"The most thoughtful and judicious one-volume history of the war and the American political leaders who presided over the difficult and painful decisions that shaped this history. The book will stand for the foreseeable future as the best study of the tragic mistakes that led to so much suffering."—Robert Dallek

Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the young stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite millions of words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent, brilliant, and previously successful men stumbled so badly.

That changes with Road to Disaster. Historian Brian VanDeMark draws upon decades of archival research, his own interviews with many of those involved, and a wealth of previously unheard recordings by Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, who served as Defense Secretaries for Kennedy and Johnson. Yet beyond that, Road to Disaster is also the first history of the war to look at the cataclysmic decisions of those in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations through the prism of recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and organizational theory to explain why the "Best and the Brightest" became trapped in situations that suffocated creative thinking and willingness to dissent, why they found change so hard, and why they were so blind to their own errors.

An epic history of America’s march to quagmire, Road to Disaster is a landmark in scholarship and a book of immense importance.

You live under a cult. This cult controls your life, and it controls your life to your detriment. If you expect any relief from your situation in the future, you must at the very least become aware of the true nature of your situation. Otherwise you will continue to be "playthings of the gods"...

Walter Carnot Vetsch was born in 1947 in Louisiana, with a gift that he himself defines as the "unlearned knowledge." Many of us, over the years, generally acquire a degree of wisdom, which cannot be learned in schools. When we pass away, this knowledge dissolves in the universal consciousness, so, when we're back here in our next incarnation, we usually have to start everything from scratch. This was not the case of Walter. From his earliest years, he knew exactly what "reality" really was, how it worked, and what were the forces that made it work. He knew that this knowledge was true, and the best confirmation of it was that when, in the end of the 1960s, he decided to expose this knowledge in a book, those same forces violently opposed to it.

"All that I write," Walter says, "is based on the material I was able to bring through from before I was born here. This is what triggered the people who look for that sort of stuff, persons with 'unlearned knowledge,' which could upset a system where knowledge is controlled."

Paris in the 1860s: a magnificent time of expression, where brilliant young artists rebel against the stodginess of the past to freely explore new styles of creating—and bold new ways of living.

Passionate, beautiful, and utterly devoted to her art, Berthe Morisot is determined to be recognized as an important painter. But as a woman, she finds herself sometimes overlooked in favor of her male counterparts—Monet, Pissarro, Degas.

And there is one great artist among them who captivates young Berthe like none other: the celebrated genius Édouard Manet. A mesmerizing, breathtaking rogue—a shameless roué, undeterred and irresistible—his life is a wildly overgrown garden of scandal. He becomes Berthe's mentor, her teacher...her lover, despite his curiously devoted marriage to his frumpy, unappealing wife, Suzanne, and his many rumored dalliances with his own models. For a headstrong young woman from a respectable family, an affair with such an intoxicating scoundrel can only spell heartbreak and ruin.

But Berthe refuses to resign herself to the life of quiet submission that Society has dictated for her. Undiscouraged, she will create her own destiny...and confront life—and love—on her own terms.

ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS AND THE ULTRA-TERRESTRIALS – THE REVEALING TRUTH COULD CAUSE WORLDWIDE RELIGIOUS, POLITICAL AND ENERGY UPHEAVALS!

The belief in strange beings coming down from the stars to intermingle with humanity can be traced back to the earliest days of mankind. While the scientific community maintains that the current notion of UFOs and their extraterrestrial pilots is simply a modern version of the myths and legends contained within almost every culture and civilization, Ancient Astronaut theorists maintain that we have been “tinkered with,” and that someone – or “something” else – is keeping a watchful eye over mankind for their own purposes that can only be alluded to.

As early as the 1960s, Britain’s 8th Earl of Clancarty, Brinsley Le Poer Trench, made an astounding revelation. He said that he was convinced that life on earth had originated on the planet Mars and that the first voyagers here had been the Biblical Adam and Even who had left their paradise of the Garden of Eden and arrived on earth in a space ark piloted by Noah.

Thus the roots of the various Biblical stories from the Old Testament which are taught in every Sunday School today. But the story told by British nobility and the other researchers in this book tell even a far stranger tale about the secret history of our planet, a history that is “forbidden knowledge” to a handful of individuals who are now sharing their findings for the first time:

• Why has the CIA and the military shown an unprecedented interest in the remains of what many claims to be Noah’s Ark that came to rest on Turkey’s Mount Ararat? Is the anomalous structure a crashed space ship, something metallic as opposed to the gopher-wood of the Biblical tale, as researcher Nick Redfern insists could be true?
• Is there a distinction to be made between the ancient aliens and the true Creator God, and do these “visitors” have the same imponderable questions as we do about life, death and religion? Eric von Daniken spokesman Giorgio Tsoukalos has his own ideas on this concept?
• “We have met the Martians and they are us,” suggests Brad Steiger. Is there new evidence to suggest that life on earth was first planted in South America and spread out from there?
• Is there a new race of humans being formed in these uncertain times? According to the Earl of Clancarty, some of us are rapidly reacquiring the telepathy and psychic we were originally created with.

