It has been inspired by the scientific ferment that swept through Britain at the end of the 18th century, and which Holmes now radically redefines as 'the revolution of Romantic Science'.

    

    What was Jenny Diski doing in the sixties? A lot: dropping out, taking drugs, buying clothes, having sex, demonstrating, and spending time in mental hospitals. Now, as Diski herself turns sixty years old, she examines what has been lost in the purple haze of nostalgia and selective memory of that era, what endures, and what has always been the same. From the vantage point of London, she takes stock of the Sexual Revolution, the fashion, the drug culture, and the psychiatric movements and education systems of the day. What she discovers is that the ideas of the sixties often paved the way for their antithesis, and that by confusing liberation and libertarianism, a new kind of radicalism would take over both in the UK and America.Witty, provocative, and gorgeously written, Jenny Diski promises to feed your head with new insights about everything that was, and is, the sixties.

    Basil's, but Alexia Blue travels with a different purpose: to visit the public baths. What starts off as a simple vacation quickly becomes an obsession, as Brue ventures out to sample the range of bathing traditions the world has to offer. Full of intimacies, discoveries and unexpected twists, Cathedrals of the Flesh is the candid and playful account of one woman's determination to follow her passion.

    And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.” – Gordon Lightfoot, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” The Great Lakes have claimed countless thousands of vessels over the course of history, but its biggest and most famous victim was the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, the largest ship of its day to sail the Great Lakes and still the largest to lie below Lake Superior’s murky depths. The giant ore freighter was intentionally built "within a foot of the maximum length allowed for passage through the soon-to-be completed Saint Lawrence Seaway.” but despite its commercial purpose, the Edmund Fitzgerald was also one of the most luxurious ships to ever set sail in the Great Lakes. One person who sailed aboard the ship recounted, “Stewards treated the guests to the entire VIP routine. The cuisine was reportedly excellent and snacks were always available in the lounge. A small but well stocked kitchenette provided the drinks. Once each trip, the captain held a candlelight dinner for the guests, complete with mess-jacketed stewards and special ‘clamdigger’ punch.” Indeed, when it was completed in 1957, the Edmund Fitzgerald was nearly 730 feet long and dubbed “Queen of the Lakes”, and it was so popular that people would wait along the shores to catch a glimpse of the famous boat. The ship had already earned various safety awards and never suffered a serious problem when it set sail from Superior, Wisconsin with over 26,000 tons of freight on November 9, 1975 and headed for a steel mill near Detroit. During that afternoon, however, the National Weather Service, which had earlier predicted that a storm would miss Lake Superior, revised its estimates and issued gale warnings. Over the course of the next 24 hours, the Fitzgerald and other ships in Lake Superior tried to weather the storm, but by the early evening hours of November 10, the Fitzgerald’s captain radioed other ships to report that the ship was having some problems and was taking on water. In the ship’s last radio contact, the captain reported that the ship and crew were “holding our own,” but just what happened next still remains a mystery to this day. Minutes after that last contact, the Edmund Fitzgerald stopped replying on the radio and no longer showed up on radar, indicating that it sank, but no distress signal was ever given, suggesting something catastrophic happened almost instantly. At the time the ship went down with all 29 of its crew, winds had reached about 60 miles per hour, waves were about 25 feet high, and rogue waves were measured at 35 feet. The wreck of the ship was found within days, and the fact that it was found in two large pieces suggest it broke apart on the surface of the lake, but it’s still unclear how that happened. Since her loss with all hands, people from all walks of life have weighed in on the ship’s fate, including official investigators, sailors, and meteorologists, but no one has yet to come to a clear conclusion about what exactly went wrong. Various theories have since been put forth, attributing the sinking to everything from rogue waves to the flooding of the cargo hold, but the loss made clear that more stringent regulations on shipping in the Great Lakes was necessary, and it was also a painful reminder of the dangers of maritime travel.

