Visible Voice Books New Releases

New Arrivals: Summer 2008

2008-06-20T20:01:00.000-07:00

How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead
by Ariel Gore

Despite the gimmicky nature of this title, Ariel Gore takes a tough love approach to developing your craft that dispenses with all of the usual trite suggestions. Comfort spaces and careful selection of your paper and pens are irrelevant to her DIY ethos. She points out the white elephant in teh room, asserting that nobody really cares how talented a writer you might be until you put in the leg work to get yourself published. With a few of the standard devices (just write, all the time) mixed into her gritty approach to guerrilla marketing, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead could possibly be one of the most useful tools an aspiring author could come across.

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Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook
by Isa Chanda Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero

Chefs MOskowitz and Romero present a delicious array of vegan cuisine without falling back on imitation meats or substitutions. Rather, they uphold the virtues of the vegetable in its own right, with a delectable collection of dishes from breakfast to dessert. Additionally, the first half of the book includes more generalized instructions on vegetable prep and vegan practices, to get you started with yoru own concoctions. Our cooking section has undergone a bit of a vegan renaissance just in time for the growing season. Come on in and check it out.

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The Plague of Doves
by Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich's North Dakota has the hallucinogenic domesticity of Stanley Spencer's Cookham. In her 12 novels, she has returned again and again to the beloved and familiar landscape she grew up in, and the Native American reservation is lit up by her fevered imagination. This is a land where God and a liver-eating cannibal wrangle over the bodies of their prey and where young lovers melt into walls of doves.
The raucous and apocalyptic plague of birds of the title provides the background to Erdrich's bizarre and beautiful story. As the Catholics frighten away the doves with Hail Marys, the lovers Mooshum and Junesse come together in a meeting that later furnishes their granddaughter Evelina with proof that 'our family has maintained something of an historical reputation for deathless romantic encounters'.
This is a book that never lets us forget the sinewy, often tortuous rhythms of a culture that lives through words, passing on talismanic tales across the generations. At its heart is the dark story of the 1911 murder of a white family and the racist lynching of a group of Native American scapegoats, including Mooshum, whose escape from death troubles the consciences of his offspring. Erdrich weaves the politics of the encounter into a story that we come to understand layer by layer, with Evelina's own tale told in conjunction with the descendants of the lynchers and with the now elderly surviving baby of the murdered white family.

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Belong to Me
by Marisa de los Santos

Everyone has secrets. Some we keep to protect ourselves, others we keep to protect those we love.
A devoted city dweller, Cornelia Brown surprised no one more than herself when she was gripped by the sudden, inescapable desire to leave urban life behind and head for an idyllic suburb. Though she knows she and her beloved husband, Teo, have made the right move, she approaches her new life with trepidation and struggles to forge friendships in her new home. Cornelia's mettle is quickly tested by judgmental neighbor Piper Truitt. Perfectly manicured, impeccably dressed, and possessing impossible standards, Piper is the embodiment of everything Cornelia feared she would find in suburbia. A saving grace soon appears in the form of Lake. Over a shared love of literature and old movies, Cornelia develops an instant bond with this warm yet elusive woman who has also recently arrived in town, ostensibly to send her perceptive and brilliant son, Dev, to a school for the gifted.

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Armageddon in Retrospect
by Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by Gris Grimly

A combination of Neil Gaiman's incredible imagination and Gris Grimly's wonderful illustrations makes this book a winner. Two children and their pet gazelle go adventuring in a boat, ('B is for Boat, pushing off in the dark'), and enter the frightening dark world of pirates and monsters.
Each letter of the alphabet pushes the children further into the sewers to face danger and fear ('F is for Fear and its many devices').
This is certainly not an alphabet for the small child but has been written for an older audience that likes to be thrilled by horror and mayhem. Grimly's illustrations are intricate and detailed and the reader will find much to pore over time and time again.