A new caliber of thriller set at the collision of ’60s counterculture and the rise of dark forces in world government. Heroes creator Tim Kring injects history with a supernatural, hallucinogenic what-if.

Set in the crucible of the 1960s, Shift is the story of Chandler Forrestal, a man whose life is changed forever when he is unwittingly dragged into a CIA mind-control experiment. After being given a massive dose of LSD, Chandler develops a frightening array of mental powers. With his one-in-a-billion brain chemistry, Chandler’s heightened perception uncovers a plot to assassinate President Kennedy. 

Propelled to prevent the conspiracy of assassination and anarchy, Chandler becomes a target for deadly forces in and out of the government and is pursued across a simmering landscape peopled by rogue CIA agents, Cuban killers, Mafia madmen, and ex-Nazi scientists…all the while haunted by a beautiful woman with her own scandalous past to purge, her own score to settle. Chased across America, will Chandler be able to harness his “shift” and rewrite history?

Combining the nonstop style of Ludlum with the sinister, tangled conspiracies of DeLillo and Dick, and featuring cameos from Lee Harvey Oswald to Timothy Leary to J. Edgar Hoover, Shift is a thriller guaranteed to be equal parts heart-stopping and thought-provoking.

Disney's newest animated feature, Zootopia, is a comedy-adventure starring Officer Judy Hopps, a rookie bunny cop who has to team up with fast-talking scam-artist fox Nick Wilde to crack her first case in the all-animal city of Zootopia. This lushly illustrated book offers a behind-the-scenes view of the elaborate artistry involved in creating the film.

"I had very little expectations one way or the other from it, but wound up enjoying Disney's latest animated feature immensely, which made digging into The Art Of Zootopia even more of a delight. As we've come to expect with these lovely hardcover tomes, it's packed with design and development artwork and insight into the creation of the film."--A Site Called Fred

"A fantastic companion book to a fantastic movie...The Art of Zootopia is such a treat in the way that it not only revisits the movie's delightfully heartwarming characters and fantastic art, but gives us an engaging look at what went into the making of Zootopia. The book starts with author Jessica Julius describing the movie's original story pitch - a 1960s spy story - and how it evolved over four years into the modern day tale of underdogs, prejudice, and fighting for justice for all. She gives us the scoop on how the characters were developed (balancing a feminine yet tough, naïve yet sharp, optimistic yet challenged bunny cop isn't so easy!), shows us amazing "sets" I don't even remember in the fast-moving film, and she lets us in on all kinds of fun details, like the fact that it took eight months to get the various animals' fur just right (color, texture, and direction of fur growth takes more contemplation than I realized). We are also privy to many sketches and scenes that were eventually cut from the film...The Art of Zootopia is both a captivating companion book to the movie, as well as a stand-alone coffee table book that doesn't need any knowledge of the movie to be appreciated." --Wink Books

"If you liked Zootopia and (like me) you love seeing what goes into making a movie, you'll love this book. It's filled with concept art and stories about how the movie came to be: for instance, it started off as a spy caper featuring a bunny spy. There's so much thought that went into the design of everything from buildings to vehicles to clothing, and this book gives you the opportunity to get a closer look at it all. There's a chapter on each of the sections of Zootopia, like Tundratown and Little Rodentia-perfect for poring over those blink-and-you-missed-it details from the film." --Geek Dad

About the Author

Jessica Julius is a creative executive at Walt Disney Animation Studios, where she has worked on such films as Frozen, Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, The Princess and the Frog, and Bolt. She lives in Los Angeles.

Byron Howard, director of Zootopia, joined the Walt Disney Animation Studios in 1994 and has served as an animator, designer, and supervising animator for such classic films as Mulan and Lilo & Stitch. He directed Bolt and Tangled.

Rich Moore, director of Zootopia, directed 2012's Oscar®-nominated feature Wreck-It Ralph.

The daughter of a wealthy railway magnate, Paula Power inherits De Stancy Castle, an ancient castle in need of modernization. She commissions George Somerset, a young architect, to undertake the work. Somerset falls in love with Paula but she, the Laodicean of the title, is torn between his admiration and that of Captain De Stancy, whose old-world romanticism contrasts with Somerset's forward-looking attitude. Paula's vacillation, however, is not only romantic. Her ambiguity regarding religion, politics and social progress is a reflection of the author's own. This new Penguin Classics edition of Hardy's text contains an introduction and notes that illuminate and clarify these themes, and draws parallels between the text and the author's life and views.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas Hardy, was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.

