In this classic work, now updated, the author of Culture and Imperialism reveals the hidden agendas and distortions of fact that underlie even the most "objective" coverage of the Islamic world.

    After that he could describe his cars for three [LP] sides and get away with it." Christgau on Carly Simon: "If a horse could sing in a monotone, the horse would sound like Carly Simon, only a horse wouldn't rhyme 'yacht,' 'apricot,' and 'gavotte.'" Christgau on Van Morrison: "This is a man who gets stoned on a drink of water and urges us to turn our radios all the way into the mystic. Visionary hooks his specialty." Christgau on Lou Reed: "Reed Sounds like he's imitating his worst enemy, himself." (Lou Reed on Robert Christgau: "What a moron! Studying rock and roll. I can't believe it!") An indispensable book, Christgau's Rock Albums the '70s is the definitive guide to nearly 3,000 albums of the decade that brought us progressive rock, country rock, glam rock, funk, disco, punk, heavy metal, and new wave.

    

    This definitive collection represents the best of Rolling Stone's first decade and a half.

    Populated by guys and dolls, show girls and gangsters, Runyon's world captured the imagination of a vast public "more than somewhat," as he would have put it. It is a world of sentiment and surprise, and above all, humor. Runyon intorduced millions of readers to a milieu of colorful smalltime hoodlums and hustlers--the likes of Nathan Detroit, Harry the Horse and Nicely Johnson--and their "dolls," such as Dark Dolores, Madame La Gimp, and Miss Missouri Martin. Runyon described his characters in the inimitable idiom her adapted from real-life street talk. Runyon's ever-present narrator serves as our eyes and ears, whether the scene is Broadway, the racetracks of Miami and Saratoga, football games in Ivy League New England, or even (in his Christmas fable, "The Three Wise Guys") Bethlehem (Pennsylvania). Many readers know Runyon's work better from movies than from his writings--hardly surprising, considering that more than two dozen films have been made from his stories, including Guys and Dolls, The Lemon Drop Kid and Pocketful of Miracles from this collection. This volume once again makes available an outstanding selection of Runyon's hugely entertaining Broadway stories, many of them for the first time in paperback

    In the fall of 1979 Cameron Crowe at 22 years of age walked into the office of Principal William Gray's office and asked permission to attend classes for the full length of the school year to research a book he was to write of his experiences inside the walls of Ridgemont High and Redondo Beach, California. This is the day-by-day journal of horny and wasted semi-blank adults who don't know a thing about their future.

    

    It is like any busy lower-class street in Bombay, densely populated by vendors, merchants and shops, but also overcrowded with girls, from 11-year-olds to 65-year-old ex-madams. The street is lined with old wooden buildings, which teem with prostitutes hanging out of the windows, in the viewing cages on the ground floor, and on the steps. From sunrise to sunset the customers pass down the street to survey the girls. Mary Ellen Mark's extraordinary portrait of Falkland Road was first published in 1981 and has long been recognized as one of the major bodies of work in the canon of this significant Magnum photographer. The book contains 65 photographs made over six weeks that show the daily life lived by the women (and men) of the street. Mark's images are beautiful, electric, shocking and remarkable for their emotional power and for the visceral brilliance of their color. Together with Mark's captions and introductory text, Falkland Road is an astonishing work of insight into a raw and frightening world, made accessible by the completeness of the photographer's involvement, by her humanity, and by the way she captures the variety of individual life and the color, passion and tenderness that still abide there.