His unique, melodic compositions were released on the Prestige jazz label. In the late 1960s the Viking-garbed Moondog was a pop music sensation on Columbia Records. Moondog is the noted inspiration for the contemporary freak folk movement led by Devendra Banhart.Moondog's compositional style influenced his former roommate, Philip Glass, whose Preface and performances of Moondog works appear in the book. Moondog's work transcends labels and redefines the distinction between popular and high culture. A CD compilation with a variety of Moondog's compositions is bound into the book.The CD tracklisting is as follows:1: Caribea (1:32)Performer/Composer: Moondog2: To a Sea Horse (1:43)Performer/Composer: Moondog3: Trees Against the Sky (.51)Performer/Composer: Moondog4: Oo Debut (1:09)Performer/Composer: Moondog5: Autumn (2:07)Performer/Composer: Moondog6: Moondog Monologue (8:24)Performer/Composer: Moondog7: Moondog’s Theme (1:53)Performer/Composer: Moondog8: Trimbas in Quarters (1:47)Performer/Composer: Moondog9: I Came Into This World Alone (1:19)Performers: Moondog, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Jon GibsonComposer: Moondog10: Be a Hobo (1:22)Performers: Moondog, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Jon GibsonComposer: Moondog11: Why Spend the Dark Night With You (1:40)Performers: Moondog, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Jon GibsonComposer: Moondog12: All is Loneliness (1:38)Performers: Moondog, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Jon GibsonComposer: Moondog13: Organ Rounds (2:04)Performer/Composer: Moondog14: Canon in F Major, Book I (.43)Performer: Paul JordanComposer: Moondog15: Canon in B Flat Major, Book III (1:36)Performer: Paul JordanComposer: Moondog16: Canon in B Flat Major, Book I (.43)Performer: Paul JordanComposer: Moondog17: Canon in B Flat Major, Book II (.28)Performer: Paul JordanComposer: Moondog18: Canon in G Sharp Minor, Book I (.44)Performer: Paul JordanComposer: Moondog19: Canon in C Sharp Minor, Book II (1:32)Performer: Paul JordanComposer: Moondog20: 5/4 Snakebite Rattle (3:41)Performer: Stefan LakatosComposer: Moondog21: Trimbas and Woodblock in 5/2 (1:26)Performer: Stefan LakatosComposer: Moondog22: When I Am Deep in Sleep (2:17)Performer: Stefan LakatosComposer: Moondog23: Rabbit Hop (2:25)Performer/Composer: Moondog24: Dog Trot (2:25)Performer/Composer: Moondog25: Bird’s Lament (2:00)Performer/Composer: Moondog26: Viking 1 (2:55)Performer/Composer: Moondog27: Heimdall Fanfare (3:06)Performer/Composer: Moondog28: Intro and Overtone Continuum (2:22)Performer/Composer: Moondog

    A former cult member, now a counselor helping those affected by destructive cults, Hassan exposes the troubling facts about cults' recruitment, their use of psychological manipulation, and their often subtle influence on government, the legal system, and society as a whole.  This updated paperback edition includes a new preface by the author and an expanded bibliography and resource list.

    Illustrated.

    Alive with the outrageous personalities and revolutionary upheavals of a time that changed the world, Hippie is trippy and true to the spirit of a time unlike any other. Far out, man!

    presidents join the Thirteen Club? What is the only major New York hotel that has a thirteenth floor? In 13, a fascinating cultural history-cum-detective story, Nathaniel Lachenmeyer gets to the root of how one superstition—the fear of the number 13—developed among wildly divergent societies. A book about mythmaking, 13 explores why people believe what they believe, and the real reason Friday the 13th is the most unlucky day in the world.

    But twenty years later, Crowley’s name and image were everywhere. The Beatles put him on the cover of  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Rolling Stones were briefly serious devotees. Today, his visage hangs in goth clubs, occult temples, and college dorm rooms, and his methods of ceremonial magick animate the passions of myriad occultists and spiritual seekers. Aleister Crowley is more than just a biography of this compelling, controversial, and divisive figure—it’s also a portrait of his unparalleled influence on modern pop culture.

    This text describes the practice, theory, and underlying rationale of black magic in all its branches - the summoning and control of evil spirits, necromancy, psychic attack, devil worship, witchcraft, evil charms and spells - as well as other branches of occult theory.

    The great psychologist dreamed that his work was understood by a wide public, rather than just by psychiatrists, and therefore he agreed to write and edit this fascinating book. Here, Jung examines the full world of the unconscious, whose language he believed to be the symbols constantly revealed in dreams. Convinced that dreams offer practical advice, sent from the unconscious to the conscious self, Jung felt that self-understanding would lead to a full and productive life. Thus, the reader will gain new insights into himself from this thoughtful volume, which also illustrates symbols throughout history. Completed just before his death by Jung and his associates, it is clearly addressed to the general reader.

    In Can't Find My Way Home, journalist and filmmaker Martin Torgoff chronicles what a long strange trip it's been as the American Century became the Great Stoned Age. Weaving together first-person accounts and historical background, Can't Find My Way Home is a narrative vast in scope yet rich in intimate detail. Torgoff tells the stories of those whose lives became synonymous with the drug culture, from Charlie Parker, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and John Belushi to ordinary people who felt their consciousness "expanded" or who plumbed the depths of addiction. He also examines the broader impact of drugs on society and politics, from the war on drugs to the recovery movement, and the continuing debate over drug policy. A vivid work of cultural history that neither demonizes nor romanticizes its subject, Can't Find My Way Home is a provocative and fascinating look at how drugs have entered the American mainstream.

