This is Kapuscinski's vivid, compelling and personal report on the life and death of the Soviet superpower, from the entrance of Soviet troops into his hometown in Poland in 1939, through his journey across desolate Siberia and the republics of Central Asia in the 1950s and 60s, to his wanderings over the vast Soviet lands - from Poland to the Pacific, the Arctic Circle to Afghanistan - in the years of the USSR's decline and final disintegration in 1991.

    To Hunter S. Thompson, being a Gonzo journalist means doing whatever it takes to get to the truth; everything from dropping acid with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the 60s, to participating in wild orgies and getting his nose broken while chronicling life with the Hell's Angels, to founding the Freak Power Party and running for sheriff of Aspen in 1970. A virtual icon, Thompson has regularly trashed the prime directives of reporting—accuracy and objectivity—yet he nonetheless always produces some of the sharpest political and cultural analysis around. Surrounded by submachine guns, fistfuls of colorful pills, and the ubiquitous Wild Turkey, Thompson careens through his life and career, unfolded in this book in all its decadence. New art by Ralph Steadman and over 20 black-and-white photographs are featured.

    An American Iliad in the guise of contemporary political reportage, What It Takes penetrates the mystery at the heart of all presidential campaigns: How do presumably ordinary people acquire that mixture of ambition, stamina, and pure shamelessness that makes a true candidate? As he recounts the frenzied course of the 1988 presidential race -- and scours the psyches of contenders from George Bush and Robert Dole to Michael Dukakis and Gary Hart -- Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer comes up with the answers, in a book that is vast, exhaustively researched, exhilarating, and sometimes appalling in its revelations.

    These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style.These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens—as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.

    She had worked for Vogue on fashion assignments at the start of the war, photographing Dylan Thomas, Margot Fonteyn and James Mason as well as Henry Moore sketching in the air raid shelters of London. After D-Day and for the remainder of the war Miller followed the US Army across Europe, giving Vogue an extraordinary hotline to the front in France, and giving the world some of the most powerful photographs of the Second World War ever to appear. In Lee Miller's War, twelve of Miller's most important despatches are reassembled from the original manuscripts, interspersed with letters and telegrams which give a glimpse of Lee's personal reactions to the events she reported. Starting with her first report from a field hospital soon after D-Day, the despatches and 200 photographs chronicle the liberation of Paris, fighting in the Loire Valley, Luxembourg, Alsace, the Russian/ American link at Torgau and the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, ending with her now-famous picture of Hitler's Berchtesgaden house Alderhorst in flames. personal involvement with professional detachment, while her photographs, with their own quality of surrealist irony, show war-ravaged cities, buildings and landscapes, but above all, the heroic resilience of people. David Scherman, the renowned war photojournalist who shared many of these assignments with her, has provided a fascinating foreword.

    This edition also contains more new material as well as all the original essays - from the myth-making of the Gulf War to the surreal pleasures of Disneyland. Breaking through the consensual silence, Pilger pays tribute to those dissenting voices we are seldom permitted to hear.

    Spanning nearly five decades, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, their story has the scope, depth, wealth of incident, and emotional intensity of a great novel, and an abundance of humor, scandal, warmth, and trauma. A masterful chronicle of the turbulent postwar era, illuminating the interplay between private life and profound cultural changes.Donald Katz begins his account in 1945, when Sam Gordon comes home from the war to his young wife, and two-year-old daughter, eager to move his family into the growing middle class. After a few years in the Bronx, Sam and Eve move to a new Long Island subdivision and have two more children. As the '50s yield to the '60s, the younger Gordons fly out into the culture like shrapnel from an artillery shell, each tracing a unique trajectory.Katz tells the Gordons' story-the unraveling of Sam's and Eve's American dream, to the slow, hopeful reknitting of the family-marshaling a vivid cast of supporting characters. Deftly juxtaposing day-to-day family life with landmark public events, Katz creates a rich and revealing portrait of the second half of 20th century America.

    Here is a tough-minded exploration of why we're in trouble, starting with the basic issues of who gets heard, who gets ignored, and why. Greider shows us the realities of power in Washington today, uncovering the hidden relationships that link politicians with corporations and the rich, and that subvert the needs of ordinary citizens. How do we put meaning back into public life? Greider shares the stories of some citizens who have managed to crack Washington's "Grand Bazaar" of influence peddling as he reveals the structures designed to thwart them. Without naiveté or cynicism, Greider shows us how the system can still be made to work for the people, and delineates the lines of battle in the struggle to save democracy. By showing us the reality of how the political decisions that shape our lives are made, William Greider explains how we can begin to take control once more.

