You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The hidden history of the haunted and beloved city of New Orleans, told through the intersecting lives of nine remarkable characters. “Nine Lives is stunning work. Dan Baum has immersed himself in New Orleans, the most fascinating city in the United States, and illuminated it in a way that is as innovative as Tom Wolfe on hot rods and Truman Capote on a pair of murderers. Full of stylistic brilliance and deep insight and an overriding compassion, Nine Lives is an instant classic of creative nonfiction.” —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain Nine Lives is a multivoiced biography of a dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city, told through the lives of night unforgettable characters and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed New Orleans in the 1960s, and Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. Dan Baum brings the kaleidoscopic portrait to life, showing us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved. BONUS: This edition contains a Nine Lives discussion guide.
Dan Baum is a gun fanatic. He is also Jewish Democrat who grew up in suburban New Jersey. In Gun Guys, he takes us on a guided tour of gun stores and gun shows, shooting ranges and festivals, contests and auctions, trying to figure out what draws so many of us to guns in the first place. Is it just part of being American? Introducing a wide cast of characters, Baum shows both sides of the gun culture in America, bringing an entire world vividly to life, and in doing so helping to find a middle ground in the gun debate, where actual conversation can take place.
Argues that despite increasing levels of government action, illicit drugs are more readily available than ever, and analyzes the failure of our drug policy
In-depth analysis of the derivative action in Asia - a critical part of Asian corporate law and governance.
Name by Jonathon Yardly of the Washington Post as one of the best books of 2000, Citizen Coors combines a monumental business story with a heartrending tale of family strife and a sweeping vista of American politics in the last half of the twentieth century. From the moment when the dsitute Prussian Adolph Coors stows away to America in 1868, through the creation of the Heritage Foundation, to the global expansion of the billion-dollar Coors Brewing Company, the Coors family triumphed by iron-willed commitment to its own values -- values that ironically prove the family's undoing on both the business and political fronts. Acclaimed writer Dan Baum captures it all, from Adolph's Prohibition-provoked suicide to the banishment of an heir-apparent for marrying without permission. Baum vividly depicts the genius, eccentricity, and tragic weaknesses of the remarkable Coors family.
Massing confronts the failure of the "war on drugs" and documents the much greater potential for reclaiming drug addicts that can be had by treatment and support rather than criminalization, and at a lower cost than building ever more prisons and militarizing drug source countries in Latin America.
Society's drug problem will persist, and debates over how to solve it will continue, getting nowhere, until we define our terms. This book is an effort to do just that--to parse the legal, moral, and philosophical underpinnings for any discussion of drug policy. Does liberal political theory, with its commitment to individual freedom, offer any guidance in the matter of drugs, particularly regarding their legal status? Do the commitments that citizens of liberal democracies make--commitments to ideals such as rationality, equality, justice, and democratic forms of decision-making--have implications for drug policy? These are the questions addressed in this volume, which explores the possibil...
“Champy’s engaging prose, fascinating success stories, penetrating reflections, and provocative challenges to the status quo capture your full attention from the first page to the last and leave your mind swirling with new thoughts about how to exploit opportunities in a very different world.” – Ray Stata, Founder and Chairman of the Board, Analog Devices, Inc. “To outsmart or be outsmarted, that is the question in modern business. Jim Champy has found the answer, in fact many answers, by looking inside amazingly successful companies. And he tells their simple stories in this book that is so delightfully short it can be read on one flight.” – Dr. Robert “Bob” Metcalfe, Gene...
“An in-depth and compelling account of diverse Americans living off the grid.” —Los Angeles Times The radical search for the simple life in today’s America. On a frigid April night, a classically trained opera singer, five months pregnant, and her husband, a former marine biologist, disembark an Amtrak train in La Plata, Missouri, assemble two bikes, and pedal off into the night, bound for a homestead they've purchased, sight unseen. Meanwhile, a horticulturist, heir to the Great Migration that brought masses of African Americans to Detroit, and her husband, a product of the white flight from it, have turned to urban farming to revitalize the blighted city they both love. And near Mi...
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams comes this transformative work showing that sometimes the recovery is more gripping than the addiction. With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction -- both her own and others' -- and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the...