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Sway
by Sandy Amazeen

Lazar takes three of the best known 60’s icons; the Stones, Charles Manson, Kenneth Anger and packages them into a story of the times which 20-somethings will likely fail to appreciate. Focusing on Brian Jones during the first years of the Stones success, Bobby Beausoliel who, under Manson’s influence, committed the first murder and the roles they played in Anger’s acclaimed avant-garde movie, Invocation of My Demon Brother this gritty rehash plunges the reader into the drug culture of the time. Mick Jagger who wrote the lyrics for Anger’s film and Keith Richards figure in as they struggle with the seductions of sudden popularity while honing their musical skills and feeling betrayed by Jones. Through it all, it is Anger’s story that binds the characters together against a backdrop of the Vietnam War and Manson family killings told with crystal clarity. Although Lazar's recreation of the 60's does an admirable job of capturing the feel of the time, this is likely to be lost on those who didn't live through that era.

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Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic
by Jim DeRogatis

Bangs, who died in 1982 of what a New York medical examiner called a Darvon overdose (though some have other theories), casts a long shadow on rock & roll. He is arguably the only rock critic, dead or alive, whose life and achievements warrant a book-length examination. Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic by Chicago journalist Jim DeRogatis, is a warts-and-all look at this woefully self-destructive genius. The basic facts: Bangs, the product of a troubled home, grew up in El Cajon, CA, gravitating early to beat prose, jazz, and rock (not to mention drugs and alcohol). He was a shoe salesman when he began freelancing for Rolling Stone in 1969, but by 1971 he'd become the star staffer at Creem (''America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine''). He continued to write prolifically for numerous publications until his death. A wordsmith of uncommon eloquence and endless passion, he documented — and helped shape — both heavy metal and punk; his work (some of which can be found in the posthumous collection, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung) continues to inspire admirers and imitators.
As DeRogatis makes painfully clear, Bangs' personal life was a shambles. A world-class substance abuser, Bangs once called burning out ''the central heroic myth of the sixties,'' coining a credo — ''live fast, be bad, get messy, die young'' — and fulfilling it. The final chapters of Blurt, which document his free fall into an alcoholic abyss, are as riveting as the last third of Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas (and more depressing). DeRogatis wisely offsets the horror of Bangs' final years by including a postscript by the great man himself, a howlingly funny 1974 essay called ''How to Be a Rock Critic'' that should be required reading for anyone contemplating a career in music journalism.

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YOUNG STALIN By Simon Sebag Montefiore

2008-01-08T13:39:00.001-08:00

What makes a Stalin? Was he illegitimate? Was his mother whore or saint? Was Stalin a Tsarist agent or Lenin's chief gangster? Was his most notorious heist planned during his stay in London? Was he to blame for his wife's death? If he really missed the 1917 Revolution, how did he emerge so powerful?

Born in poverty, scarred by his upbringing, exceptional in his studies, this charismatic but dangerous boy was hailed as a romantic poet and trained as a priest but found his mission as fanatical revolutionary. He became the mastermind of bank-robberies, protection-rackets, arson, piracy and murder yet he was, uniquely, part-intellectual, part-brigand. Surprisingly, he is also revealed as a scandalously prolific lover, leaving a trail of mistresses (varying from schoolgirls to noblewomen) and illegitimate children.

Here is the arch-conspirator and escape-artist whose brutal ingenuity so impressed Lenin that he made Stalin (with Trotsky) his top henchman. The paranoid underworld of Joseph Conrad-style terrorism was Stalin's natural habitat. Montefiore shows how clannish Caucasian banditry and murderous gangsterism, combined with pitiless ideology, qualified Stalin to dominate the Kremlin – and create the USSR in his flawed image.

Based on massive research and astonishing new evidence in archives from Moscow to Georgia, Young Stalin, companion and prequel to bestselling, prizewinning Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, is a chronicle of the Revolution, a pre-history of the USSR – and a fascinatingly intimate biography: this is how Stalin became Stalin.

MARCO POLO: From Venice To Xanadu By Laurence Bergreen

2008-01-08T13:33:00.000-08:00

As the most celebrated European to explore Asia, Marco Polo was the original global traveler and the earliest bridge between East and West. A universal icon of adventure and discovery, he has inspired six centuries of popular fascination and spurious mythology. Now, from the acclaimed author of Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (“Superb . . . A first-rate historical page turner”—The New York Times)—comes the first fully authoritative biography of one of the most enchanting figures in world history. In this masterly work, Marco Polo’s incredible odyssey—along the Silk Road and through all the fantastic circumstances of his life—is chronicled in sumptuous and illuminating detail.