While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Hardy's poetry, though prolific, was not as well received during his lifetime. It was rediscovered in the 1950s, when Hardy's poetry had a significant influence on the Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Philip Larkin.

Most of his fictional works – initially published as serials in magazines – were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. They explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances. Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Psychedelic Experience : A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary

“It is a book for the living as well as for the dying.”—Lama Govinda

We are in the midst of a powerful psychedelic renaissance. After four decades of hibernation, the promise of the psychoactive ’60s—that deeper self-awareness, achieved through reality-bending substances and practices, will lead to greater external harmony—is again gaining a major following. The signs are everywhere, from the influence of today’s preeminent psychedelic thinker Daniel Pinchbeck, to the renewed interest in the legacy of Terence McKenna, and to the upsurge of collective, inclusive (and overtly tripped-out) cultural phenomena like the spectacle of Burning Man.

The Psychedelic Experience, created in the movement’s early years by the prophetic shaman-professors Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), is a foundational text that serves as a model and a guide for all subsequent mind-expanding inquiries. In this wholly unique book, the authors provide an interpretation of an ancient sacred manuscript, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, from a psychedelic perspective. The Psychedelic Experience describes their discoveries in broadening spiritual consciousness through a combination of Tibetan meditation techniques and psychotropic substances.

As sacred as the text it reflects, The Psychedelic Experience is a guidebook to the wilderness of mind and an indispensable resource from the founding fathers of psychedelia.

He’s an American legend, a straight-shooting businessman who brought Chrysler back from the brink and in the process became a media celebrity, newsmaker, and a man many had urged to run for president.

The son of Italian immigrants, Lee Iacocca rose spectacularly through the ranks of Ford Motor Company to become its president, only to be toppled eight years later in a power play that should have shattered him. But Lee Iacocca didn’t get mad, he got even. He led a battle for Chrysler’s survival that made his name a symbol of integrity, know-how, and guts for millions of Americans.

In his classic hard-hitting style, he tells us how he changed the automobile industry in the 1960s by creating the phenomenal Mustang. He goes behind the scenes for a look at Henry Ford’s reign of intimidation and manipulation. He recounts the miraculous rebirth of Chrysler from near bankruptcy to repayment of its $1.2 billion government loan so early that Washington didn’t know how to cash the check.

NOW A NEW YORK TIMES, PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, INDIEBOUND, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, CHRONICLE HERALD, SALISBURY POST, GUELPH MERCURY TRIBUNE,AND BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER | NAMED A BEST/MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2017 BY: The Washington Post • Bustle • Men's Journal • The Chicago Reader • StarTribune • Blavity • The Guardian • NBC New York's Bill's Books • Kirkus • Essence

“One of the most frank and searing discussions on race ... a deeply serious, urgent book, which should take its place in the tradition of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and King's Why We Can't Wait." ―The New York Times Book Review

Toni Morrison hails Tears We Cannot Stop as "Elegantly written and powerful in several areas: moving personal recollections; profound cultural analysis; and guidance for moral redemption. A work to relish." 

Stephen King says: "Here’s a sermon that’s as fierce as it is lucid…If you’re black, you’ll feel a spark of recognition in every paragraph. If you’re white, Dyson tells you what you need to know―what this white man needed to know, at least. This is a major achievement. I read it and said amen."

Short, emotional, literary, powerful―Tears We Cannot Stop is the book that all Americans who care about the current and long-burning crisis in race relations will want to read.

As the country grapples with racist division at a level not seen since the 1960s, one man's voice soars above the rest with conviction and compassion. In his 2016 New York Times op-ed piece "Death in Black and White," Michael Eric Dyson moved a nation. Now he continues to speak out in Tears We Cannot Stop―a provocative and deeply personal call for change. Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.

"The time is at hand for reckoning with the past, recognizing the truth of the present, and moving together to redeem the nation for our future. If we don't act now, if you don't address race immediately, there very well may be no future."

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America’s affluent suburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first-person confession is narrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who sees himself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding around him. 

Fascinated by yet alienated from his attractive, self-absorbed parents and the privileged world they inhabit, Richard incisively analyzes his own mismanaged childhood, his pretentious private schooling, his “successful-executive” father, and his elusive mother. In an act of defiance and desperation, eleven-year-old Richard strikes out in a way that presages the violence of ever-younger Americans in the turbulent decades to come.

A National Book Award finalist, Expensive People is a stunning combination of social satire and gothic horror. “You cannot put this novel away after you have opened it,” said The Detroit News. “This is that kind of book–hypnotic, fascinating, and electrifying.”

Expensive People is the second novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, them, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.

