The book opens with Leaf Fielding's arrest in a pre-dawn police raid and ends five years later with his release from jail.The narrative moves back and forth between the harsh world of prison and his previous life - from a childhood at a brutal boarding school onto undergraduate days and his LSD epiphany in the summer of love, 1967.Acid transformed him in an instant from nerdy scholar to footloose freak. His ten years of adventures in the hippie underground gave the title to this book - a quote from a Bob Dylan song - they also took him across Europe, to the Andes, to Indochina and on to the edge of the known universe. They also led inexorably to his downfall.

    Since its creation in 2010, Instagram’s fun and simple interface has captured our collective imagination, swiftly becoming a way of life. In No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, technology reporter Sarah Frier explains how Instagram’s founders married art and technology to overcome skeptics and to hook the public on visual storytelling. At first, Instagram initially attracted artisans, but then the platform exploded in popularity among the masses, creating an entire industry of digital influencers that’s now worth tens of billions of dollars. Eighteen months after Instagram’s launch and explosive growth, the founders—Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger—made the gut-wrenching decision to sell the company to Facebook. For most companies, that would be the end of the story; but for Instagram, it was only the beginning. Instagram borrowed some lessons from Facebook and rejected others, until eventually its success stirred tension with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, just as Facebook became embroiled in a string of public crises. Frier unearths the details that led to the cofounders’ departure, bringing to light dramatic moments unknown to the public until now. At its heart, No Filter draws on unprecedented exclusive access—from the founders of Instagram, as well as employees, executives, and competitors; hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio; Anna Wintour of Vogue; Kris Jenner of the Kardashian-Jenner empire; and a plethora of influencers, from fashionistas with millions of followers to owners of famous dogs worldwide—to show how Instagram has fundamentally changed the way we communicate, shop, eat, and travel. The book brings readers inside users’ strategies to craft their personal image and fame, explaining how the company’s product decisions have affected the structure of our society. From teenagers to the pope, No Filter tells the captivating story of how Instagram not only created a new industry but also changed our lives.

    From the son of a sharecropper to an itinerant bluesman, Honeyboy’s stories of good friends Charlie Patton, Big Walter Horton, Little Walter Jacobs, and Robert Johnson are a godsend to blues fans. History buffs will marvel at his unique perspective and firsthand accounts of the 1927 Mississippi River flood, vagrancy laws, makeshift courts in the back of seed stores, plantation life, and the Depression.

    Over the course of the next two years, he shared his students’ triumphs, tragedies, joys, and frustrations. He got a behind the scenes look into how school systems and teachers function – and how they break. As the pressure built and the runaway train of his brief teaching career began to derail, Dalton came to understand why the education system can’t seem to recruit new teachers and why many of the teachers in the existing system aren’t doing their jobs.Available exclusively at Amazon.com.

    In 2001, at the age of thirty-three, Ekow Eshun-born in London to African-born parents-embarks on a trip to Ghana in search of his roots, and in this rich narrative he evokes both the physical and emotional aspects of his travels. Eshun makes his way to Accra, Ghana's cosmopolitan capital city; to the storied slave forts of Elmina; to the historic warrior kingdom of Asante. He reflects on earlier pilgrims who followed the same path-W. E. B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X-and on the millions of slaves shipped to the West from the Ghanaian coast. He recalls the racially charged years of his youth, and he considers the paradoxes and possibilities in contemporary Britain for someone like himself. Finally, he uncovers a long-held secret about his lineage that will compel him to question everything he knows about himself and about where he comes from. Written with exquisite particularity of place and mind, and with rare immediacy and candor, "Black Gold of the Sun" tells a story of identity, belonging, and unexpected hope.