We meet him as a callow young man, the scion of a wealthy Venetian merchant family, only seventeen when he sets out in 1271 with his father and uncle on their journey to Asia. We see him gain the confidence of Kublai Khan, the world’s most feared and powerful leader, and watch him become a trusted diplomat and intelligence agent in the ruler’s inner circle. We are privy to his far-flung adventures on behalf of the Khan, living among the Mongols and other tribes, and traveling to magical cities, some far advanced over the West. We learn the customs of the Khan’s court, both erotic and mercantile, and Polo’s uncanny ability to adapt to them. We follow him on his journey back to Venice, laden with riches, the latest inventions, and twenty-four years’ worth of extraordinary tales.

And we see his collaboration with the famed writer Rustichello of Pisa, who immediately saw in Polo the story of a lifetime; enlivened by his genius for observation, Polo’s tales needed little embellishment. Recorded by Rustichello as the two languished as prisoners of war in a Genoese jail, the Travels would explode the notion of non-Europeans as untutored savages and stand as the definitive description of China until the nineteenth century.

Drawing on original sources in more than half a dozen languages, and on his own travels along Polo’s route in China and Mongolia, Bergreen explores the lingering controversies surrounding Polo’s legend, settling age-old questions and testing others for significance. Synthesizing history, biography, and travelogue, this is the timely chronicle of a man who extended the boundaries of human knowledge and imagination. Destined to be the definitive account of its subject for decades to come, Marco Polo takes us on a journey to the limits of history—and beyond.

CREEM: America’s Only Rock N’ Roll Magazine By Robert Matheu and Brian J. Bowe

2008-01-08T13:25:00.000-08:00

With raw photographs of rock's greatest stars and insightful prose by the legendary rock journalists who were stars in their own right, CREEM magazine stood at the forefront of youth counterculture from 1969 to 1988 as "America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine." A product of Detroit's revolutionary counterculture, CREEM cultivated an incredibly gifted staff of iconoclastic scribes, editors, photographers, and graphic artists whose work continues to resonate today, including: Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches, and a not-so-famous Cameron Crowe. They invented a raucous new form of journalism, where the writing and photographs were as much an expression of rock 'n' roll as the music itself. CREEM embraced and abused the best and the worst of the era: MC5, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, the Faces, Lou Reed, the Stooges, T.Rex, Kiss, Mott the Hoople, the Who, the New York Dolls, Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, the Ramones, Cheap Trick, the Clash, and Van Halen, among many others.

Now the Mouth of the Motor City presents a retrospective of the beautiful haze that was rock's golden age—from the end of the hippie days through glam and punk and into '80s metal. Featuring the best of the magazine's vast archives of photos, illustrations, and articles, CREEM is the authentic rock 'n' roll experience—written for fanatics by fanatics.

LAURA WARHOLIC or, The Sexual Intellectual By Alexander Theroux

2008-01-08T13:21:00.000-08:00

In his first novel in nearly twenty years, Alexander Theroux, National Book Award Nominee, returns with a compendious satire, a bold and inquisitorial circuit-breaking examination of love and hate, of rejection and forgiveness, of trust and romantic disappointment, of the terrors of contemporary life. Eugene Eyestones, an erudite sex columnist for a Boston cultural magazine, becomes enmeshed in the messy life of a would-be artist named Laura Warholic, who, repulsing and fascinating him at the same time, becomes a mirror in which he not only sees himself but through which he is forced to face his own demons. Not only does she inadvertently supply him with material for his columns, but she exemplifies all that Eugene considers wrong with contemporary America (of which the publishing profession and its recognizable denizens serves as a microcosm) — a garish and dunce-filled Babylon that Theroux scorches with inventive and relentless satire. Nostalgic for the old days and old manners, a way of life lost to grace, loving from afar a mysterious beauty named Rapunzel Wisht, Eugene fights against the rising tide of stupidity, focusing on Laura in the hope that by saving her he can validate his ethical beliefs. But feckless Laura and the colorful but bizarre cast of characters surrounding Eugene — brilliant bigots, nihilists, Generation-X slackers and zanies of all sexual persuasions — threaten to pull him under, leading to the novel's unforgettable conclusion, a climax of betrayal and redemption of Dostoevskyan power. As in all of Theroux's works, his maximalist and pyrotechnic prose style and searching intellect are the chief attractions, capable of outrageous comedy, nuanced philosophical discussions, winsome love scenes, flame-throwing tirades, subtle theological musings, and an unflinching genius for a profound if merciless look at the human condition. Horrifying and hilarious, damning and demanding, Laura Warholic in its uncompromising power will surely be one of the most talked-about novels of the season, and for years to come.

