What does Charles Darwin have in common with Johannes Gutenberg, or with Jackson Pollock, Martin Luther, Betty Friedan, Steve Jobs, and DJ Kool Herc? They were the disruptors, upending cultural, technical, spiritual, or scientific paradigms and altering the way we live forever. In this book, bestselling author Alan Axelrod presents engaging profiles, accompanied by original line drawings, of fifty visionaries who rewrote the rules and changed the...

Collected in one volume, three counterculture classics that embody the spirit of the 1960s.
 
Included here are three great works by the incomparable Richard Brautigan:
 
Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through the country’s rural waterways—a book “that has very little to do with trout fishing and a lot to...

Roll the Bones tells the story of gambling: where it came from, how it has changed, and where it is now. This is the new Casino Edition. which updates and expands the global history of gambling to include a greater focus on casinos, from their development in European spas to their growth in Reno and Las Vegas. New material chronicles in greater depth the development of casino resorts on the Las Vegas Strip and their spread throughout the United States....

Savage Girls and Wild Boys is a fascinating history of extraordinary children, brought up by animals, raised in the wilderness, or locked up for long years in solitary confinement. Wild or feral children have fascinated us through the centuries, and continue to do so today. In a haunting and hugely readable study, Michael Newton deftly investigates a number of infamous cases. He looks at Peter the Wild Boy, who gripped the attention of Swift and...

How did marriage, considered a religious duty in medieval Europe, become a venue for personal fulfillment in contemporary America? How did the notion of romantic love, a novelty in the Middle Ages, become a prerequisite for marriage today? And, if the original purpose of marriage was procreation, what exactly is the purpose of marriage for women now? Combining "a scholar's rigor and a storyteller's craft"(San Jose Mercury News), distinguished cultural...

In this vibrant, high-spirited history, medievalist Eleanor Janega turns to the Middle Ages to unfurl its suppositions about women and reveal what's shifted over time--and what hasn't. Enshrined medieval thinkers, almost always male, subscribed to classical Greek and Roman philosophy and Christian theology for their concepts of the sexes, deriding women as oversexed sinners, inherently lustful, insatiable, and weak. In contrast, drawing on accounts...

A funny and provocative cultural history of class, manners, and the decline of civility In his smart and thought provoking new book, literary/social critic Mark Caldwell gives us a history of the demise of manners and charts the progress of an epidemic of rudeness in America. The breakdown of civility has in recent years become a national obsession, and our modern climate of boorishness has cultivated a host of etiquette watchdogs, like Miss Manners...

A classic masterwork newly updated The electrifying true story of the rise and fall of New York's notorious Bonanno crime family On New York's Park Avenue on a rainy Tuesday night in October 1964, the famous Mafia chieftain Joseph Bonanno was kidnapped by two mobsters and reported by the police as dead on the following morning. More than a year later, Bonanno mysteriously reappeared, setting off a bloody mob feud that came to be known as the "Banana...

A riveting account, at once a reconstruction of the race to find a cure, a history of bubonic plague, and an investigation into the threat of plague today Plague. The very word carries an unholy resonance. No other disease can claim its apocalyptic or mythological power. It can lie dormant for centuries, only to resurface with ferocious, nation-killing force. Here, with the high drama of a great adventure tale, Edward Marriott unravels the story...