    If we started off with rudimentary utterances on the level of "man throw spear," how did we end up with sophisticated grammars, enormous vocabularies, and intricately nuanced degrees of meaning?Drawing on recent groundbreaking discoveries in modern linguistics, Deutscher exposes the elusive forces of creation at work in human communication, giving us fresh insight into how language emerges, evolves, and decays. He traces the evolution of linguistic complexity from an early "Me Tarzan" stage to such elaborate single-word constructions as the Turkish sehirlilestiremediklerimizdensiniz ("you are one of those whom we couldn't turn into a town dweller"). Arguing that destruction and creation in language are intimately entwined, Deutscher shows how these processes are continuously in operation, generating new words, new structures, and new meanings.

    But, in fact, record stores served as community centers, information exchanges, clubs, art galleries, and launching pads for numerous bands and record labels. Record Store Days takes a long, loving look back at the retail refuges that enthralled at least three generations of music lovers, providing a glimpse into the special alchemy that makes a great record store. Written and compiled by two record store veterans, this lively and nostalgic anthology includes photographs and reminiscences from musicians, music industry executives, former record store clerks, and, of course, avid fans.

    Either way, we can listen to nearly anything, at any time. The possibilities in this new age of listening overturn old assumptions about what it means to properly appreciate music—to be an “educated” listener. In Every Song Ever, the veteran New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff reimagines the very idea of music appreciation for our times. As familiar subdivisions like “rock” and “jazz” matter less and less and music’s accessible past becomes longer and broader, listeners can put aside the intentions of composers and musicians and engage music afresh, on their own terms. Ratliff isolates signal musical traits—such as repetition, speed, and virtuosity—and traces them across wildly diverse recordings to reveal unexpected connections. When we listen for slowness, for instance, we may detect surprising affinities between the drone metal of Sunn O))), the mixtape manipulations of DJ Screw, Sarah Vaughan singing “Lover Man,” and the final works of Shostakovich. And if we listen for closeness, we might notice how the tight harmonies of bluegrass vocals illuminate the virtuosic synchrony of John Coltrane’s quartet. Ratliff also goes in search of “the perfect moment”; considers what it means to hear emotion by sampling the complex sadness that powers the music of Nick Drake and Slayer; and examines the meaning of certain common behaviors, such as the impulse to document and possess the entire performance history of the Grateful Dead. Encompassing the sounds of five continents and several centuries, Ratliff’s book is an artful work of criticism and a lesson in open-mindedness. It is a definitive field guide to our radically altered musical habitat.

    Included in each large-form at volume are gorgeous food and landscape photographs.

    For the seventeenth-century aristocratic Frenchman, it meant changing his shirt once a day, using perfume to obliterate both his own aroma and everyone else’s, but never immersing himself in – horrors! – water. By the early 1900s, an extraordinary idea took hold in North America – that frequent bathing, perhaps even a daily bath, was advisable. Not since the Roman Empire had people been so clean, and standards became even more extreme as the millennium approached. Now we live in a deodorized world where germophobes shake hands with their elbows and where sales of hand sanitizers, wipes and sprays are skyrocketing.The apparently routine task of taking up soap and water (or not) is Katherine Ashenburg’s starting point for a unique exploration of Western culture, which yields surprising insights into our notions of privacy, health, individuality, religion and sexuality.Ashenburg searches for clean and dirty in plague-ridden streets, medieval steam baths, castles and tenements, and in bathrooms of every description. She reveals the bizarre rescriptions of history’s doctors as well as the hygienic peccadilloes of kings, mistresses, monks and ordinary citizens, and guides us through the twists and turns to our own understanding of clean, which is no more rational than the rest. Filled with amusing anecdotes and quotations from the great bathers of history, The Dirt on Clean takes us on a journey that is by turns intriguing, humorous, startling and not always for the squeamish. Ashenburg’s tour of history’s baths and bathrooms reveals much about our changing and most intimate selves – what we desire, what we ignore, what we fear, and a significant part of who we are.

