But in the past two decades, revolutionaries have stormed its traditional bastions, making their mark—and their fortunes—modernizing the production and marketing of wine. Noble Rot introduces us to the figures who epitomize the changes sweeping Bordeaux—the noble family behind Château d'Yquem; a stonemason turned winemaker whose wine, made in a garage, sells for $100 a bottle; the Maryland-based critic Robert Parker, whose opinion routinely makes or breaks a wine; the New World operations that have used branding to undercut Bordeaux's supremacy—and delves into the mysteries of the legendary classification of 1855.

    

    It is filled with new interviews with music legends such as Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Alan Jardine, Bruce Johnston, David Marks, Blondie Chaplin, Randy Bachman, Roger McGuinn, John Sebastian, Lyle Lovett, Alice Cooper, and Al Kooper, and commentary from a younger generation such as Matthew Sweet, Carnie Wilson, Daniel Lanois, Cameron Crowe, and Zooey Deschanel. Even hardcore fans will be delighted by the breadth of this musical-history volume. Plans for celebrating the golden anniversary of "America's band" include the long-awaited release of 1967's Smile--the most famous aborted album in rock history--and concerts reuniting the group's five main surviving members. The band's music is as influential as it was 50 years ago, and this retelling of how the iconic rock group found itself in the annals of pop culture couldn't come at a better time.

    As President of the nonprofit group Mercy for Animals and former US Executive Director of Compassion in World Farming, she has led the fight against the sprawling chicken industry that raises billions of birds in cruel conditions--all to satisfy the American appetite for meat.Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry is her story of working alongside the food and farming industry for animal welfare and ethical food. Instead of fighting and protesting and shaming--approaches that simply haven't worked previously--Garcés has instead gotten to know the producers. She has worked alongside owners of the megafarms, befriending them, having frank conversations with them, and ultimately encouraging change through dialogue and discussion. Leah is changing the way America farms her animals through this bold approach, and is helping to directly improve the lives of millions of farmed animals.When she started her journey, Leah did not have much empathy to spare for the chicken-contract farmer--until she actually met one and tried to understand the difficulties they faced. This is the story of what happens when we cross enemy lines to look for solutions. It's a story of giving in to discomfort for the sake of progress. It's a story of the power of human connection, and what happens when we practice empathy toward our enemies.

    Told in rich detail, this novel of sweeping historical fiction will stay with readers long after turning the last page.Madeleine Talmage Force is just seventeen when she attracts the attention of John Jacob “Jack” Astor. Madeleine is beautiful, intelligent, and solidly upper-class, but the Astors are in a league apart. Jack’s mother was the Mrs. Astor, American royalty and New York’s most formidable socialite. Jack is dashing and industrious—a hero of the Spanish-American war, an inventor, and a canny businessman. Despite their twenty-nine-year age difference, and the scandal of Jack’s recent divorce, Madeleine falls headlong into love—and becomes the press’s favorite target.On their extended honeymoon in Egypt, the newlyweds finally find a measure of peace from photographers and journalists. Madeleine feels truly alive for the first time—and is happily pregnant. The couple plans to return home in the spring of 1912, aboard an opulent new ocean liner. When the ship hits an iceberg close to midnight on April 14th, there is no immediate panic. The swift, state-of-the-art RMS Titanic seems unsinkable. As Jack helps Madeleine into a lifeboat, he assures her that he’ll see her soon in New York…Four months later, at the Astors’ Fifth Avenue mansion, a widowed Madeleine gives birth to their son. In the wake of the disaster, the press has elevated her to the status of virtuous, tragic heroine. But Madeleine’s most important decision still lies ahead: whether to accept the role assigned to her, or carve out her own remarkable path…