Praise for The Wonderland Quartet, four early novels by Joyce Carol Oates

A Garden of Earthly Delights
Expensive People
them
Wonderland

"Protean and prodigious are surely the words that describe Ms. Oates. From the very beginning, as these impressive and diverse novels make clear, her talents and interests and strengths have never found comfort in fashionable restraint. She's sought, instead, to do it all -- to face and brilliantly, inventively transact and give shape to as much of experience as possible, as if by no other means is a useful and persuasive gesture of moral imagination even conceivable. For us readers these are valuable books." --Richard Ford

"These four novels reveal Oates' powers of observation and invention, her meticulous social documentation joined to her genius for forging unforgettable myths. She is one of the handful of great American novelists of the last hundred years. " --Edmund White

"This rich, kaleidoscopic suite of novels displays the young Joyce Carol Oates exercising her formidable artistic powers to portray a turbulent twentieth-century America. They offer the reader a singular opportunity to experience some of Oates's best writing and to witness her development, novel by novel, into one of our finest contemporary writers." --Greg Johnson, author of Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates 

"As a young writer, Joyce Carol Oates published four remarkable novels, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), them (1969), and Wonderland(1971). They were all nominated for the National Book Award, and Oates won the award for them in 1970....Reprinting the series in modern paperback editions nearly forty years after their composition allows us a new perspective on their collective meaning and illuminates their place in Oates's overall career...The Wonderland Quartet, written in the "white heat" of youthful imagination and fervor, remains not only relevant but prophetic about the widening social and economic gulf in American society, the self-destructive violence of political extremism, and the terrifying hubris of science and technology. Bringing to life an unforgettable range of men and women, the Wonderland Quartet offers a compelling introduction to a protean and prodigious contemporary artist." -- Elaine Showalter, from her introduction, which appears in all four of these new Modern Library editions

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. The bestselling author of the novels We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, she has written numerous works of fiction as well as poetry, essays, criticism, and plays.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. Spanning from the Great Depression to the turbulent Vietnam War era, Wonderland is the epic account of Jesse Vogel, a boy who emerged from a family tragedy with his life spared but his world torn apart. Orphaned after watching his father murder his entire family, Jesse embarks on a personal odyssey that takes him from a Dickensian foster home to college and graduate school to the pinnacle of the medical profession. As an adult, Jesse must summon the strength to reach across the “generation gap” and rescue his endangered teenaged daughter, who has fallen into the drug-infused 1960s counterculture. 

Hailed by Library Journal as “the greatest of Oates’s novels,” Wonderland is the capstone of a magnificent literary excursion that plunges beneath the glossy surface of American life. 

Wonderland is the final novel in Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and them, are also available from the Modern Library.

From Publishers Weekly

Our review of Oates's 1971 masterpiece starring Jesse Vogel, reissued here with a new afterword, concluded: " 'Wonderland' is not a place from which one escapes unscathed but for those who care about the best in American fiction it must be visited.' "
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. As powerful and relevant today as it on its initial publication, them chronicles the tumultuous lives of a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, from the 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her “potent, life-gripping imagination,” Oates traces the aspirations and struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who is filled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequent destinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight to survive in a world of violence and danger.

Winner of the National Book Award, them is an enthralling novel about love, class, race, and the inhumanity of urban life. It is, raves The New York Times, “a superbly accomplished vision.”

Them is the third novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.

Winner of the National Book Award and in print for more than thirty years, them ranks as one of the most masterly portraits of postwar America ever written by a novelist. Including several new pages and text substantially revised and updated by the author, this Modern Library edition is the most current and accurate version available of Oates' seminal work.
A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age sixteen, and her two children, Maureen and Jules, make up Oates' vision of the American fam-ily--broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel's title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans who inhabit the outskirts of society--men and women, mothers and children--whose lives many authors in the 1960s had left unexamined. Alfred Kazin called her subject "the sheer rich chaos of American life." The Nation wrote, "When Miss Oates' potent, life-gripping imagination and her skill at narrative are conjoined, as they are preeminently in them, she is a prodigious writer."
In addition to the text revisions, this--new edition contains an Afterword by the author and a new Introduction by Greg Johnson, Oates' biographer and the author of two monographs on the work of Joyce Carol Oates.

The story of the unlikely friendship between the two physicists who fundamentally recast the notion of time and history

"[Paul Halpern] is at his best when explaining concepts of physics."―Wall Street Journal

"Feynman was a doer, Wheeler a dreamer. So Paul Halpern aptly describes them in The Quantum Labyrinth, his book about their lives, work and friendship, and the virtues of their complementary styles....Feynman was one of the greatest intuitive problem-solvers in twentieth-century physics, a world-class doer. But I suspect that many readers will take most pleasure from the account of Wheeler's inspired dreaming."―Nature

In 1939, Richard Feynman, a brilliant graduate of MIT, arrived in John Wheeler's Princeton office to report for duty as his teaching assistant. A lifelong friendship and enormously productive collaboration was born, despite sharp differences in personality. The soft-spoken Wheeler, though conservative in appearance, was a raging nonconformist full of wild ideas about the universe. The boisterous Feynman was a cautious physicist who believed only what could be tested. Yet they were complementary spirits. Their collaboration led to a complete rethinking of the nature of time and reality. It enabled Feynman to show how quantum reality is a combination of alternative, contradictory possibilities, and inspired Wheeler to develop his landmark concept of wormholes, portals to the future and past. Together, Feynman and Wheeler made sure that quantum physics would never be the same again.