    While still a student, Donald Hall came to know Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and T. S. Eliot. He interviewed Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore for The Paris Review, and his portraits, anecdotes, descriptions, criticisms, and literary gossip, drawn from life

    At once highly objective and deeply intimate, the photos capture the complex humanity of creators of jazz and blues--the very spirit of the music of New Orleans. 92 photographs.

    She explores the somewhat deflated world of post-revolutionary Prague, guides us through the labyrinthine New York art world of the eighties, and takes us behind the one-way mirror of Salvador Minuchin's school of family therapy.And to each subject she brings the incisive skepticism and dazzling epigrammatic style that are her hallmarks.“Why don’t more people write like [Malcolm]?... She is cast from the mold of the Eastern European intellectual: beholden to modernism. as familiar with Kundera’s exile as she is with Freud’s Vienna. This sensibility must grant her the detachment she sometimes so mercilessly employs, but it also gives her an unassailable passion for getting to the center of things.” —Boston Globe

    Fisher is Hawthorne Professor of Political Science at Emory and Henry College in Emory, Virginia.

    Here is a collection of the south Georgia teacher's finest essays.

    An electrifying and intensely involving history of the apocalyptic end of the antiwar movement, told through the story of the 1970 bombing of the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin and the man who masterminded it.

    A century-long tale of courage, despair and outright mulishness told with wit, candor and great affection. Superlative journalism- sharp, detailed and unsparing." -Kirkus Starred Review

    Now in a book as fresh, provocative, and fearless as anything else she has written, she shows us how and in what circumstances Americans give birth. At the start, she knew no more of the subject, and not less, than any mother does. Recalling her experiences in the 1930s and 1940s of giving birth - in London, in Washington, D.C., and in Oakland, California - she observes, "A curious amnesia takes over in which all memory of the discomforts you have endured is wiped out, and your determination never, ever to do that again fast fades." But then, years later in 1989 - when her own children were adults, and birth a subject of no special interest to her - she meet a young woman, a midwife in Northern California who was being harassed by government agents and the medical establishment. Her sympathies, along with her reportorial instincts, were immediately stirred. There was a story there that needed to be explored and revealed. Far more than she anticipated then, she was at the beginning of an investigation that would lead her over the next three years to the writing of this extraordinary book. This is not a book about the miracle of life. It is about the role of money and politics in a lucrative industry; a saga of champagne birthing suites for the rich and desperate measures for the poor. It is a colorful history - from the torture and burning of midwives in medieval times, through the absurd pretensions of the modest Victorian age, to this century's vast succession of anaesthetic, technological, and "natural" birthing fashions. And it is a comprehensive indictment of the politics of birth and national health. Jessica Mitford explores conventional and alternative methods, and the costs of having a child. She gives flesh-and-blood meaning to the cold statistics. Daring to ask hard questions and skeptical of soft answers

    Buchanan describes murder, mayhem and madness in Miami.

    The Dalai Lama Known and loved worldwide for his teachings on mindfulness and compassion, Thich Nhat Hanh was once nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. On Peacemaking, this beloved Zen master returns to the theme that first brought him to the world's attention: peace, and how to embody it. Looking deeply into the roots of anger, Thich Nhat Hanh emerges with real solutions to the violence we commit against ourselves and each other. Thich Nhat Hanh uses the philosophy of non-dualism to show that we are not separate, but one with our feelings and the world. He teaches that the awareness of anger, not its suppression, - is key to its control. From the keys to transforming anger through meditation to putting kindness into action to heal the wounds between nations, here is Thich Nhat Hanh's personal testament to the spiritual and practical power of nonviolence, with Peacemaking. Topics: Interbeing; the effects of awareness; liberation through insight; cultivating nonviolence toward self; understanding your enemies; what the Vietnam War taught us; mindfulness and ecology; restoring yourself; kindness in action; ideal solitude; teaching children peacemaking; and more

    government officials who lied about their fate for half-a-century, keeping a lid on the most disgraceful cover-up in American history. Soldiers of Misfortune reveals for the first time that top U.S. officials, from Roosevelt to Bush, made the determination to write off America's missing sons, secretly held hostage in the Soviet Union. In an explosive revelation, Colonel Philip Corso, an intelligence aide to President Dwight Eisenhower, revealed exclusively to the authors that the president personally made the decision to abandon hundreds, perhaps thousands, of U.S. POWs from the Korean War. More than six years ago, Jim Sanders began his lonely quest for the truth about American POWs "liberated" by Soviet troops in Germany and Eastern Europe near the end of World War II. Then Mark Sauter and R. Cort Kirkwood joined in the search - sifting through thousands of formerly classified documents, interviewing military brass and escapees from Russia, and evaluating chilling eyewitness accounts. As the authors neared the truth, top level Pentagon officials attempted to "neutralize" and silence them in a desperate attempt to bury the truth from the public. At the same time a newspaper office and Sanders's car were surreptitiously entered, his apartment ransacked and crucial documents stolen. A secret covenant of the 1945 Yalta agreement provided that the U.S. and Britain would return Soviet citizens residing in the West. In exchange, Stalin promised to return Western soldiers who had been liberated by the Red Army. After the war, American and British authorities breached that agreement by secretly permitting Soviets to remain in the West. Stalin learned about the deception and retaliated by holding 23,500 American and 30,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers captive in the vast Soviet gulag system. The authors trace the fate of Ameri

