by Rafael Alvarez (2004)
THE WIRE is one of the most critically acclaimed drama series in the history of television. It portrays the war of attrition between Baltimore's hardened police force and its drug dealers, and the blurring of good and evil, justice and injustice, and right and wrong that happens every day as men and women struggle against the insitutions they are bound up in. Over its five series it has built up a detailed, rich and layered portrait of Baltimore: from its corner boys touting dope and its dock workers facing extinction, through the strained education system and tainted halls of power, to the crumbling media establishment. Rafael Alvarez - a reporter, essayist and staff writer for the show - brings the reader inside this world, detailing many of the real-life incidents and personalities that inspired the show's storylines and characters. Packed with photographs and featuring an introduction by the show's creator and executive producer David Simon, as well as essays by acclaimed authors George Pelecanos and Laura Lippman, THE WIRE: TRUTH BE TOLD covers all five series in glorious detail.
Terry Deary
"The Horrible Histories Annual 2016 is a must-have for all Horrible Histories fans. Packed with foul facts, gory games, dreadful jokes, quick quizzes and putrid puzzles - it's the annual with rat-itude! Discover all the dreadful details about your favourite eras of history from the Rotten Romans, to the Terrible Tudors and the Gorgeous Georgians to the Woeful World Wars. History has never been so horrible!"--Publisher description.
Léonie J. Archer
Bringing together normally self-contained areas of research, this book presents penetrating analyses of the nature and perpetuation of slavery through the ages.
David Hajdu
Heroes and Villains is the first collection of essays by David Hajdu, award-winning author of The Ten-Cent Plague, Positively 4th Street, and Lush Life. Eclectic and controversial, Hajdu's essays take on topics as varied as pop music, jazz, the avant-garde, comic books, and our downloading culture. The heart of Heroes and Villains is an extraordinary new piece of cultural rediscovery, original to this book. It tells the untold story of one of the most important—and, ultimately, one of the most tragic—figures in American popular music, Billy Eckstine. Through exhaustive new research, Hajdu shows how this great, forgotten singer, once more popular than Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, transformed American music by combining sex appeal, sophistication, and black machismo—in the era of segregation. The cost, for Eckstine, was his career—and nearly his life. Other essays in this expansive book deal with topical and surprising subjects like Beyonce, Bobby Darin, Kanye West, Marjane Satrapi, Woody Guthrie, Will Eisner, the White Stripes, Elmer Fudd, Elvis Costello, Harry Partch, Ray Charles, Joni Mitchell, and more.
Stacy Horn
Rain barrels that refill themselves. Psychic horses. Mind-reading Cold War spies. For many, these phenomena are evidence of an unseen world just beyond the grasp of our five senses. For a group of scientists at Duke University, such mysteries demanded further investigation. From 1930 to 1980, under the leadership of Dr. J. B. Rhine, often considered the Einstein of the paranormal, the scientists at the Duke Parapsychology Lab attempted to test the bizarre, the frightening, and the unexplainable against the rigors of science.In Unbelievable, Stacy Horn reveals the strange, lost history of these first attempts to prove—or disprove—the existence of the paranormal, bringing to light a half-century's worth of ghost stories, poltergeists, and paranormal activity. The Duke scientists were queried by the likes of Albert Einstein, Richard Nixon, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, and Helen Keller; the U.S. Army and blue-chip corporations such as IBM and Zenith seized upon their findings.Investigating telepathy, clairvoyance, ghosts, poltergeists, and the myriad other strange phenomena that people claim to have experienced, the scientists did find proof that the human mind can exhibit telepathic powers—but their discovery would put them at odds with both the scientific community and the community of believers at large, beginning a multidecade battle among unyielding critics, die-hard believers, and scientists themselves. Yet Horn reveals that between the power of belief and the promise of scientific investigation, there is room for everyone to acknowledge that the truth is out there.