“A delightfully weird . . . journey that includes crazed pharmacists, a guy named Buddha Cheese, and an interstate road trip with a trunk full of pot.” —A. J. Jacobs, New York Times–bestselling author Alfred Ryan Nerz is a Yale-educated author, journalist, and TV producer. He’s also a longtime marijuana enthusiast who has made it his mission to better understand America’s long-standing love-hate relationship with our favorite (sometimes) illegal drug. His cross-country investigation started out sensibly enough: taking classes at a cannabis college, hanging out with a man who gets three hundred pre-rolled joints per month from the federal government, and visiting the world’s largest medical marijuana dispensary. But his journey took an unexpected turn and he found himself embedded with one of the largest growers and dealers on the West Coast. He quickly transformed into an underworld apprentice—surrounded by pit bulls, exotic drugs, beanbags full of cash, and trunks full of weed. But while struggling to navigate the eccentric characters and rampant paranoia of the black market, he maintained enough equanimity to explore a number of vital questions: Is marijuana hurting or helping us? How is it affecting our lungs, our brains, and our ambitions? Is it truly addictive, and if so, are too many of us dependent on it? Should we legalize it? Does he need to quit? As entertaining as it is illuminating, Marijuanamerica is one man’s attempt to humanize the myriad hot-button topics surrounding the nation’s obsession with weed, while learning something about himself along the way. “These wacky accounts rival T.C. Boyle’s fine novel Budding Prospects in showing the highly misguided paranoia that can be cured—or accentuated—by consumption of the marijuana plant’s sticky blossoms.” —Pasatiempo

LEARN TO GROW AN OUTDOOR 5 POUND MINIMUM MEDICAL MARIJUANA PLANT CONSISTENTLY! HOW TO INCREASE YIELDS, IMPROVE QUALITY, AND SAVE MONEY EVERY CYCLE ON YOUR INDOOR AND OUTDOOR! This is not a Beginners grow manual! It is designed for the master gardener who wants to refine his or her techniques and constantly improve. Learn to grow Nor-Cal style and become your own expert. Relevant to both Indoor and Outdoor gardens, and all Medical growers, this book will take you to the next level!

Jon Hart is not a professional athlete. His one major sports victory is a world championship in roller basketball, which is basketball on in-line skates. More than ten years ago, he started pursuing his own bucket list and embarked on a hilarious and insightful journey into the furthest reaches of the sports world.

Mark Binelli turns his sharp, forceful prose to fiction, in an inventive retelling of the outrageous life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, a bluesman with one hit and a string of inflammatory guises He came on stage in a coffin, carried by pallbearers, drunk enough to climb into his casket every night. Onstage he wore a cape, clamped a bone to his nose, and carried a staff topped with a human skull. Offstage, he insisted he'd been raised by a tribe of Blackfoot Indians, that he'd joined the army at fourteen, that he'd defeated the middleweight boxing champion of Alaska, that he'd fathered seventy-five illegitimate children. The R&B wildman Screamin' Jay Hawkins only had a single hit, the classic "I Put a Spell On You," and was often written off as a clownish novelty act -- or worse, an offense to his race -- but his myth-making was legendary. In his second novel, Mark Binelli embraces the man and the legend to create a hilarious, tragic, fantastical portrait of this unlikeliest of protagonists. Hawkins saw his life story as a wild picaresque, and Binelli's novel follows suit, tackling the subject in a dazzling collage-like style. At Rolling Stone, Binelli has profiled some of the greatest musicians of our time, and this novel deftly plays with the inordinate focus on "authenticity" in so much music writing about African-Americans. An entire novel built around a musician as deliberately inauthentic as Screamin' Jay Hawkins thus becomes a sort of subversive act, as well as an extremely funny and surprisingly moving one.

Journalist Ryan Nerz spent a year penetrating the highest echelons of international competitive eating and Eat This Book is the fascinating and gut-bustingly hilarious account of his journey. Nerz gives us all the facts about the history of the IFOCE (Independent Federation of Competitive Eating)--from the story of a clever Nathan's promotion that began in 1916 on the corner of Surf and Stillwell in Coney Island to the intricacies of individual international competitions, the controversial Belt of Fat Theory and the corporate wars to control this exploding sport. He keeps the reader turning the pages as we are swept up in the lives of Sonya "The Black Widow" Thomas, "Cookie" Jarvis, "Hungry" Charles Hardy, and many other top gurgitators whose egos and secret agendas, hopes and dreams are revealed in dramatic detail. As Nerz goes on his own quest to become a top gurgitator, we become obsessed with him as he lies awake at night in physical pain from downing dozens of burgers and learning to chug gallons of water to expand his increasingly abused stomach. Sparing no one's appetite, Nerz reveals the training, game-day strategies and after-effects of competition in this delectably shocking banquet of gluttony and glory on the competitive eating circuit.

