Describes the author's lifelong fascination and career with snakes, including his adventures with dangerous snakes around the world and his associations with some of the world's leading herpetologists.

THE STORY: A study of modern friendship when put to the test, the play centers on Jonathan and his wife, Jenifer, while they visit their oldest friend, Michael, at his home in Los Angeles. Jonathan, an actor, is in L.A. auditioning for a film--his f

John LaRue was professor of herpetology at Louisiana State University when a green anaconda wrapped around him one night at John’s previous research place. The LSU professor was rescued by Jacob Gigue, his assistant. Both were guarding the Atchafalaya River Basin from constrictor snakes transported from the Everglades of Florida by a narcissistic criminal parading within academic circles as an international scientist. The fracas between John and Andre Bennelli began one night six years earlier. Then Bennelli had taunted John unmercifully by fondling his female associate, stomping to death his injured pet laughing seagull, degrading John’s truck, and finally hitting John with a triple knotted table napkin. As a result, John gave Bennelli an elbow smash that stumbled him into an antique Coke machine thirty feet across the floor of the Gumbo House restaurant in Saint Martinsville. The narcissistic, double-jointed, and athletic Bennelli never got over losing that fight with John, previously crippled from an accident initiated by a new employee dropping John into a pile of steel girders from a bucket crane of a Shell oil rig located in the Gulf of Mexico. However, Bennelli, after gaining consciousness, asked John to make a life-for-life sporting bet on which one would die first. Bennelli bet John that he would run him and his wife crazy before he finally killed John and molested Lisa LaFay, John’s wife-to-be later. Lisa, a struggling student nurse, had formerly waited tables at Antoine’s Restaurant in New Orleans and been given much money in gratuities—for favors—to Bennelli’s no avail. To fulfill his narcissistic need for dominance over John and Lisa, Bennelli used techniques taught him by Gypsies passing through Dusseldorf, Germany. Raised north of Paris, France, Andre developed a fetish for snakes when he learned in biology class that snakes had no shoulders. Bennelli used the cultural global warming controversy to show mind control, feeding his narcissistic need for such. Consequently, Bennelli put out pythons on the Natchez Trace; the Nottoway Plantation; near White Castle, Louisiana, the Hermitage in Nashville, Tennessee, and within the Little Pigeon River that runs through Gatlinburg, Tennessee, near the Pancake Pantry. Finally, Bennelli, disguised as a juggling clown, succumbed in an unsuspecting manner at the Opp Rattlesnake Rodeo in Opp, Alabama. Oddly, Bennelli had requested that Dr. Cabbot, his psychiatrist, and John act as coexecutors and see that his body was buried in the family wine vineyard in France.

Writer and adventurer Leslie Anthony has spent his life on two planks, racing down hills, searching for the next perfect ride. His real baptism, however, began in the early nineties when Alaska emerged as the ski world’s Next Big Thing. Steep faces and vast tracks of powder snow, were captured on film and beamed to audiences around the world. The result was a freeskiing revolution. With insight and humor, White Planet, traces an arc through the new ski culture, in a rock ‘n’ roll adventure that follows a diaspora to far-flung corners of the globe. Along the way, Anthony introduces many of the daredevils, visionaries and entrepreneurs who are bringing the sport to such unexpected places as Mexico, China, Lebanon and India.

As a leading Confederate general, Braxton Bragg (1817–1876) earned a reputation for incompetence, for wantonly shooting his own soldiers, and for losing battles. This public image established him not only as a scapegoat for the South's military failures but also as the chief whipping boy of the Confederacy. The strongly negative opinions of Bragg's contemporaries have continued to color assessments of the general's military career and character by generations of historians. Rather than take these assessments at face value, Earl J. Hess's biography offers a much more balanced account of Bragg, the man and the officer. While Hess analyzes Bragg's many campaigns and battles, he also emphasizes how his contemporaries viewed his successes and failures and how these reactions affected Bragg both personally and professionally. The testimony and opinions of other members of the Confederate army--including Bragg's superiors, his fellow generals, and his subordinates--reveal how the general became a symbol for the larger military failures that undid the Confederacy. By connecting the general's personal life to his military career, Hess positions Bragg as a figure saddled with unwarranted infamy and humanizes him as a flawed yet misunderstood figure in Civil War history.

A tribute to the spirits and drinking traditions of the South through a leading barwoman's glass, with 80 recipes and photos. IACP AWARD WINNER Craft cocktail maven Alba Huerta succinctly tells the story of drinking in the South through themes such as "Trading with the Enemy," "the Rural South," "the Drinking Society," "the Saltwater South," and others that anchor the menu at her destination bar, Julep. With historical overviews, 15 bar snack recipes, and 65 bespoke cocktail recipes, ranging from the iconic Mint Julep (and variations such as Rye Julep and Sparkling Julep) to modern inventions like the Snakebit Sprout, Liquid Currency, and Hot July, Huerta recounts the tales and traditions that define drinking culture in the American South today. Approximately 80 evocative cocktail and location photographs convey the romance and style that distinguish Julep and serve to inspire beverage enthusiasts to relive Southern history via the bar cart.

You Really Got Me is Nick Hasted’s illuminating biography of The Kinks, drawing on years of in-depth interviews with Ray and Dave Davies and shedding new light on a turbulent 30-year career scarred by suicide attempts, on-stage fights and recurring mental breakdowns. The Kinks’ distorted fuzz cut through popular music like a chainsaw and unexpectedly propelled two brothers from North London straight to the heights of stardom, to stand alongside The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. With exclusive interviews Nick Hasted untangles this turbulence: Why The Kinks became the only British group to be banned from America at the height of their success; why original bassist Pete Quaife quit in 1968; Ray Davies’ fraught relationship with Chrissie Hynde; how The Kinks’ later years rehabilitated their reputation in America. Updated to include details of the hit musical Sunny Afternoon and an up-to-the-minute report on the troubled relationship between the Davies brothers, You Really Got Me is the ultimate Kinks biography. “Keen eyed critique of a most contrary band” Uncut “Hasted is illuminating” Guardian

What Carroll Shelby wanted was a 2,400-pound sports car sheathed in carbon fiber that was the fastest road car in the world. What he got was quite a different matter! The Series 1 was one of the most highly anticipated sports cars in living memory. It was a magazine cover story seven times and countless more articles were written about it. The car was eventually produced early in 2000-but it reached its owners well behind schedule, at a higher price, and in smaller numbers than first projected. The story of the Shelby Series 1 "is about everything that could possibly go wrong and then did." It's a drama of gigantic and aspiring egos, petty prerogatives, awesome talent, bureaucratic bungling, and brilliant engineering. Of the many cars Shelby created over his career, none was as controversial as the Series 1. Snake Bit - an apt description of what happened to anyone and everyone involved in the project - is required and captivating reading for the thousands of Carroll Shelby fans throughout the world.

In a style that is writerly and audacious, Adam Phillips takes up a variety of seemingly ordinary subjects underinvestigated by psychoanalysis--kissing, worrying, risk, solitude, composure, even farting as it relates to worrying. He argues that psychoanalysis began as a virtuoso improvisation within the science of medicine, but that virtuosity has given way to the dream of science that only the examined life is worth living. Phillips goes on to show how the drive to omniscience has been unfortunate both for psychoanalysis and for life. He reveals how much one's psychic health depends on establishing a realm of life that successfully resists examination.