    ... Chen flips the script with a character-driven narrative, exposing the people who fueled the industry (not necessarily the folks you’d expect) and what motivated them (not necessarily unadulterated greed). Gamers will find this book impossible to put down, as will anyone who loves a good origin story."—Apple Books, Best of the Month selection  "Fans of financial thrillers such as  Barbarians at the Gate  will be excited by this insider account of the dizzying rise of fantasy sports websites"— Publishers Weekly  You've seen the commercials. Here is the untold story behind the clash of billion dollar companies that unleashed an unprecedented advertising war. From Sports Illustrated's Albert Chen comes the story of two companies whose battle unleashed a carpet bombing of advertising as they sought supremacy in an exploding fantasy sports and gambling market: In a time of gushing venture capital money, FanDuel and DraftKings turned into billion-dollar companies seemingly overnight — then, just as quickly, found themselves the target of FBI and Department of Justice investigations, and facing likely destruction. Chen tells the story of the improbable individuals behind the saga: An Irishman who knew nothing about American sports. A fantasy geek who felt it was his destiny to change the way fellow nerds watched the games they loved. A conflicted poker player. A mother of three in Scotland. In a character-driven narrative with excursions into the strange and unexpected, Chen takes us from casinos to board rooms, from Edinburgh to Wall Street to the Vegas Strip, to tell a sprawling and intimate tale of the new world that this group of accidental disruptors helped to create. It’s a story of ideas and dreams, about a world of risk, luck, hubris, greed and redemption—a story for our high-stakes times.

    And we love to fall in love. As children we pour our love into our pets and our friends. As teenagers we fall in love with musicians and actors and the boy whose locker is next to ours. As we mature, we long for romantic love that will last a lifetime. Sacrificial love, unexplainable love, familial love, desperate love. Love songs and love stories. Clearly we were created with the longing for love ingrained in our souls.With lots of wit and a bit of wisdom drawn from a lifetime of falling in love, Lincee Ray invites you to an unabashed celebration of that loving feeling. As she reveals the loves of her life and encourages you to recall your own, you'll discover alongside her that there is only one who can ever truly fulfill the deepest longings of our hearts. And he made us to be part of a divine love story.

    Amos Barshad has long been fascinated by the powerful. But not by elected officials or natural leaders—he’s interested in their scheming advisors, the dark figures who wield power in the shadows. And, as Barshad shows in No One Man Should Have All That Power, the natural habitat of these manipulators is not only political backrooms. It’s anywhere power dynamics exist—from Hollywood to drug cartels, from recording studios to the NFL. In this wildly entertaining, wide-ranging, and insightful exploration of the phenomenon, Barshad takes readers into the lives of more than a dozen of these notorious figures, starting with Grigori Rasputin. An almost mythical Russian mystic, Rasputin drank, danced, and healed his way into a position of power behind the last of the tsars. But not every one of these figures rose to power through lechery or magical cures. Barshad explores how they got there, how they wielded control, what led to their downfall or staved it off, and what lessons we can take from them, including how to spot Rasputins in the wild. Based on interviews with well-known personalities like Scooter Braun (Justin Bieber’s manager), Alex Guerrero (Tom Brady’s trainer), and Sam Nunberg (Trump’s former aide) and original reporting on figures like Nicaragua’s powerful first lady Rosario Murillo and the Tijuana cartel boss known as “Narcomami,” No One Man Should Have All That Poweris an eye-opening book from an exciting new voice.

    Willis, according to prosecutors, was “the kingpin, organizer and leader of a vast conspiracy,” all within the legendarily insular and vicious Chinese mafia.It started when John Willis was 16 years old . . . his life seemed hopeless. His father had abandoned his family years earlier, his older brother had just died of a heart attack, and his mother was dying. John was alone, sleeping on the floor of his deceased brother’s home. Desperate, John reached out to Woping, a young Chinese man Willis had rescued from a bar fight weeks before. Woping literally picks him up off the street, taking him home to live among his own brothers and sisters. Soon, Willis is accompanying Woping to meet his Chinese mobster friends, and starts working for them. Journalist Bob Halloran tells the tale of John Willis, aka White Devil, the only white man to ever rise through the ranks in the Chinese mafia. Willis began as an enforcer, riding around with other gang members to “encourage” people to pay their debts. He soon graduated to even more dangerous work as a full-fledged gang member, barely escaping with his life on several occasions.As a white man navigating an otherwise exclusively Asian world, Willis was at first an interesting anomaly, but his ruthless devotion to his adopted culture eventually led to him emerging as a leader. He organized his own gang of co-conspirators and began an extremely lucrative criminal venture selling tens of thousands of oxycodone pills. A year-long FBI investigation brought him down, and John pleaded guilty to save the love of his life from prosecution. He has no regrets.White Devil explores the workings of the Chinese mafia, and he speaks frankly about his relationships with other gang members, the crimes he committed, and why he’ll never rat out any of his brothers to the cops.Told to Halloran from Willis’s prison cell, White Devil is a shocking portrait of a man who was allowed access into a secret world, and who is paying the price for his hardened life.