A PERFECT MESS: The Hidden Benefits Of Disorder By Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman

2008-01-08T13:00:00.000-08:00

Do you have a messy desk? Welcome to the club--most people do. And if you're like two out of three people, you feel guilty and ashamed about it, as well as about the lack of neatness and organization in your home, your office, your schedule, your parenting, and everywhere else in your life. And other people probably give you grief about it. But are messiness and disorganization really such terrible things? If so, why do people who keep their desks very neat spend an average of 36 percent more time looking for things at work than people who keep a fairly messy desk?

A Perfect Mess shatters the myths and misunderstandings about messiness and disorder that have led to an often pointless, counterproductive and demoralizing bias toward neatness and organization in our society. Drawing on examples from business, parenting, cooking, the war on terrorism, retail stores and even the meteoric career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, A Perfect Mess demonstrates that moderately messy systems use resources more efficiently, spur creativity, yield better solutions and are harder to break than neat ones.

A Perfect Mess helps readers assess the right amount of disorder for a given system, and show how to apply these ideas everywhere from the kitchen, garage or office, to government and all of society. Find out why A Perfect Mess is leading more and more people to just say 'yes' to mess!

Stop letting the neat-freaks push you around. Find out why a certain amount of messiness and disorganization is probably already working in your favor--and how to take even better advantage of the benefits of disorder. From jaywalking to musical improvisation to organizational charts, A Perfect Mess analyzes and celebrates the long-ignored brighter side to one of our most wide-spread and natural characteristics: Making a mess.

Board: Surf/Skate/Snow Graphics: Surf/Skate/Snow Graphics Jeremy Leslie

2007-11-03T13:54:00.000-07:00

This revised edition of the first and most complete book on board sports graphics -- from rarer, classic archival material to the latest trends -- includes exciting examples of recent board graphics. Surfing, skateboarding and snowboarding have produced a stunning array of imagery and some of the most influential graphics to emerge in the last 30 years. Board is a comprehensive survey of the best of board sports graphics, from rare, classic archive material to the latest trends. Top artists and art directors, such as Jim Phillips, Erik Brunetti, Todd Francis, Marc McKee and Scott Clum, explain the complex subcultures which have given rise to this art, and examine the close links between board sports and music, design, and fashion. Anarchic, funny, brutal, and beautiful, Board is a unique document of the visual expression of youth culture.

Finding Iris Chang Paula Kamen

2007-11-03T13:53:00.000-07:00

Iris Chang’s mysterious suicide in 2004, at age thirty-six, didn’t seem to make any sense. She had more to live for than anyone, including fame, fortune, beauty, a husband, and child. Some even wondered if the controversial author of the Rape of Nanking had been murdered. Long-time friend Paula Kamen was among those left wondering what had gone so wrong. Seeking to reconcile the suicide with the image of Chang’s “perfect” life, Kamen searched her own memory and scoured Chang’s letters, diaries, and archival material to fill in the gaps of Chang’s personal transformation-from awkward teen to homecoming princess in college, from “ex-shy person” to world-class speaker and international human rights pioneer-and later decline into mental illness and paranoia. A literary investigation of an important writer’s journey, Finding Iris is a tribute to a lost heroine, a portrait of the real and vulnerable woman who inspired so many around the world.