"...a transnational musical exploration by an unsettled self and soul, from the newest enfant terrible to arrive on our music scene." -Outsmart Magazine. "..a harrowing, moving, glowing book... 88x50 is one of the finest memoirs by any performing artist, and a powerful testament to the great American project of self-invention and mastery. Adam Tendler is an astonishing pianist and a brilliant writer, altogether in a class of his own."-Rick Whitaker, author of An Honest Ghost and Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling A music school misfit escapes to the highway with a ramshackle recital tour called America 88x50-eighty-eight piano keys by fifty states-winging it from the front seat of his Hyundai and bringing free performances of seldom-heard, modern American music to some of the country's most isolated corners. It's an all-American road trip with a modern music twist, but behind the public façade is a musical Johnny Appleseed desperate to find himself and spiraling into a secret life that could lead just as easily from ultimate self-acceptance to ultimate self-destruction. In this pedal-to-the-metal literary debut, complete with a free online companion offering nearly 200 multimedia features, Adam Tendler takes readers for an unforgettable ride into the classical music odyssey that beat the odds, shaped an artist, and shook this nation one piano at a time. Adam Tendler thrives on challenge. A virtuoso pianist attracted to the most demanding scores, he performs them from memory. A freelance artist whose fearlessness and nerve has seen him through highwire performances (without a net) at Carnegie Hall, he has shown up in rinky-dink churches from Alabama to Alaska to play modernist American music for 50 small handfuls of ruffians and little old ladies who must have thought they were hearing something like the music of the end of the world as he made his way, usually on a catastrophic, ill-tuned piano, through a program that would challenge even big-city sophisticates and Europeans. Meanwhile he burst out of the closet and transformed himself from music student to world-class artist-and wrote a harrowing, moving, glowing book about it. "88x50" is one of the finest memoirs by any performing artist, and a powerful testament to the great American project of self-invention and mastery. Adam Tendler is an astonishing pianist and a brilliant writer, altogether in a class of his own.--Rick Whitaker, author of An Honest Ghost and Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling

Sharply observant, laugh-out-loud funny comics from The Believer cartoonist and New York Times illustrator My Dirty Dumb Eyes is the highly anticipated debut collection from award-winning cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt. In a few short years, Hanawalt has made a name for herself: her intricately detailed, absurdly funny comics have appeared in venues as wide and varied as The Hairpin, VanityFair.com, Lucky Peach, Saveur, The New York Times, and The Believer. My Dirty Dumb Eyes intermingles drawings, paintings, single-panel gag jokes, funny lists, and anthropomorphized animals, all in the service of satirical, startlingly observant commentary on pop culture, contemporary society, and human idiosyncrasies. Her wild sense of humor contrasts strikingly with the carefully rendered lines and flawless draftsmanship that are Hanawalt trademarks. Whether she’s revealing the secret lives of celebrity chefs or explaining that what dogs really want is a tennis-ball bride, My Dirty Dumb Eyes will have readers rolling in the aisles, as Hanawalt’s insights into human (and animal) behavior startle and delight time and again.

"Sustainability is about contributing to a society that everybody benefits from, not just going organic because you don't want to die from cancer or have a difficult pregnancy. What is a sustainable restaurant? It's one in which as the restaurant grows, the people grow with it."-from Behind the Kitchen Door How do restaurant workers live on some of the lowest wages in America? And how do poor working conditions-discriminatory labor practices, exploitation, and unsanitary kitchens-affect the meals that arrive at our restaurant tables? Saru Jayaraman, who launched the national restaurant workers' organization Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, sets out to answer these questions by following the lives of restaurant workers in New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Detroit, and New Orleans. Blending personal narrative and investigative journalism, Jayaraman shows us that the quality of the food that arrives at our restaurant tables depends not only on the sourcing of the ingredients. Our meals benefit from the attention and skill of the people who chop, grill, sauté, and serve. Behind the Kitchen Door is a groundbreaking exploration of the political, economic, and moral implications of dining out. Jayaraman focuses on the stories of individuals, like Daniel, who grew up on a farm in Ecuador and sought to improve the conditions for employees at Del Posto; the treatment of workers behind the scenes belied the high-toned Slow Food ethic on display in the front of the house. Increasingly, Americans are choosing to dine at restaurants that offer organic, fair-trade, and free-range ingredients for reasons of both health and ethics. Yet few of these diners are aware of the working conditions at the restaurants themselves. But whether you eat haute cuisine or fast food, the well-being of restaurant workers is a pressing concern, affecting our health and safety, local economies, and the life of our communities. Highlighting the roles of the 10 million people, many immigrants, many people of color, who bring their passion, tenacity, and vision to the American dining experience, Jayaraman sets out a bold agenda to raise the living standards of the nation's second-largest private sector workforce-and ensure that dining out is a positive experience on both sides of the kitchen door.

Twenty years after writing Drug Lord, Terrence Poppa decided the information in his book was more important than ever. In an important interview with the Texas Tribune, Poppa explains that ''the Mexico that I wrote about in the book describes the old order of things: Mexico under the PRI. In that sense, the book was out of date, because how drug trafficking operated under the PRI is completely different than how it works today in a new Mexico, under the democratically transformed Mexico...There has been a decoupling of the highest levels of power from drug trafficking now. It's important for people to understand that, so I had to bring the book up to date.''

Campaigns that Shook the World examines the most extraordinary PR campaigns from the 1970s to the present day showcasing the impact of PR excellence.