In a shtetl in Imperial Russia, we meet the first of the Markoff women, beautiful, rebellious, red-haired Eve. As the new wife of David Markoff, Eve confronts the tyranny of her father-in-law’s household, where women are treated as servants and men are treated as boys. While the spirit of the revolution grows throughout Russia, Eve sows seeds off freedom beneath her father-in-law’s roof. And as the lives of the Markoffs are increasingly threatened by Cossack flames, the love between Eve and David is destined for betrayal. The son born to Eve grows up to become a revolutionary, forced to flee to America. There he bitterly rejects his past and paves the way for his daughter’s marriage into Russian aristocracy. By the time Eve escapes to America, the lies that divide the Markoff family have separated mother and son forever. But the past must be given its due—in a showdown that sets rage against love.

In a luxury Boston hotel on April 14, 2009, police discovered the body of a beautiful young woman—her head battered, a bullet through her heart. Within hours, the story exploded, making headlines across the nation. The victim, a masseuse named Julissa Brisman, had advertised her erotic services on popular classified ads Web site Craigslist. A twenty-two-year-old medical student named Philip Markoff was her last-known client... The Boston Police Homicide Unit followed a digital trail that led to Markoff's home, where investigators found a gun, prepaid cell phones, plastic handcuffs, and other evidence linking Markoff to Brisman. They also uncovered a stash of women's undergarments, raising even more questions about their suspect: How many other women did Markoff meet before Brisman? And what happened to them? This is the true story of one woman's DATE WITH DEATH.

Told by one of our greatest chroniclers of technology and society, the definitive biography of iconic serial visionary Stewart Brand, from the Merry Pranksters and the generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism and the rise of a new planetary culture—the story behind so many other stories Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Steve Jobs’s endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. The contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a through line of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was “Access to Tools”; with rare exceptions he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. Brand's life can be hard to fit onto one screen. John Markoff, also a great chronicler of tech culture, has done something extraordinary in unfolding the rich, twisting story of Brand’s life against its proper landscape. As Markoff makes marvelously clear, the streams of individualism, respect for science, environmentalism, and Eastern and indigenous thought that flow through Brand’s entire life form a powerful gestalt, a California state of mind that has a hegemonic power to this day. His way of thinking embraces a true planetary consciousness that may be the best hope we humans collectively have.

“This makes entertaining reading. Many accounts of the birth of personal computing have been written, but this is the first close look at the drug habits of the earliest pioneers.” —New York Times Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. John Markoff’s landmark book is about the culture and consciousness behind the first PCs—the culture being counter– and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It’s a brilliant evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and ’70s, where a group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for freeing minds and information. In these pages one encounters Ken Kesey and the phone hacker Cap’n Crunch, est and LSD, The Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Lab. What the Dormouse Said is a poignant, funny, and inspiring book by one of the smartest technology writers around.

This true-crime original hardcover, published with the hit CBS news program "48 Hours," reveals the shocking story behind the Craigslist Killer.

Waves of Democracy looks at two centuries of history of democratization as a series of multicontinental episodes in which social movements and elite power holders in many countries converged to reorganize political systems. Democracy is defined and redefined in these episodes. John Markoff examines several ways in which governing elites of national states mimic each other and ways in which social movements and elites interact. There is no other book written for undergraduates that looks at democracy over such a broad sweep of time and across so many countries and cultures.

Man has long searched for the cause and meaning of mental illness. This second book continues in an attempt to answer those questions. The author/compiler has spent 47 years investigating these problems and his conclusion is that severe unconscious bisexual conflict and confusion lie at the root of all mental illness, as difficult to comprehend as this idea may be. The book itself consists of 773 quotations, from a variety of sources, all of which point to the unshakable truth of this hypothesis. This is a fixed law of nature, unassailable and constantly operative in every case. No other species but man is afflicted with mental illness because no other species has either the intellectual power to repress their sexual feelings nor the motivation to do so. The disease we call schizophrenia is but an arbitrary name, which is used to designate the end-stage of a process beginning with a slight neurosis. The more severe the bisexual conflict and confusion in the individual, the more severe the degree of the mental illness which is experienced. Several other investigators in the past have reached this same conclusion, but unfortunately their wisdom went largely unheeded. Hopefully this book will remedy that ill-advised neglect.