Mating In Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic & the Domestic Esther Perel

2007-11-03T13:41:00.001-07:00

A provocative and controversial look at intimacy and sexual relationships by a seasoned clinician who examines the paradoxical relationship between domesticity and sexual desire and explains what it takes to bring lust home. In her 20 years of clinical experience, Esther Perel has treated scores of couples who complain of domestic lives devoid of eroticism. They describe loving, intimate relationships that are egalitarian and open and yet, their sex lives are passionless and dull. In her explosively original thesis, Perel explains that our cultural penchant for equality, fairness and absolute candor is antithetical to erotic desire for men and women alike. Sexual excitement, she explains, doesn't play by the rules of good citizenship. Rather, it is politically incorrect, thriving on power plays, role reversals, unfair advantages, imperious demands, ambiguity in gesture and words, seductive manipulations, and subtle cruelties. We might have exciting, playful, even poetic sex if we were less constrained in the bedroom by our emotional correctness and our emphasis on safety and respect.

Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music Phil Ramone & Charles Granata

2007-11-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

Sinatra. Streisand. Dylan. Pavarotti. McCartney. Sting. Madonna. What do these musicians have in common besides their super-stardom? They have all worked with legendary music producer Phil Ramone.

For almost five decades, Phil Ramone has been a force in the music industry. He has produced records and collaborated with almost every major talent in the business. There is a craft to making records, and Phil has spent his life mastering it. For the first time ever, he shares the secrets of his trade.

Making Records is a fascinating look “behind the glass” of a recording studio. From Phil’s exhilarating early days recording jazz and commercial jingles at A&R, to his first studio, and eventual legendary producer status, Phil allows you to sit in on the sessions that created some of the most memorable music of the 20th century -- including Frank Sinatra’s Duets album, Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Ray Charles’s Genius Loves Company and Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years.

In addition to being a ringside seat for contemporary popular music history, Making Records is an unprecedented tutorial on the magic behind what music producers and engineers do. In these pages, Phil offers a rare peek inside the way music is made . . . illuminating the creative thought processes behind some of the most influential sessions in music history.

This is a book about the art that is making records -- the way it began, the way it is now, and everything in between.

The Stuff Of Thought: Language As A Window Into Human Nature Steven Pinker

2007-11-03T13:32:00.000-07:00

New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books—including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate—have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today’s most important and popular science writers.

Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society.

With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life—why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

On The Road : The Original Scroll By: Jack Kerouac

2007-09-07T12:10:00.001-07:00

The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published word for word as Kerouac originally composed it.

Though Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, it was not until three weeks in April 1951, in an apartment on West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, that he wrote the first full draft that was satisfactory to him. Typed out as one long, single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper that he later taped together to form a 120 foot scroll, this document is among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history. It represents the first full expression of Kerouac’s revolutionary aesthetic, the identifiable point at which his thematic vision and narrative voice came together in a sustained burst of creative energy. It was also part of a wider vital experimentation in the American literary, musical, and visual arts in the post-World War II period.

It was not until more than six years later, and several new drafts, that Viking published, in 1957, the novel known to us today. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road, Viking will publish the 1951 scroll in a standard book format. The differences between the two versions are principally ones of significant detail and altered emphasis. The scroll is slightly longer and has a heightened linguistic virtuosity and a more sexually frenetic tone. It also uses the real names of Kerouac’s friends instead of the fictional names he later invented for them. The transcription of the scroll was done by Howard Cunnell who, along with Joshua Kupetz, George Mouratidis, and Penny Vlagopoulos, provides a critical introduction that explains the fascinating compositional and publication history of On the Road and anchors the text in its historical, political, and social context.

The Israel Lobby And U.S. Foreign Policy By: John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

2007-09-07T08:50:00.000-07:00

Writing in The New York Review of Books, Michael Massing declared, “Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force.”

The Israel Lobby, by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, was one of the most controversial articles in recent memory. Originally published in the London Review of Books in March 2006, it provoked both howls of outrage and cheers of gratitude for challenging what had been a taboo issue in America: the impact of the Israel Lobby on U.S. foreign policy.

Now in a work of major importance, Mearsheimer and Walt deepen and expand their argument and confront recent developments in Lebanon and Iran. They describe the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel and argues that this support cannot be fully explained in either strategic or moral grounds. This exceptional relationship is due largely to the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. Mearsheimer and Walt provactively contend that the lobby has a far-reaching impact on America’s posture throughout the Middle East and the policies it has encouraged are in neither America’s national interest nor Israel’s long-term interest. The lobby’s influence also affects America’s relationship with important allies and increases dangers that all states face from global jihadist terror.

Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions By: Lisa Randall

2007-09-07T08:46:00.000-07:00

The universe has its secrets. It may even hide extra dimensions, different from anything ever imagined. A whole raft of remarkable concepts now rides atop the scientific firmament, including parallel universes, warped geometry, and threedimensional sink-holes. We understand far more about the world than we did just a few short years ago -- and yet we are more uncertain about the true nature of the universe than ever before. Have we reached a point of scientific discovery so advanced that the laws of physics as we know them are simply not sufficient? Will we all soon have to accept explanations that previously remained in the realm of science fiction?

Lisa Randall is herself making these extraordinary breakthroughs, pushing back the boundaries of science in her research to answer some of the most fundamental questions posed by Nature. For example, why is the gravitational field from the entire Earth so defenseless against the small tug of a tiny magnet? Searching for answers to such seemingly irresolvable questions has led physicists to postulate extra dimensions, the presence of which may lead to unimaginable gains in scientific understanding. Randall takes us into the incredible world of warped, hidden dimensions that underpin the universe we live in, describing how we might prove their existence, while examining the questions that they still leave unanswered.

Warped Passages provides an exhilarating overview that tracks the arc of discovery from early twentieth-century physics to the razor's edge of today's particle physics and string theory, unweaving the current debates about relativity, quantum mechanics, and gravity. In a highly readable style sure to entertain and elucidate, Lisa Randall demystifies the science and beguilingly unravels the mysteries of the myriad worlds that may exist just beyond the one we are only now beginning to know.

The World Without Us By: Alan Weisman

2007-09-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us.

In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; what of our everyday stuff may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.

The World Without Us reveals how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York's subways would start eroding the city's foundations, and how, as the world’s cities crumble, asphalt jungles give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically-treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dalai Lama, and paleontologists – who describe a pre-human world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths – Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.

From places already devoid of humans (a last fragment of primeval European forest; the Korean DMZ; Chernobyl), Weisman reveals Earth's tremendous capacity for self-healing. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman's narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that doesn't depend on our demise. It is narrative nonfiction at its finest, and in posing an irresistible concept with both gravity and a highly-readable touch, it looks deeply at our effects on the planet in a way that no other book has.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma : A Natural History Of Four Meals By: Michael Pollan

2007-09-07T08:34:00.001-07:00

What should we have for dinner? The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves? The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.

In this groundbreaking book, one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.

The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.

Was She Pretty? By Leanne Shapton

2007-09-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

A simple concept brilliantly rendered – concise details of a lover’s exes accompanied by stark drawings, each suggesting a full world of conflicting emotional experiences. Perfect on its own, as a catalyst for imagining the missing details, or as a trigger for some bittersweet reminiscing. Truly one-of-a-kind.

Cassavetes On Cassavetes - Edited by Raymond Carney

2007-09-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

As a speaker, John Cassavetes is as direct and articulate as his films are challenging and oblique. Whether or not you’re an admirer of his work, his insights on the creative process, the importance of community and the virtues of unrelenting determination are applicable to pretty much anyone working in pretty much any field. He’s no easier than his films, but they’re both worth the strain.

Abducted: How People Come To Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens

2007-09-06T11:04:00.000-07:00

It’s easy to ridicule adherents of the E.T.-implanted-things-in-my-head story, a temptation this book avoids. Clancy simply attempts to understand what they believe and why. An empathetic, objective and engagingly written examination of the type of thinking involved in alien abduction fantasies and the social/psychological needs that such stories fulfill in the true believers, it’s also very funny, like a witty conversation with an unstuffy expert on a curious subject

The Possibility Of An Island - By: Michel Houellebecq

2007-09-06T10:57:00.000-07:00

Provocative in ways that people who think they like provocation may find disconcerting and repulsive, this devastating sci-fi epic also dashes Michel Houellebecq's scornful, contemptuous worldview with a dose of true sorrow barely hinted at in his previous novels. Maybe. Whatever. Whether Houellebecq is penning eulogies or elegies for the steady collapse of Western civilization remains up for debate, but he’s documenting it more probingly than anyone else.