He had staggered into a Boston cop’s apartment, helping himself to the sellable stuff and all the beer in the fridge. The cop came home, found Jim passed out at the kitchen table, beat the hell out of him, and arrested him.But Wahlberg, a 130-pound kid from Dorchester, had learned some things from his life on the street and his first prison sentence. He knew how to survive. And he knew that if he wanted to avoid serving the full sentence, he would have to do something.He did what he was best at: He hustled. He would create the illusion that he was trying to change, that he’d become the model prisoner, not a guy hell-bent on getting out while he was still young enough to drink more, steal more, and do more drugs.He didn’t know, though, that the Catholic priest he was trying to hustle was actually hustling him.The Big Hustle is the story of a redeemed life and a family’s healing. This is the no-holds-barred, unvarnished, and sometimes brutal true story of Jim Wahlberg, the fifth of nine kids growing up in a working-class Irish Catholic neighborhood outside of Boston, hustling for attention any way he could get it, which led him to the biggest hustle of his life. Against all odds he got clean, he got out, and he got the girl. Jim dedicated his new life as a former addict to working with addicts, and for years has spread the word that recovery is possible.But nothing could have prepared him for what came next. His discovery that his own son was an addict threw Jim into a crisis—one that led him deeper into his faith and led to healing he never thought possible. This book is a testament to God’s power and an invitation to all of us to hope in the darkest places.

    Often the only boy in the dance studio, he was called a sissy, a term he wore like a badge of honor. He was unlike anyone else, deeply gifted and spirited.Moving to New York at nineteen, he arrived to one of the great booms of dance in America. Audiences in 1976 had the luxury of Merce Cunningham's finest experiments with time and space, of Twyla Tharp's virtuosity, and Lucinda Childs's genius. Morris was flat broke but found a group of likeminded artists that danced together, travelled together, slept together. No one wanted to break the spell or miss a thing, because "if you missed anything, you missed everything." This collective, led by Morris's fiercely original vision, became the famed Mark Morris Dance Group.Suddenly, Morris was making a fast ascent. Celebrated by The New Yorker's critic as one of the great young talents, an androgynous beauty in the vein of Michelangelo's David, he and his company had arrived. Collaborations with the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Yo-Yo Ma, Lou Harrison, and Howard Hodgkin followed. And so did controversy: from the circus of his tenure at La Monnaie in Belgium to his work on the biggest flop in Broadway history. But through the Reagan-Bush era, the worst of the AIDS epidemic, through rehearsal squabbles and backstage intrigues, Morris emerged as one of the great visionaries of modern dance, a force of nature with a dedication to beauty and a love of the body, an artist as joyful as he is provocative.Out Loud is the bighearted and outspoken story of a man as formidable on the page as he is on the boards. With unusual candor and disarming wit, Morris's memoir captures the life of a performer who broke the mold, a brilliant maverick who found his home in the collective and liberating world of music and dance.