    Written with a perfect blend of curiosity and respect, Rapture Ready! is an insightful, enlightening, and weird journey through Christian pop culture--with it pulpy novels, music, creationism museums, and more--by talented New Yorker writer Radosh.

    Unique among nations, America is deeply religious, religiously diverse, and remarkably tolerant. But in recent decades the nation's religious landscape has been reshaped. America has experienced three seismic shocks, say Robert Putnam and David Campbell. In the 1960s, religious observance plummeted. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, a conservative reaction produced the rise of evangelicalism and the Religious Right. Since the 1990s, however, young people, turned off by that linkage between faith and conservative politics, have abandoned organized religion. The result has been a growing polarization—the ranks of religious conservatives and secular liberals have swelled, leaving a dwindling group of religious moderates in between. At the same time, personal interfaith ties are strengthening. Interfaith marriage has increased while religious identities have become more fluid. Putnam and Campbell show how this denser web of personal ties brings surprising interfaith tolerance, notwithstanding the so-called culture wars. American Grace is based on two of the most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America. It includes a dozen in-depth profiles of diverse congregations across the country, which illuminate how the trends described by Putnam and Campbell affect the lives of real Americans. Nearly every chapter of American Grace contains a surprise about American religious life. Among them:● Between one-third and one-half of all American marriages are interfaith; ● Roughly one-third of Americans have switched religions at some point in their lives; ● Young people are more opposed to abortion than their parents but more accepting of gay marriage; ● Even fervently religious Americans believe that people of other faiths can go to heaven; ● Religious Americans are better neighbors than secular Americans—more generous with their time and treasure even for secular causes—but the explanation has less to do with faith than with their communities of faith; ● Jews are the most broadly popular religious group in America today. American Grace promises to be the most important book in decades about American religious life and an essential book for understanding the United States today.

    Perhaps you've seen their pickets on the news, the members holding signs with messages that are too offensive to copy here, protesting at events such as the funerals of soldiers, the 9-year old victim of the recent Tucson shooting, and Elizabeth Edwards, all in front of their grieving families. The WBC is fervently anti-gay, anti-Semitic, and anti- practically everything and everyone. And they aren't going anywhere: in March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the WBC's right to picket funerals.Since no organized religion will claim affiliation with the WBC, it's perhaps more accurate to think of them as a cult. Lauren Drain was thrust into that cult at the age of 15, and then spat back out again seven years later.Lauren spent her early years enjoying a normal life with her family in Florida. But when her formerly liberal and secular father set out to produce a documentary about the WBC, his detached interest gradually evolved into fascination, and he moved the entire family to Kansas to join the church and live on their compound. Over the next seven years, Lauren fully assimilated their extreme beliefs, and became a member of the church and an active and vocal picketer. But as she matured and began to challenge some of the church's tenets, she was unceremoniously cast out from the church and permanently cut off from her family and from everyone else she knew and loved.Banished is the story of Lauren's fight to find herself amidst dramatic changes in a world of extremists and a life in exile.

    From our colonial past to the present, the monster in all its various forms has been a staple of American culture. A masterful survey of our grim and often disturbing past, Monsters in America uniquely brings together history and culture studies to expose the dark obsessions that have helped create our national identity.Monsters are not just fears of the individual psyche, historian Scott Poole explains, but are concoctions of the public imagination, reactions to cultural influences, social change, and historical events. Conflicting anxieties about race, class, gender, sexuality, religious beliefs, science, and politics manifest as haunting beings among the populace. From Victorian-era mad scientists to modern-day serial killers, new monsters appear as American society evolves, paralleling fluctuating challenges to the cultural status quo. Consulting newspaper accounts, archival materials, personal papers, comic books, films, and oral histories, Poole adroitly illustrates how the creation of the monstrous "other" not only reflects society's fears but shapes actual historical behavior and becomes a cultural reminder of inhuman acts.

    Boorstin explores the development of artistic innovation over 3,000 years. A hugely ambitious chronicle of the arts that Boorstin delivers with the scope that made his Discoverers a national bestseller.

    A loving home, shared with squabbling siblings, overseen by devoted parents. Yet in other ways it was the precise opposite: a revolving door of TV camera crews and documentary makers, a world of extreme discipline, of siblings vanishing in the night.Megan Phelps-Roper was raised in the Westboro Baptist Church - the fire-and-brimstone religious sect at once aggressively homophobic and anti-Semitic, rejoiceful for AIDS and natural disasters, and notorious for its picketing the funerals of American soldiers. From her first public protest, aged five, to her instrumental role in spreading the church's invective via social media, her formative years brought their difficulties. But being reviled was not one of them. She was preaching God's truth. She was, in her words, 'all in'.In November 2012, at the age of twenty-six, she left the church, her family, and her life behind. Unfollow is a story about the rarest thing of all: a person changing their mind. It is a fascinating insight into a closed world of extreme belief, a biography of a complex family, and a hope-inspiring memoir of a young woman finding the courage to find compassion for others, as well as herself.