    In America men and women wept openly in the streets for their dead leader. But events soon began to unpick the original version of what happened. It turned out that theaofficial report was little more than a crude government whitewash designed to hide the real truth. Even American Presidents admitted as much. President Nixon memorably confessed in private that the Warren Report was the biggest hoax ever perpetuated on the American public. It began to emerge that maybe Lee Harvey Oswald, the original one nut gunman, may not have acted on his own; others were involved, too. That meant no lone gunman, but a conspiracy. This book attempts to answer the big question: who really shot JFK? And, more important still, exactly why was he shot? John Hughes-Wilson argues that the murder of John Kennedy was, like the murder of Julius Caesar 2,000ayears before, nothing less than a bloody coup dOCO(r)tat by his political enemies, a conspiracy hell bent on removing a leader who was threatening the power and the money of the ruling establishment. Pointing the finger at Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, and the Mafia, John joins Jackie and Bobby Kennedy in their conclusion that the assassination of JFK was far more complex than a deranged attack by Lee Harvey Oswald, the 24-year-old ex-Marine."

    Until then, being Jewish in the Netherlands had not been an issue. But by 1941 it had become a matter of life or death. On several occasions, Selma barely avoided being rounded up by the Nazis. While her father was summoned to a work camp and eventually hospitalized in a Dutch transition camp, her mother and sister went into hiding—until they were betrayed in June 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. In an act of defiance and with nowhere else to turn, Selma took on an assumed identity, dyed her hair blond, and joined the Resistance movement, using the pseudonym Margareta van der Kuit. For two years “Marga” risked it all. Using a fake ID, and passing as Aryan, she traveled around the country and even to Nazi headquarters in Paris, sharing information and delivering papers—doing, as she later explained, what “had to be done.” In July 1944 her luck ran out. She was transported to Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp as a political prisoner. Unlike her parents and sister who she later found out died in other camps—Selma survived by using her alias, pretending to be someone else. It was only after the war ended that she could reclaim her identity and dared to say once again: My name is Selma. “We were ordinary people plunged into extraordinary circumstances,” she writes in this “astonishing, inspirational, and important” memoir (Ariana Neumann, author of When Time Stopped). Full of hope and courage, this is Selma’s story in her own words.

    A woman learning to claim her own desires and adventures, Suzanne Roberts encounters lightning and landslides, sharks and piranha-infested waters, a nightclub drugging, burning bodies, and brief affairs as she searches for the love of her life and finally herself. Throughout her travels Roberts tries hard not to be a bad tourist, but owing to her cultural blind spots, things don’t always go as planned. Fearlessly confessional, shamelessly funny, and wholly unapologetic, Roberts offers a refreshingly honest account of the joys and absurdities of confronting new landscapes and cultures, as well as new versions of herself. Raw, bawdy, and self-effacing, Bad Tourist is a journey packed with delights and surprises—both of the greater world and of the mysterious workings of the heart.