    Far beyond simply being a sports league, the NBA has become an entertainment and pop culture juggernaut. From all kinds of team logo merchandise to officially branded video games and players crossing over into reality television, film, fashion lines, and more, there is an inseparable line between sports and entertainment. But only four decades ago, this would have been unthinkable. Featuring writing that leaps off the page with energy and wit, journalist and basketball fan Pete Croatto takes us behind the scenes to the meetings that lead to the monumental American Basketball Association–National Basketball Association merger in 1976, revolutionizing the NBA’s image. He pays homage to legendary talents including Julius “Dr. J” Erving, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan and reveals how two polar-opposite rookies, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, led game attendance to skyrocket and racial lines to dissolve. Croatto also dives into CBS’s personality-driven coverage of key players, as well as other cable television efforts, which launched NBA players into unprecedented celebrity status. Essential reading whether you’re a casual or longtime fan, From Hang Time to Prime Time is an enthralling and entertaining celebration of basketball history.

    Over sixty men were murdered, including the leader of the Winter Hill Gang, James "Buddy" McLean. The leadership of one of the most influential non-Italian crime organizations in the United States was inherited by his childhood friend, Howard T. "Howie" Winter. In CITIZEN SOMERVILLE the events during his tenure offer a true picture of an era in Boston's pre-Whitey Bulger history when the streets were protected by a close-knit group of Irish-Italian "businessmen." The son of one of Winter's closest friends, BOBBY MARTINI has laid his own history bare to depict a life of survival in the rough streets of Somerville, stopping just short of entering the Mob life. The death of Martini's two brothers as well as the murders and suicides of scores of others reveal the darker personal side of a small New England town. CITIZEN SOMERVILLE slices a layer deeper than a crime memoir by allowing a usually ostracized faction to speak - the women. After decades of silence, three strong and very different females lift the Mob veil and voice their own struggle to survive in Somerville's criminal circle. Often painfully poignant and yet frequently hilarious, CITIZEN SOMERVILLE is a microscopic view of a generation struggling to walk the moral tightrope between societal decency and the loyalty of criminality.

    Should she induce labor and have an epidural and succumb to the doctors wishes for many seemingly invasive procedures or try to wait it out? Bui’s writing presents the stress and lack of control with a honest and personal style."

    . . It takes a skillful journalist to weave data and anecdotes together so effectively." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles TimesAn award-winning journalist investigates Amazon’s impact on the wealth and poverty of towns and cities across the United States.In 1937, the famed writer and activist Upton Sinclair published a novel bearing the subtitle A Story of Ford-America. He blasted the callousness of a company worth “a billion dollars” that underpaid its workers while forcing them to engage in repetitive and sometimes dangerous assembly line labor. Eighty-three years later, the market capitalization of Amazon.com has exceeded one trillion dollars, while the value of the Ford Motor Company hovers around thirty billion. We have, it seems, entered the age of one-click America—and as the coronavirus makes Americans more dependent on online shopping, its sway will only intensify.Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated.Ranging across the country, MacGillis tells the stories of those who’ve thrived and struggled to thrive in this rapidly changing environment. In Seattle, high-paid workers in new office towers displace a historic black neighborhood. In suburban Virginia, homeowners try to protect their neighborhood from the environmental impact of a new data center. Meanwhile, in El Paso, small office supply firms seek to weather Amazon’s takeover of government procurement, and in Baltimore a warehouse supplants a fabled steel plant. Fulfillment also shows how Amazon has become a force in Washington, D.C., ushering readers through a revolving door for lobbyists and government contractors and into CEO Jeff Bezos’s lavish Kalorama mansion.With empathy and breadth, MacGillis demonstrates the hidden human costs of the other inequality—not the growing gap between rich and poor, but the gap between the country’s winning and losing regions. The result is an intimate account of contemporary capitalism: its drive to innovate, its dark, pitiless magic, its remaking of America with every click.

    In this eloquent, persuasive book, Neil Postman alerts us to the real and present dangers of this state of affairs, and offers compelling suggestions as to how to withstand the media onslaught. Before we hand over politics, education, religion, and journalism to the show business demands of the television age, we must recognize the ways in which the media shape our lives and the ways we can, in turn, shape them to serve out highest goals.