"Paul Halpern brings the full story of these men to life in a brilliant way...Feynman's contributions to the development of quantum field theory...are not only covered, they're explained in gloriously in-depth and simultaneously comprehensible fashion...Well-researched, well-written, and highly accessible."
―Forbes.com/Starts With a Bang 

"[The Quantum Labyrinth] provides a portrait of a rather neglected era in physics. Following the twin revolutions of quantum theory and relativity in the early 1900s, the 1940s to the late 1960s can appear like a time when already challenging ideas became all but incomprehensible beyond the academy. But Halpern shows that it was every bit as significant as the pre-war period that looks now to be an age almost of gods and legends."―Physics World

"Excellent...[Halpern] brings onto the stage two of the key developers of the modern quantum theory."―Nature Physics

Rainbow Body: The Life and Realization of a Tibetan Yogin, Togden Ugyen Tendzin, presents the remarkable life story of Togden Ugyen Tendzin (1888–1962), a Tibetan yogin who in death achieved the “rainbow body,” the release of the physical body in the essence of the five elements and one of the highest spiritual attainments of Dzogchen, recognized as the supreme level of Tibetan Buddhism. His nephew, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, one of the greatest living masters of Dzogchen, composed the book from his own recollections of his uncle as well as direct quotes from talks with the great yogin himself and his disciple Sala Karma Samten. The book traces the yogin’s childhood struggles, the circumstances that led him to his teacher, the eminent Adzom Drugpa, and his difficult path to self-realization. Finally, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu relates the story of Ugyen Tendzin’s death during imprisonment by the Chinese, when witnesses discovered that though his sheepskin robe still sat upright, his body was gone—a testament to its having dissolved into the rainbow body.

Review

"Chögyal Namkhai Norbu is one of the greatest Tibetan meditation masters and scholars teaching in the West."
—Lama Surya Das, author of Awakening the Buddha Within and Awakening the Buddhist Heart, and the founder of the Dzogchen Foundation in Massachusetts

About the Author

Born in Eastern Tibet in 1938, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu is an internationally known Dzogchen Buddhist teacher and author. The direct descendant of the first Dzogchen Tibetan master of Tibet, Norbu spent his childhood receiving many teachings from masters of various traditions. In the 1960s he was invited to teach in Italy. During his career he wrote many books on Tibetan culture and Dzogchen Buddhism. He is the founder of two nonprofit organizations including the Shang Shung Institute, which is dedicated to the preservation of Tibetan culture.

The Western Land is legendary Beat writer William S. Burrough’s profound, revealing, and often astonishing meditation on morality, loneliness, life, and death -- a Book of the Dead for the nuclear age. 

"Burrough's visionary power, his comic genius, and his unerring ability to crack the codes that make up the life of this century are undimished." -- J.G. Ballard, Washington Post Book World

From Publishers Weekly

"The trilogy that began with Cities of the Red Night and continued with The Place of Dead Roads is completed here, and the result is a divine comedy," wrote PW of this "remarkable achievement," concerning the search for eternal rest that is symbolized by the Western Lands of Egyptian mythology.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, satirist, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author who wrote in the paranoid fiction genre, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century". His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.

He was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence, but did not begin publicizing his writing until his thirties. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. In 1942 Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II, but was turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and Navy, after which he picked up the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of which grew into the Beat Generation, which was later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture.

Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris and Tangier in Morocco, as well as from his travels in the South American Amazon. Burroughs accidentally killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City, and was consequently convicted of manslaughter. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a highly controversial work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964).

In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift", a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".

Burroughs had one child, William S. Burroughs, Jr. (1947–1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. William Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

The Western Land is legendary Beat writer William S. Burrough’s profound, revealing, and often astonishing meditation on morality, loneliness, life, and death -- a Book of the Dead for the nuclear age. 

"Burrough's visionary power, his comic genius, and his unerring ability to crack the codes that make up the life of this century are undimished." -- J.G. Ballard, Washington Post Book World

From Publishers Weekly

"The trilogy that began with Cities of the Red Night and continued with The Place of Dead Roads is completed here, and the result is a divine comedy," wrote PW of this "remarkable achievement," concerning the search for eternal rest that is symbolized by the Western Lands of Egyptian mythology.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, satirist, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author who wrote in the paranoid fiction genre, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century". His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.

