In May 1974, one year after Patty Hearst and her captors robbed Hibernia National Bank, a second kidnapping took place, far from the glare of the headlines. Virginia Holman's mother, in the thrall of her first psychotic episode, believed she'd been inducted into a secret army. On command of the voices in her head, she spirited her two daughters to the family cottage on the Virginia Peninsula, painted the windows black, and set up the house as a field hospital. They remained there for four years, waiting for a war that never came. At first, it was easy to explain away her mother's symptoms in the context of the changing times -- her mother was viewed as "finding herself" in the spirit of the decade. When challenged about her delusion of the secret war, she invoked the name of Martha Mitchell. When she exhibited florid psychosis, her aunt, influenced by Hollywood's smash hit movie The Exorcist, seriously suggested that an exorcism might be in order. Even after she was hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia in the early 1980s, Holman's mother retained just enough lucidity to appease caseworkers in a system seemingly more concerned with protecting a patient's rights than with halting the progress of a woman's desperately dangerous illness. Rescuing Patty Hearst is an unflinching account of the dark days during which Holman's family was held hostage by her mother's delusions and the country was beset by the folly of the Watergate era. It is a startling memoir of a daughter's harrowing sojourn in the prison of her mother's mind. And, finally, it lingers as a moving portrait of a young woman defined by her mother's illness -- until at last she rekindles a family love that had lost its way.

    Combining science with a sense of adventure, she conveys the sheer excitement of her work, from riding the tail of a white whale to saving animals harmed by drift nets or toxic spills.

    And remarkably, it still sounds as fresh and challenging today as it did upon its release in 1967. In this book, Joe Harvard covers everything from Lou Reed's lyrical genius to John Cale's groundbreaking instrumentation, and from the creative input of Andy Warhol to the fine details of the recording process. With input from co-producer Norman Dolph and Velvets fan Jonathan Richman, Harvard documents the creation of a record which - in the eyes of many - has never been matched.EXCERPTIn 1966, some studios, like Abbey Road, had technicians in white lab coats, and even the less formal studios usually had actual engineering graduates behind the consoles. Studios were still more about science than art. Clients who dared make technical suggestions were treated with bemusement, derision, or hostility. The Velvets were a young band under constant critical attack, and the pressure to conform in order to gain acceptance must have been tremendous. Most bands of that era compromised with their record companies, through wholesale revamping of their image from wardrobe to musical style, changing or omitting lyrics, creating drastically edited versions for radio airplay, or eliminating songs entirely from their sets and records. With Andy Warhol in the band's corner, such threats were minimized.

    Although many critics have commented on the poetic quality of Dickinson's letters, William Shurr is the first to draw fully developed poems from them. In this remarkable volume, he presents nearly 500 new poems that he and his associates excavated from her correspondence, thereby expanding the canon of Dickinson's known poems by almost one-third and making a remarkable addition to the study of American literature. Here are new riddles and epigrams, as well as longer lyrics that have never been seen as poems before. While Shurr has reformatted passages from the letters as poetry, a practice Dickinson herself occasionally followed, no words, punctuation, or spellings have been changed. Shurr points out that these new verses have much in common with Dickinson's well-known poems: they have her typical punctuation (especially the characteristic dashes and capitalizations); they use her preferred hymn or ballad meters; and they continue her search for new and unusual rhymes. Most of all, these poems continue Dickinson's remarkable experiments in extending the boundaries of poetry and human sensibility.

    Critser's sharp-eyed reportage and sharp-tongued analysis make for a disarmingly funny and truly alarming book. Critser investigates the many factors of American life -- from supersize to Super Mario, from high-fructose corn syrup to the high cost of physical education in schools -- that have converged and conspired to make us some of the fattest people on the planet. He also explains why pediatricians are treating conditions rarely before noticed in children, why Type 2 diabetes is on the rise, and how agribusiness has unwittingly altered the American diet.