    Within a week of setting sail, they were all caught up in the horrifying disaster of the Titanic’s sinking, one of the biggest news stories of the century. Today, we can see their stories and the Titanic’s voyage as the beginning of the end of the established hierarchy of the Edwardian era. Writing in his elegant signature prose and using previously unpublished sources, deck plans, journal entries, and surviving artifacts, Gareth Russell peers through the portholes of these first-class travelers to immerse us in a time of unprecedented change in British and American history. Through their intertwining lives, he examines social, technological, political, and economic forces such as the nuances of the British class system, the explosion of competition in the shipping trade, the birth of the movie industry, the Irish Home Rule Crisis, and the Jewish-American immigrant experience while also recounting their intimate stories of bravery, tragedy, and selflessness. Masterful in its superb grasp of the forces of history, gripping in its moment-by-moment account of the sinking, revelatory in discounting long-held myths, and lavishly illustrated with color and black and white photographs, this absorbing, accessible, and authoritative account of the Titanic’s life and death is destined to become the definitive book on the subject.

     Let me test my presumption with a preview of four these ‘old’ stories. If I told you there was once a west coast sex cult with dozens of young girls, single ladies, and married women, who all fornicated with one well-endowed “prophet,” and he occasionally found it necessary to carry-out bondage S&M sessions here and there, you may not be surprised at all. But what if that sex cult began in 1903 and ended in 1906 with a couple of murders and suicides, does that sound like anything you have read about before? Or, how about a cheater who murders his inconvenient wife, disassembles her over a fifteen hour period, then puts her bones in the same stove he cooks breakfast for his sons before sending them off to school? If that doesn’t surprise you, perhaps the ending will–but you’ll have to find out for yourself. In ‘The Dandy and the Squire,’ a smooth-talking peacock from Kentucky visits his northern ‘cousins,’ and charms three of the women into his bed. He’s a big time operator who talks fancy, dresses fancy, and tells great stories of his days as an adventurer, riverboat gambler, and sharp-minded deal maker. He’s so smooth, he’s able to murder the patriarch’s son, make him look like the bad guy, and marry the boy’s tender-hearted sister before the Yankees get wise to his lies. Good thing, too, because he had also talked the father into giving him the family farm. Chapter Five is the stranger-than-fiction story of ‘Shoebox Annie.’ During the early 20th Century, this trollish-looking woman introduced her freakish-looking son to a life of crime. Their decade’s long spree of lyin’, cheatin’, and stealin’ led them to become America’s first mother and son team of serial killers. They were so good at disposing of bodies, none of their four victims have ever been found. If ‘old’ stories sound boring to readers of contemporary true crime, I hope this book will change minds, and fully reveal just how wicked and decadent our ancestors were. And deadly. Volume II in the Vintage True Crime Stories series is a wrecking ball that smashes to pieces that phrase, “The Good Old Days.” Maybe you will believe me when you get to the last page.

    On November 1, 2017, the Houston Astros defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in an epic seven game battle to become 2017 World Series champs. For the Astros, the combination of a magnificently played series, a 101-victory season, and the devastation Hurricane Harvey brought to their city was so incredible it might give Hollywood screenwriters pause. The nation's fourth-largest city, still reeling in the wake of disaster, was smiling again. The Astros' first-ever World Series victory is a great baseball story, but it's also the story of a major American city -- a city (and a state) that the rest of the nation doesn't always love or understand--becoming a sentimental favorite because of its grace and good will in response to the largest natural disaster in American history. The Astros' miracle season is also the fascinating tale of a thoroughly modern team. Constructed by NASA-inspired analytics, the team's data-driven system took the game to a more sophisticated level than the so-called Moneyball approach. The team's new owner, Jim Crane, bought into the system and was willing to endure humiliating seasons in the baseball wilderness with the hope, shared by few initially, that success comes to those who wait. And he was right. But no data-crunching could take credit for a team of likeable, refreshingly good-natured young men who wore "Houston Strong" patches on their jerseys and meant it--guys like shortstop Carlos Correa, who kept a photo in his locker of a Houston woman trudging through fetid water up to her knees. The Astros foundation included George Springer, a powerful slugger and rangy outfielder; third-baseman Alex Bregman, whose defensive play and clutch hitting were crucial in the series; and, of course, the stubby and tenacious second baseman Jose Altuve, the heart and soul of the team.Hurricane Season is Houston Chronicle columnist Joe Holley's moving account of this extraordinary team--and the extraordinary circumstances of their championship.