He was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence, but did not begin publicizing his writing until his thirties. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. In 1942 Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II, but was turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and Navy, after which he picked up the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of which grew into the Beat Generation, which was later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture.

Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris and Tangier in Morocco, as well as from his travels in the South American Amazon. Burroughs accidentally killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City, and was consequently convicted of manslaughter. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a highly controversial work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964).

In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift", a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".

Burroughs had one child, William S. Burroughs, Jr. (1947–1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. William Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

* Hailed by Edmund White as "a brilliant new novel" on the cover of the New York Times Book Review
* Lauded by Jonathan Franzen, E. L. Doctorow and many others
 
From a global literary star comes a prize-winning tour de force – an intimate portrayal of the drug wars in Colombia.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez has been hailed not only as one of South America’s greatest literary stars, but also as one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. In this gorgeously wrought, award-winning novel, Vásquez confronts the history of his home country, Colombia.

In the city of Bogotá, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobar’s Medellín cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombia’s streets and in the skies above. Back then, Antonio witnessed a friend’s murder, an event that haunts him still. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friend’s family have been shaped by his country’s recent violent past. His journey leads him all the way back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change: a time before narco-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare.

Vásquez is “one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature,” according to Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, and The Sound of Things Falling is his most personal, most contemporary novel to date, a masterpiece that takes his writing—and will take his literary star—even higher.

New York Times best-selling author and Emmy Award–winning news anchor Chris Hayes argues that there are really two Americas: a Colony and a Nation.

“Hayes’s forceful analysis...compel[s] readers to wrestle with some very tough questions about the nature of American democracy and its deep roots in racism, inequality and punishment.””
- Khalil Gibran Muhammad, New York Times Book Review

America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, yet nearly every empirical measure―wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation―reveals that racial inequality has barely improved since 1968, when Richard Nixon became our first “law and order” president. With the clarity and originality that distinguished his prescient bestseller, Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes upends our national conversation on policing and democracy in a book of wide-ranging historical, social, and political analysis.

Hayes contends our country has fractured in two: the Colony and the Nation. In the Nation, we venerate the law. In the Colony, we obsess over order, fear trumps civil rights, and aggressive policing resembles occupation. A Colony in a Nation explains how a country founded on justice now looks like something uncomfortably close to a police state. How and why did Americans build a system where conditions in Ferguson and West Baltimore mirror those that sparked the American Revolution?

A Colony in a Nation examines the surge in crime that began in the 1960s and peaked in the 1990s, and the unprecedented decline that followed. Drawing on close-hand reporting at flashpoints of racial conflict, as well as deeply personal experiences with policing, Hayes explores cultural touchstones, from the influential “broken windows” theory to the “squeegee men” of late-1980s Manhattan, to show how fear causes us to make dangerous and unfortunate choices, both in our society and at the personal level. With great empathy, he seeks to understand the challenges of policing communities haunted by the omnipresent threat of guns. Most important, he shows that a more democratic and sympathetic justice system already exists―in a place we least suspect.

A Colony in a Nation is an essential book―searing and insightful―that will reframe our thinking about law and order in the years to come.

“A Colony in a Nation is a highly original analysis of America’s arbitrary and erratic criminal justice system. Indeed, by Hayes's lights, the system is not erratic at all―it treats one group of Americans as citizens, and another as the colonized. This is an essential and ground-breaking text in the effort to understand how American criminal justice went so badly awry.”
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me

On a spring day in 1968 the men of Golf Company, Second Battalion, 9th Marines, walked into a disastrous firefight along the Quang Tri River.  Only half the company walked away.

In one of the most powerful books to come out of Vietnam, former Marine and New York Times columnist Michael Norman explores the extraordinary bonds that form between men in war, as he tracks down and reunites ten men who served with him in Golf Company.  In Vietnam they shared the intimacy of war:  the fear, the sacrifice, the camaraderie set amidst blood and death.  Back home they were on their own, pursued by their own injuries and memories--in Texas suburbs, the hard-scrabble Oklahoma Hills, the swirl of New York, the elegance of London.  Yet a fierce attachment linked them forever.

Beyond the violence and brutality of war, These Good Men is the story of what happened to these men in combat and in the twenty years after.  It is the story of the journey of faith and 50,000 miles that brought them together again--at an emotional reunion nearly two decades after they left Vietnam.  Most of all, it is a moving testament to one generation's loss, resilience, loyalty, and love.

A Crime in the Neighborhood, told with the deadpan humor of Nick Hornby-a wonderful novel about a boy genius whose brother may, or may not, be a murderer.