    The Little Locksmith begins in 1895 when a specialist straps five-year-old Katharine, then suffering from spinal tuberculosis, to a board with halters and pulleys in a failed attempt to prevent her being a "hunchback." Her mother says that she should be thankful that her parents are able to have her cared for by a famous surgeon; otherwise, she would grow up to be like the "little locksmith," who does jobs at their home; he has a "strange, awful peak in his back." Forced to endure "a horizontal life of night and day," Katharine remains immobile until age fifteen, only to find that she, too, has a hunched back and is "no larger than a ten-year-old child." The Little Locksmith charts Katharine's struggle to transcend physical limitations and embrace her life, her body and herself in the face of debilitating bouts of frustration and shame. Her spirit and courage prevail, and she succeeds in expanding her world far beyond the boundaries prescribed by her family and society: she attends Radcliffe College, forms deep friendships, begins to write, and in 1921, purchases a house of her own in Castine, Maine. There she creates her home, room by room, fashioning it as a space for guests, lovers, and artists. The Little Locksmith stands as a testimony to Katharine's aspirations and desires-for independence, for love, and for the pursuit of her art."We tend to forget nowadays that there is more than one variety of hero (and heroine). Katharine Butler Hathaway, who died last Christmas Eve, was the kind of heroine whose deeds are rarely chronicled. They were not spectacular and no medal would have been appropriate for her. All she did was to take a life which fate had cast in the mold of a frightful tragedy and redesign it into a quiet, modest work of art. The life was her own.

    Glicksberg says if you want to be a writer you have to, quote, sit on a window sill and get all pensive and stuff and jot down descriptions. Unquote Glicksberg! I don't know what kind of things he writes but I found my inspiration in Malibu with a radio, my best girlfriends, and absolutely zillions of boys for miles. I absolutely had to write everything down because I heard that when you get older you forget things, and I'd be the most miserable woman in the world if I forgot all about Moondoggie and what happened this summer. I absolutely owe the world my story. (And every word is true. I swear.) This is Franzie, part Holden Caulfield, part Lolita. The guys call her Gidget--short for "girl midget”--and she’s a girl coming of age in the summer of 1957. Based on the experiences of his own daughter, Frederick Kohner's trend-setting novel became an international sensation and turned its irrepressible heroine into an American pop culture icon whose voice still echoes every thrill, every fear, and every hope that every teenager ever had about growing up.

    Lawrence Lipton's fascinating book is one of the first complete, unbiased studies of the strange, important offshoot of society.

    Johnson begins with a sentence seemingly calibrated to the scale of the book he set himself to review: The long-awaited monetary history of the United States by Friedman and Schwartz is in every sense of the term a monumental scholarly achievement--monumental in its sheer bulk, monumental in the definitiveness of its treatment of innumerable issues, large and small . . . monumental, above all, in the theoretical and statistical effort and ingenuity that have been brought to bear on the solution of complex and subtle economic issues.Friedman and Schwartz marshaled massive historical data and sharp analytics to support the claim that monetary policy--steady control of the money supply--matters profoundly in the management of the nation's economy, especially in navigating serious economic fluctuations. In their influential chapter 7, The Great Contraction--which Princeton published in 1965 as a separate paperback--they address the central economic event of the century, the Depression. According to Hugh Rockoff, writing in January 1965: If Great Depressions could be prevented through timely actions by the monetary authority (or by a monetary rule), as Friedman and Schwartz had contended, then the case for market economies was measurably stronger.Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976 for work related to A Monetary History as well as to his other Princeton University Press book, A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957).

    Never lapsing into hapless nostalgia, these conversations with figures as diverse as Jello Biafra, Kathleen Hanna, Noam Chomsky, Henry Rollins, Sleater-Kinney, Ian MacKaye, and many more provide a unique perspective into American punk rock and all that it has inspired (and confounded). Not limited to conversations with musicians, the book includes vital interviews with political organizers, punk entrepreneurs, designers, film-makers, writers, illustrators, and artists of many different media. Punk Planet has consistently explored the crossover of punk with activism, and reflects the currents of the underground while simultaneously challenging the bleak centerism of today's popular American culture.

