A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies


Dennis Bartok - 2016
    It is about the death of physical film in the digital era and about a paranoid, secretive, eccentric, and sometimes obsessive group of film-mad collectors who made movies and their projection a private religion in the time before DVDs and Blu-rays.The book includes the stories of film historian/critic Leonard Maltin, TCM host Robert Osborne discussing Rock Hudson's secret 1970s film vault, RoboCop producer Jon Davison dropping acid and screening King Kong with Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore East, and Academy Award-winning film historian Kevin Brownlow recounting his decades-long quest to restore the 1927 Napoleon. Other lesser-known but equally fascinating subjects include one-legged former Broadway dancer Tony Turano, who lives in a Norma Desmond-like world of decaying movie memories, and notorious film pirate Al Beardsley, one of the men responsible for putting O. J. Simpson behind bars.Authors Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph examine one of the least-known episodes in modern legal history: the FBI's and Justice Department's campaign to harass, intimidate, and arrest film dealers and collectors in the early 1970s. Many of those persecuted were gay men. Victims included Planet of the Apes star Roddy McDowall, who was arrested in 1974 for film collecting and forced to name names of fellow collectors, including Rock Hudson and Mel Torm�.A Thousand Cuts explores the obsessions of the colorful individuals who created their own screening rooms, spent vast sums, negotiated underground networks, and even risked legal jeopardy to pursue their passion for real, physical film.

The Target H


Lionel Derrick - 2000
    heroin trade. Mark Hardin... He'd learned how in Vietnam: Infiltrate the enemy's position, determine the plan of action and then strike swiftly, taking out as many key men as possible, wreaking destruction, leaving chaos in your wake. He is a new breed of warrior, without uniform, without rank - dedicated to the American way of life, and pledged to fight anyone who seeks to destroy it. On either side of the law. That's why he's in Los Angeles. Just the beginning of a long and lonely series of brush fire wars.

Rope Burns: The Shocking True Story of the Most Twisted Couple in American Crime!


Robert Scott - 2001
    James Daveggio was a drug abuser and violent rapist. Together, they forged one of the most perverse alliances in criminal history - and in September 1997 - began a nightmare spree of incest, kidnapping, rape, torture...and maybe, murder.Torture VanAfter customizing Michaud's green minivan into the ultimate mobile torture chamber, the predatory pair hit the road to hell. From California to Nevada, they abducted defenseless young women, including one of Daveggio's own relatives, and forced them to endure hours—sometimes days—of unspeakable sexual acts in their orgy of terror.Rope BurnsEventually captured by police, Michaud and Daveggio were convicted on May 19, 1999 for the abduction and rape of 20–year-old Juanita Rodriguez in Reno, Nevada. They have also been indicted for the first degree murder of Vanessa Samson, 22, in Pleasanton, California. Now awaiting trial, they face a possible conviction that could condemn them both to die by lethal injection.16 Pages Of Shocking Photos!

Eye of the Beast: The True Story of Serial Killer James Wood


Terry Adams - 1997
    No elaborate rituals. No predetermine victims. Just an instant, uncontrollable urge to kill.On a summer afternoon in 1993, an eleven-year-old girl sets out through her familiar neighborhood to collect payments on her paper route. In one home she meets a harmless-looking stranger. Driven by an unstoppable desire, James Wood will make this route her last.The grisly murder of Jeralee Underwood was the final crime in James Wood's lifetime career of armed robbery, kidnapping, rape, and murder. Not until the Underwood case, which brought terror to a close-knit Idaho community, did crime experts begin to piece together a detailed profile of Wood's depraved personality and successfully hunt him down. Unlike other serial killers, Wood acted purely on impulse, to strike out the instincts of a bloodthirsty predator. Based on four years of meticulous researched by the detective who captured Wood, and other forensic experts on the case, this is the true story of how a sociopath is bred-and what it takes to trap him at his own deadly game.With eight pages of startling photos!

Hugh Glass, Mountain Man


Robert M. McClung - 1990
    A fictionalized biography of the legendary hero of the Old West, who as a fur trapper in 1823, survived an attack by a grizzly bear.

Whispers: The Voices of Paranoia


Ronald K. Siegel - 1994
    Delusions and hallucinations feed on each other, flourishing with amazing speed. Locked in a new mode of thinking the paranoid views life as from a cell. In a dozen case studies Dr. Ronald Siegel takes us on a chilling but mesmerizing journey into the dark mysteries of the human mind.We meet a woman who hears her teeth whispering; a beautiful ballet dancer who is in love with a shadow; a UCLA student who believes Hitler is speaking to him through a stolen computer program; and a cocaine addict for whom the invasion of imaginary bugs was strong enough to drive him to commit murder.A dedicated and compassionate scientist, Dr. Siegel follows his patients into the shadowlands where paranoia flourishes--drug addiction, prison, organized crime, and terrorism often at risk to himself. He explores mild cases of patients who vaguely believe something is stalking them to serious cases of patients with apocalyptic visions so intense that they shake the foundations of an entire community. Fascinating, enlightening, and immersive, "reading Whispers is like reading about an exotic and dangerous travel adventure" (The Washington Post).