    Before going to Mozambique, William Finnegan saw the war, like so many foreign observers, through a South African lens, viewing the conflict as apartheid's "forward defense." This lens was shattered by what he witnessed and what he heard from Mozambicans, especially those who had lived with the bandidos armado, the "armed bandits" otherwise known as the Renamo rebels. The shifting, wrenching, ground-level stories that people told combine to form an account of the war more local and nuanced, more complex, more African—than anything that has been politically convenient to describe.A Complicated War combines frontline reporting, personal narrative, political analysis, and comparative scholarship to present a picture of a Mozambique harrowed by profound local conflicts—ethnic, religious, political and personal. Finnegan writes that South Africa's domination and destabilization are basic elements of Mozambique's plight, but he offers a subtle description and analysis that will allow us to see the post-apartheid region from a new, more realistic, if less comfortable, point of view.

    Simon recounts his harrowing ordeal and the events leading up to his release, including the intervention of Mikhail Gorbachev.

    J. Simpson trial and the rise of MSNBC as well as on the Clinton scandals, the media's obsession with Monica Lewinsky, and the resulting conflation of investigative reporting with gossip.

    Weaving biography, history, and literary criticism together, Cocker explores the lives and works of a dozen major explorer/writers and paints fascinating portraits of the places that have obsessed them. Photographs.

    This book features interviews with 22 major jazz figures, including Art Blakey, Anthony Braxton, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Tommy Flanagan, Dizzy Gillespie, Chico Hamilton, Lee Konitz, Charles Mingus, Clark Terry and Henry Threadgill.

    Combat-style reporting gave way to national debate as officials deplored 'senseless violence' and pundits saw the unravelling of civilization or deplored the shame of the cities. But why was the crisis of South Central Los Angeles visible only when backlit by flames? Amid all the sensationalized accounts of fragmented, chaotic communities, efforts of valour are seldom reported. Neither helpless nor without hope, black Angelenos go about their lives, bolstering their communities from within. Far from giving up or giving in, they persist, using anger, faith and the cold logic of experience to deal with drugs, gangs and unemployment; build churches, schools and community centres; weave together new music, films, stories.

    In tow were correspondent Jim Clancy, a camera crew, and enough equipment to fill seven taxis. Wiener's job was to orchestrate the network's coverage from the Iraqi capital--a herculean task that involved everything from negotiating with difficult Iraqi officials to gathering news to lifting spirits (including those that came in bottles). All in a day's work for CNN's executive producer in Baghdad. Live from Baghdad is the fast-paced story of Wiener's adventures in Iraq during the period of tense international maneuvering that would culminate in open war. By turns suspenseful, irreverent, and inspiring, it is also a no-holds-barred inside look at how the media covered a simmering crisis. Every day of Wiener's five-month stay--from the moment he was greeted at the airport by his Iraqi minder through his harrowing wartime escape on the road to Amman--confirms that this assignment was his toughest. Baghdad's surprisingly modern facilities did little to mask the mentality of a Third World dictatorship ruled by a cult of personality. The country's besiegement, compounded by the cutthroat competition of aggressive Western news media, created daily pressures so intense that news crews at ground zero frequently resorted to late-night bases where cross-dressing was not uncommon. Celebrities like Jesse Jackson, Dan Rather, and Carl Bernstein dropped in amid the chaos, only to fly out the moment they'd gotten their piece of the story. But, armed with irreverence, pluck, and a dogged determination to see it through, Wiener and his CNN cohorts were there for the long haul. When theinane code words the kids have the sniffles reached news organizations from Washington, the Al-Rasheed Hotel erupted in panic. Within hours, almost every major network still in Baghdad prepared to leave. But CNN decided to remain. And when the Iraqi capital came under attack, correspondents Peter Arnett, Bernard Shaw, and John Holliman reported the news live to the world. A few days later, the Iraqis expelled almost everyone--except Wiener, Arnett and their courageous engineer.