    At its core are the candid assessments of former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, the only member of Bush's cabinet to leave and speak frankly about how and why the administration has come to its core policies and decisions -- from cutting taxes for the rich to conducting preemptive war.O'Neill's account is supported by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind's interviews with numerous participants in the administration, by transcripts of meetings, and by voluminous documents. The result is a disclosure of breadth and depth unparalleled for an ongoing presidency. As readers are taken to the very epicenter of government, Suskind presents an astonishing picture of a president so carefully managed in his public posture that he is a mystery to most Americans. Now, he is revealed.

    He maintains that the widest possible freedom in content and approach will help ensure narrative fiction's continued vitality.

     Rikki Moore was always the star of the family, easily outshining her younger sister, Stacy, at every turn. Smart, kind, and beautiful, it was no surprise when Rikki met and married the perfect man -- pediatrician Matt Dresden. Her students at 59th Street Elementary School adored her, the church matrons solicited her help on every committee, and everyone wanted the golden couple to put in an appearance at their parties. Stacy? She was just the overweight little sister who couldn't get her love life together. But the world didn't know about the storms that rippled just beneath the surface of Rikki's image of perfection. Ever since she was a teenager there were emotional breakdowns and obsessive behaviors -- secrets that Stacy was left to bear alone. Folks whispered, but they didn't know. When Rikki's husband, Matt, mysteriously disappears, however, the Moore family's carefully constructed image comes crashing down.

    L. Mencken is to be confronted with the sad realization that most of what we find in newspapers and journals today is mere sludge. While an Alexander Cockburn or a Christopher Hitchens can churn out a brilliant, at times almost sublime piece of invective, the sad fact is that for all their talent, they are mere polemicists. Mencken, however, was a true contrarian, and, for that reason, he had far more scope for his talents. It would be quite fair to call him a true American genius whose range and Mark Twain-like skepticism leave the reader sometimes convulsed with laughter, sometimes completely enraged, but always transfixed with admiration.In this volume of more than 600 pages, Mencken has collected more than 100 choice passages, ranging from men, women, and southerners to religion, politics, music, literature, and the arts. This selection is a pure delight, and, while not every piece entertains, one cannot help but be awed by this true polymath and regret not having him around today.Edited and annotated by H.L.M., this is a selection from his out-of-print writings. They come mostly from books—the six of the PREJUDICES series, A BOOK OF BURLESQUES, IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN, NOTES ON DEMOCRACY, MAKING A PRESIDENT, A BOOK OF CALUMNY, TREATISE ON RIGHT AND WRONG—but there are also magazine and newspaper pieces that never got between covers (from the American Mercury, the Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun) and some notes that were never previously published at all.Readers will find edification and amusement in his estimates of a variety of Americans—Woodrow Wilson, Aimee Semple McPherson, Roosevelt I and Roosevelt II, James Gibbons Huneker, Rudolph Valentino, Calvin Coolidge, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreiser, and Walt Whitman. Those musically inclined will enjoy his pieces on Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner, and there is material for a hundred controversies in his selections on Joseph Conrad, Thorstein Veblen, Nietzsche, and Madame Blavatsky.The author chose selections form his out of print writings: his books, magazines and newspaper pieces.(from Barnes & Noble)

    And when she is offered a place as an exchange student at a school in America it seems as if her dreams will be fulfilled. welcoming ... until she starts having to live in the suffocating and repressed atmosphere of their suburban mansion and things begin to go terribly wrong. of American Beauty in its dissection of engrained prejudices and middle-class hypocrisy. In Lou Connor, Hyland has created a larger-than-life protagonist who mesmerises the reader with her vivacity and vulnerability, from hopeful beginning to unexpected, haunting end.