It's 1967. Jack Witcher is a twelve-year-old boy genius living in a Virginia suburb at an address the entire neighborhood avoids. Jack's father has lost his job-again-and he's starting fights with other fathers. Jack's mother, sweet but painfully ugly, works as a cashier at a local market. Jack's older brother is a long-haired, pot-smoking hippie.

If all of that isn't bad enough, Jack's brother suddenly becomes the main suspect in the disappearance of the town's golden boy. And to make matters even worse, Jack is in love with the missing boy's sister, Myra. Mr. Gladstein, the town jeweler and solitary Jew, is Jack's only friend; together, they scheme to win Jack Myra's love. But to do that, Jack must overcome the prejudices, both the town's and his own, about himself and his family.

Review

"Wetta's debut portrays the fictional El Dorado Hills in Virginia during the late 1960s with Southern gothic flair. ... At turns unsparing, tender, and disturbing when it comes to rivalry and the nuances of love versus obligation, this is no typical bildungsroman. That Jack emerges from a crucible determined never to look back is unsurprising; it is the path leading him to this conclusion that is intelligently, wonderfully conceived." — Publisher's Weekly, starred review.

"If Jack's in Love is a moving portrait of a specific time, family and town, but also a universal story of growing up and coming to terms with the people-and places-that raise us, told with all the humor, truth and urgency of its teenage hero. It may have taken the first half of his life to write, but Wetta's touching novel was well worth the wait." — BookPage

"...[Y]ou should read this wonderfully written marvel of a book: a work both gripping and hilarious, joyous and heartbreakingly bittersweet." — The Wall Street Journal

"The language here is wonderful. . . . downright funny." — School Library Journal

". . . terrific . . . raw and complicated . . . keeps us gripped until the end." — The Daily Beast

About the Author

Stephen Wetta is a native of Richmond, Virginia. He received his Bachelor's Degree from VCU and received Ph. D. at New York University. Stephen is currently an English professor at Hunter College. If Jack’s in Love is his first novel.

A bawdy love story set on the Texas plains. Longhorns ranges from hard riding action and sex as hot as the blazing Texas sun to lyrical descriptions of the Old West.

From Publishers Weekly

Gay pulp veteran Banis's pseudonymous soft core novels of the '60s are hailed as "foundational" to gay literature in Michael Bronski's fulsome introduction to this new novel, Banis's "re-emergence." Bronski goes on to call this Western a "response" to Brokeback Mountain, and a "queer meditation" on the cowboy as American icon. Forty-year-old Les, the trail boss of the Double H Ranch, works for its beloved chatelaine, the elderly widow Miz Cameron, "a little dumpling of a woman, dressed in black." Les rides herd over a crew of rowdy cowboys, roping steer and sleeping around prairie campfires. Young drifter Buck, part Nasoni Indian, catches up to them on a roundup. After proving himself an expert sharpshooter, rider and roper, Buck celebrates his initiation to the group by luring one of their number, Red, into his bedroll. But Buck is really after Les, sandy-haired and significantly endowed. Banis provides a well-researched, detailed panorama of wrangling steer and the narrowing of the American Southwest, but his characters fail to convince and his sex scenes are pallid. Buck unleashes a stream of single-entendre wherever he goes (it feels good to be "rode hard"), and after the first 10 pages, it becomes tiresome.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Victor Banis headed two small publishing related corporations in the sixties and seventies, producing packaged books and magazines, along the way he launched the careers of underground photographers Pat Rocco and Tom de Simone. He was an early rabble rouser for gay rights and freedom of the press, and went through a major obscenity trial in the 1960s which advanced the cause of freedom in publishing. Drewey Wayne Gunn (The Gay Sleuth in Print and Film) has called him a "national treasure," and Michael Bronski dedicated his book Pulp Friction to him. Social historians have credited his early gay books, The Why Not and The Man From C.A.M.P. as launching the gay publishing revolution of the sixties and seventies. He is the author of over 100 books, and his verses and shorter pieces have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens had recently adopted his famed pen name of "Mark Twain" shortly before he landed in the Hawaiian Islands in 1866 to spend four months as a correspondent for the most prominent newspaper on the Pacific Coast. When, in 1872, he needed to supplement the chapters in his personal narrative Roughing It, he drew upon his twenty-five articles for the Sacramento Union and his personal notes to supply the additional recollections here presented.

The views of the "Sandwich Islands" reported by America's most famous lecturer and beloved novelist in 1866 may differ somewhat from those of the visitor of the 1990s. "The Huckleberry Finn of foreign correspondents," however, gives many faithful accounts of old Honolulu, the nobility and their ceremonies, the somnolent islands of Maui, the native sport of surfriding, the City of Refuge on the Kona Coast, and the active volcano of Kilauea. And the light touch of the great humorist is seldom missing.

