events and social issues affected these films. Films covered include Willard , The Fly , Santa Sangre and many more.

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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.

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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.

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Book cover for Beck Lynch: The Man: Not Your Average Average Girl

This compelling and deeply personal memoir from WWE superstar Rebecca Quin—a.k.a. The Man, a.k.a. Becky Lynch—delves into her earliest wrestling days, her scrappy beginnings, and her meteoric rise to fame.

By age seven, Rebecca Quin, now known in the ring as Becky Lynch, was already defying what the world expected of her. Raised in Dublin, Ireland in a devoutly Catholic family, Rebecca constantly invented new ways to make her mother worry—roughhousing with the neighborhood kids, hosting secret parties while her parents were away, enrolling in a warehouse wrestling school, nearly breaking her neck and almost kneecapping a WWE star before her own wrestling career even began—and she was always in search of a thrilling escape from the ordinary.

Rebecca’s deep love of wrestling as a child set her on an unlikely path. With few female wrestlers to look to for guidance, Rebecca pursued a wrestling career hoping to change the culture and move away from the antiquated disrespect so often directed at the elite female athletes that grace the ring. Even as a teenager, she knew that she would stop at nothing to earn a space among the greatest wrestlers of our time, and to pave a new path for female fighters.

Culled from decades of journal entries, Rebecca’s memoir offers a raw, personal, and honest depiction of the complex woman behind the character Rebecca Quin plays on TV.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Book cover for Exercised

The myth-busting science behind our modern attitudes to exercise: what our bodies really need, why it matters, and its effects on health and wellbeing.

In industrialized nations, our sedentary lifestyles have contributed to skyrocketing rates of obesity and diseases like diabetes. A key remedy, we are told, is exercise – voluntary physical activity for the sake of health. However, most of us struggle to stay fit, and our attitudes to exercise are plagued by misconceptions, finger-pointing and anxiety.

But, as Daniel Lieberman shows in Exercised , the first book of its kind by a leading scientific expert, we never evolved to exercise. We are hardwired for moderate exertion throughout each day, not triathlons or treadmills. Drawing on over a decade of high-level scientific research and eye-opening insights from evolutionary biology and anthropology, Lieberman explains precisely how exercise can promote health; debunks persistent myths about sitting, speed, strength and endurance; and points the way towards more enjoyable and physically active living in the modern world.

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Book cover for Death by Food Pyramid

Warning: Shock and outrage will grip you as you dive into this one-of-a-kind expose. Shoddy science, sketchy politics and shady special interests have shaped American Dietary recommendations and destroyed our nation’s health over recent decades. The phrase Death by Food Pyramid isn’t shock-value sensationalism, but the tragic consequence of simply doing what we have been told to do by our own government and giant food profiteers in pursuit of health.

In “Death by Food Pyramid” Denise Minger exposes the forces that overrode common sense and solid science to launch a pyramid phenomenon that bled far beyond US borders to taint the eating habits of the entire developed world.

Denise explores how generations of flawed pyramids and plates endure as part of the national consciousness, and how the one size fits all diet mentality these icons convey pushes us deeper into the throes of obesity and disease. Regardless of whether you re an omnivore or vegan, research junkie or science-phobe, health novice or seasoned dieter, “Death by Food Pyramid” will reframe your understanding of nutrition science, and inspire you to take your health, and future, into your own hands.”

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Book cover for 1995 The Year The Future Began

A hinge moment in recent American history, 1995 was an exceptional year. Drawing on interviews, oral histories, memoirs, archival collections, and news reports, W. Joseph Campbell presents a vivid, detail-rich portrait of those memorable twelve months. This book offers fresh interpretations of the decisive moments of 1995, including the emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web in mainstream American life; the bombing at Oklahoma City, the deadliest attack of domestic terrorism in U.S. history; the sensational “Trial of the Century,” at which O.J. Simpson faced charges of double murder; the U.S.-brokered negotiations at Dayton, Ohio, which ended the Bosnian War, Europe’s most vicious conflict since the Nazi era; and the first encounters at the White House between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a liaison that culminated in a stunning scandal and the spectacle of the president’s impeachment and trial. As Campbell demonstrates in this absorbing chronicle, 1995 was a year of extraordinary events, a watershed at the turn of the millennium. The effects of that pivotal year reverberate still, marking the close of one century and the dawning of another.

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Book cover for Because Internet

A linguistically informed look at how our digital world is transforming the English language.

Language is humanity’s most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What’s more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time.

Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer “LOL” or “lol,” why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.

Because Internet is essential reading for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.

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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.

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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.

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Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

Red and Blue, two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions, strike up an unlikely correspondence. But what started as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more: something epic and romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

The discovery of their bond will mean their deaths. There’s still a war going on, and someone has to win that war. That’s how wars work. Right?

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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”.

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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?

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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”.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.”