Waiting for Nothing and Other Writings


Tom Kromer - 1986
    It tells the story of one man drifting through America, east coast to west, main stem to side street, endlessly searching for "three hots and a flop"--food and a place to sleep. Kromer scans, in first-person voice, the scattered events, the stultifying sameness, of "life on the vag"--the encounters with cops, the window panes that separate hunger and a "feed," the bartering with prostitutes and homosexuals.In "Michael Kohler," Kromer's unfinished novel, the harsh existence of coal miners in Pennsylvania is told in a committed, political voice that reveals Kromer's developing affinity with leftist writers including Lincoln Steffens and Theodore Dreiser. An exploration of Kromer's proletarian roots, "Michael Kohler" was to be a political novel, a story of labor unions and the injustices of big management. Kromer's other work ranges from his college days, when he wrote a sarcastic expose of the bums in his hometown titled "Pity the Poor Panhandler: $2 an Hour Is All He Gets," to the sensitive pieces of his later life--short stories, articles, and book reviews written more out of an aching understanding of suffering than from the slick formulas of politics.Waiting for Nothing remains, however, Kromer's most powerful achievement, a work Steffens called "realism to the nth degree." Collected here as the major part of Kromer's oeuvre, Waiting for Nothing traces the author's personal struggle to preserve human virtues and emotions in the face of a brutal and dehumanizing society.

The Heming Way: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested Retro-Sexual Legend Within, Just Like Papa!


Marty Beckerman - 2011
    They cannot skin a fish, dominate a battlefield, or transform majestic creatures of the Southern Hemisphere into piano keyboards.The Heming Way demonstrates how modern eunuchs—brainwashed by PETA and Alcoholics Anonymous—can learn from Papa's unparalleled example: drunken, unshaven, meat-devouring, wife-divorcing, and gloriously self-destructive.Advice includes:How to kill enough animals to render a species endangered—just like Papa!Getting your friends to think drinking a daiquiri is manly . . . just by drinking one nine yourselfAchieving sufficiently high testosterone levels to never have to worry about the chance of having a daughter instead of a sonAnd much more!Profane, insightful, hilarious and loaded with more than 150 photos, facts and insights about Papa, The Heming Way is a difficult path, and not for the weak, but truth is manlier than fiction.

The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren


Iona Opie - 1959
    Going outside the nursery, with its assortment of parent-approved entertainments, to observe and investigate the day-to-day creative intelligence and activities of children, the Opies bring to life the rites and rhymes, jokes and jeers, laws, games, and secret spells of what has been called "the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows no signs of dying out."

Henry Darger


Klaus Biesenbach - 2009
    Angel-like Blengins with butterfly wings, natural catastrophes, innocent girls, and murderous soldiers all appear in Darger's scenes, which are reproduced in this book in double-page and gatefold spreads. In the volume's introductory essay, Klaus Biesenbach examines the radical originality of Darger's art, including his use of collage, incorporation of religious themes and iconography, and frequent juxtaposition of innocence with violence. An essay by Brooke Davis Anderson illuminates Darger's source materials and techniques. Michael Bonesteel puts Darger's life in the context of his work and selects key texts to accompany the illustrations. The book also includes for the first time the text of Darger's History of My Life, A" the artist's autobiography. The only book of its kind, Henry Darger offers an authoritative, balanced, and insightful look at an American master

The Vamps: Our Story: 100% Official


The Vamps - 2016
    

Study Skills for Students of English as a Second Language


Richard C. Yorkey - 1970
    When you use it in either your regular ESL class or a study skills class, you can be sure that your students will learn the practical skills they need to succeed in an English speaking, academic setting. Study Skills for Students of English includes sections on how to use a monolingual English dictionary, study for and take examinations, and read for comprehension. The text also covers the art of note-taking and development of writing skills.

The Bikeriders


Danny Lyon - 1997
    A seminal work of modern photojournalism, this landmark collection of photographs and interviews documents the abandon and risk implied in the name of the gang Lyon belonged to: the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. With images and interviews that are as raw, alive, and dramatic today as they were three decades ago, this new edition includes startling new images: 15 additional black-and-white photographs and 14 color prints--long thought missing--of works originally published in black-and-white. With a new introduction by the author, The Bikeriders rides again, capturing like never before the dawn of the counterculture era.

Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues: True Stories of the Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox and Unusual from the magazine "Morbid Curiosity"


Loren Rhoads - 2009
    Loren Rhoads, creator and editor of the magazine, has compiled some of her favorite stories from all ten issues in this sometimes shocking, occasionally gruesome, always fascinating anthology. This quirky book is filled with tales from ordinary people -- who just happen to have eccentric, peculiar interests. Ranging from the outrageous (attending a Black Mass, fishing bodies out of San Francisco Bay, making fake snuff films) to the more "mundane" (visiting a torture museum, tracking real vampires through San Francisco), this curiously enjoyable collection of stories, complete with illustrations and informative asides, will entertain and haunt readers long after the final page is turned.

Haunted Air: Anonymous Halloween photographs from c. 1875–1955


Ossian Brown - 2010
    These are the pictures of the dead: family portraits, mementos of the treasured, now unrecognizable, and others. The roots of Halloween lie in the ancient pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, a feast to mark the death of the old year and the birth of the new. It was believed that on this night the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not unheard amongst men. The advent of Christianity saw the pagan festival subsumed in All Souls' Day, when across Europe the dead were mourned and venerated. Children and the poor, often masked or in outlandish costume, wandered the night begging "soul cakes" in exchange for prayers, and fires burned to keep malevolent phantoms at bay. From Europe, the haunted tradition would quickly take root and flourish in the fertile soil of the New World. Feeding hungrily on fresh lore, consuming half-remembered tales of its own shadowy origins and rituals, Halloween was reborn in America. The pumpkin supplanted the carved turnip; costumes grew ever stranger, and celebrants both rural and urban seized gleefully on the festival's intoxicating, lawless spirit. For one wild night, the dead stared into the faces of the living, and the living, ghoulishly masked and clad in tattered backwoods baroque, stared back.