The story of Stax Records unfolds like a Greek tragedy. A white brother and sister build a monument to racial harmony in blighted south Memphis during the civil rights movement. Their success soon pits the siblings against each other, and the brother abandons his sister for a visionary African-American partner. Under integrated leadership, Stax explodes as a national player until, Icarus-like, the heights they achieve result in their tragic demise. They fall, losing everything, and the sanctuary they created is torn to the ground. A generation later, Stax is rebuilt brick by brick and is once again transforming disenfranchised youth into stellar young musicians.

Set in the world of 1960s and '70s soul music, Respect Yourself is a character-driven story of racial integration, and then of black power and economic independence. It's about music and musicians--Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, the Staple Singers, and Booker T. and the M.G.'s, Stax's interracial house band. It's about a small independent company's struggle to survive in an increasingly conglomerate-oriented world. And always at the center of the story is Memphis, Tennessee, an explosive city struggling through volatile years. Told by one of our leading music chroniclers, Respect Yourself is the book to own about one of our most treasured cultural institutions and the city that created it.

This epic tale of loyalty and betrayal spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. This is the novel le Carr fans have been waiting for, a brilliant, ferocious, heartbreaking work for the ages.

From Publishers Weekly

Le Carr‚ may have changed publishers, but his latest novel remains as resolutely up-to-date as ever. In place of the old Cold War games, his recent books have dealt with the depredations of international arms merchants and the impact of predatory drug manufacturers on the Third World. Now his eloquent and white-hot indignation is turned on what he sees as a duplicitous war in Iraq and the devious means employed to tarnish those who oppose it. The friends of the title are two beautifully realized characters, both idealists in their very different ways. Ted Mundy, the bighearted son of a pukka Indian Army officer, leads a life in which his inborn kindliness and lack of self-regard are turned to what he sees as good causes. With Sasha, the crippled son of an old Nazi who turns bitterly against that past only to be tormented by the rise of a new brutalism in East Germany, he forms a double-agent partnership that feeds British intelligence during the Cold War years. With the collapse of the Soviet system, Ted is at loose ends, trying both to make ends meet as a cheery tour guide for English-speaking visitors to Mad Ludwig's castle in Bavaria and to support his Muslim wife and her small son in Munich. Suddenly he hears again from Sasha, who tells him that a mysterious benefactor wishes to enlist his services as teacher and translator to counter the widespread propaganda on behalf of an Iraqi war, and he is inflamed once more with a desire to help. The grim consequences are spelled out by le Carr‚ with a deadly fury that is startling in the context of his usual urbanity. With a largely German setting that recalls some of his earliest books, as well as the same embracing clarity of vision about human motives and failings that gleams through all his best work, this is a book that offers a bitter warning even as it delivers immense reading pleasure.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

For this book, Paul Krassner contacted 250 friends and acquaintances to cull stories. These true tales, ranging from funny to bizarre to poignant, include "How the Yippies Mailed 30,000 Joints to Perfect Strangers," "The Bust at Ken Kesey's Place," and "The Acid Trip of a Death Row Prisoner."

Paul Krassner is an author, journalist, stand-up comedian, and the founder, editor, and a contributor to the The Realist. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies. He lives in Southern California.

In 1968 University of California Press published an unusual manuscript by an anthropology student named Carlos Castaneda. The Teachings of Don Juan enthralled a generation of seekers dissatisfied with the limitations of the Western worldview. Castaneda's now classic book remains controversial for the alternative way of seeing that it presents and the revolution in cognition it demands. Whether read as ethnographic fact or creative fiction, it is the story of a remarkable journey that has left an indelible impression on the life of more than a million readers around the world.

Born in 1925 in Peru, anthropologist Carlos Castaneda wrote a total of 15 books, which sold 8 million copies worldwide and were published in 17 different languages. In his writing, Castaneda describes the teaching of Don Juan, a Yaqui sorcerer and shaman. His works helped define the 1960s and usher in the New Age movement. Even after his mysterious death in California in 1998, his books continue to inspire and influence his many devoted fans.

In 1968 University of California Press published an unusual manuscript by an anthropology student named Carlos Castaneda. The Teachings of Don Juan enthralled a generation of seekers dissatisfied with the limitations of the Western worldview. Castaneda's now classic book remains controversial for the alternative way of seeing that it presents and the revolution in cognition it demands. Whether read as ethnographic fact or creative fiction, it is the story of a remarkable journey that has left an indelible impression on the life of more than a million readers around the world.

Born in 1925 in Peru, anthropologist Carlos Castaneda wrote a total of 15 books, which sold 8 million copies worldwide and were published in 17 different languages. In his writing, Castaneda describes the teaching of Don Juan, a Yaqui sorcerer and shaman. His works helped define the 1960s and usher in the New Age movement. Even after his mysterious death in California in 1998, his books continue to inspire and influence his many devoted fans.