Beware Euphoria


Book Description

George Fisher seeks the moral roots of America's antidrug regime and challenges claims that early antidrug laws arose from racial animus. Those moral roots trace to early Christian sexual strictures, which later influenced Puritan condemnations of drunkenness, and ultimately shaped the early American drug war. Early laws against opium dens, cocaine, and cannabis rarely rose from racial strife, but sprang from the traditional moral censure of intoxication and perceived threats to respectable white women and youth. The book closes with an examination of cannabis legalization, driven in part by the movement for racial justice.




Beware of God


Book Description

Violent rabbis, lovelorn wives, a busy Grim Reaper, shame-filled simians, and one seriously angry deity populate this humorous and disquieting collection. Shalom Auslander's stories in Beware of God have the mysterious punch of a dream. They are wide ranging and inventive: A young Jewish man's inexplicable transformation into a very large, blond, tattooed goy ends with a Talmudic argument over whether or not his father can beat his unclean son with a copy of the Talmud. A pious man having a near-death experience discovers that God is actually a chicken, and he's forced to reconsider his life -- and his diet. At God's insistence, Leo Schwartzman searches Home Depot for supplies for an ark. And a young boy mistakes Holocaust Remembrance Day as emergency preparedness training for the future. Auslander draws upon his upbringing in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York State to craft stories that are filled with shame, sex, God, and death, but also manage to be wickedly funny and poignant.




So Shall We Reap


Book Description

A work that focuses on the relentless drive for maximum food production at rock-bottom cost. As health scares spiral, rural workers are driven off the land and poor nations are forced to export their goods in a cut-throat marketplace. Colin Trudge proposes an alternative, looking at the global food industry and showing how - without resorting to GM crops - corporate barons can be stripped of control, the world can be fed and humanity can survive.




Perpetual Euphoria


Book Description

How happiness became mandatory—and why we should reject the demand to "be happy" Happiness today is not just a possibility or an option but a requirement and a duty. To fail to be happy is to fail utterly. Happiness has become a religion—one whose smiley-faced god looks down in rebuke upon everyone who hasn't yet attained the blessed state of perpetual euphoria. How has a liberating principle of the Enlightenment—the right to pursue happiness—become the unavoidable and burdensome responsibility to be happy? How did we become unhappy about not being happy—and what might we do to escape this predicament? In Perpetual Euphoria, Pascal Bruckner takes up these questions with all his unconventional wit, force, and brilliance, arguing that we might be happier if we simply abandoned our mad pursuit of happiness. Gripped by the twin illusions that we are responsible for being happy or unhappy and that happiness can be produced by effort, many of us are now martyring ourselves—sacrificing our time, fortunes, health, and peace of mind—in the hope of entering an earthly paradise. Much better, Bruckner argues, would be to accept that happiness is an unbidden and fragile gift that arrives only by grace and luck. A stimulating and entertaining meditation on the unhappiness at the heart of the modern cult of happiness, Perpetual Euphoria is a book for everyone who has ever bristled at the command to "be happy."




The Last Hack


Book Description

The Scottish crime master dishes out “equal parts adrenaline and empathy” in a thriller featuring a woman hacker and online intrigue (Diana Gabaldon). Sam Morpeth has had to grow up way too fast. Left to fend for a younger sister with learning difficulties when their mother goes to prison, she is forced to watch her dreams of university evaporate. But Sam learns what it is to be truly powerless when a stranger begins to blackmail her online. Meanwhile, reporter Jack Parlabane seems to have finally gotten his career back on track with a job at a flashy online news start-up, but his success has left him indebted to a volatile source on the wrong side of the law. Now that debt is being called in, and it could cost him everything. Thrown together by a common enemy, Sam and Jack are about to discover they have more in common than they realize—and might be each other’s only hope. (Published in the UK as Want You Gone) “Pure literary dynamite.” —Lorenzo Carcaterra, New York Times–bestselling author of Sleepers “Tremendous fun, with superb characterization, gripping moral complexity, and no shortage of clever villainy.” —Chris Pavone, New York Times–bestselling author of The Paris Diversion “A revelation . . . The computer is the scariest tool since the invention of the buzzsaw.” —Thomas Perry, New York Times–bestselling author of The Bomb Maker “Works exceptionally well as cybercrime fiction, but it’s the human element that makes it tick.” —Kirkus Reviews




Opium for the Masses


Book Description

A practical guide to growing and using poppies and other botanical wonders.




A Short History of Financial Euphoria


Book Description

The world-renowned economist offers "dourly irreverent analyses of financial debacle from the tulip craze of the seventeenth century to the recent plague of junk bonds." —The Atlantic. With incomparable wisdom, skill, and wit, world-renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith traces the history of the major speculative episodes in our economy over the last three centuries. Exposing the ways in which normally sane people display reckless behavior in pursuit of profit, Galbraith asserts that our "notoriously short" financial memory is what creates the conditions for market collapse. By recognizing these signs and understanding what causes them we can guard against future recessions and have a better hold on our country's (and our own) financial destiny.




Boom, Crisis, and Adjustment


Book Description

Boom, Crisis, and Adjustment reviews the macroeconomic experiences of eighteen developing countries from 1974 to 1989. The authors address why the experiences and policy reactions have differed among the countries, and how their individual growth rates were affected by these policy reactions.




When the Grass Stops Growing


Book Description

Sir Carol Mather MC had a fascinating war. His memoirs, which quickly sold out, covers service with Sterling's SAS, his escape from a POW camp in Italy and his two tours on Montgomery's small personal staff. No wonder this book was widely reviewed and described as 'a classic' in The Spectator.




The Viper Within


Book Description

DISILLUSIONED WITH HIS childhood faith, Jon longs to restore that sense of belonging to something greater than himself. Enter Jeremiah, magnetic and mysterious founder of the Brotherhood of the Hebetheus. In Jon, Jeremiah finds a willing disciple for his “new” religion, and an eager participant in the Brotherhood’s daring plan: they will kidnap a classmate who Jeremiah believes is part of a terrorist cell. By foiling her plot to blow up their school, the boys of the Hebetheus will command the world’s attention, show a righteous religion as the only real tool to thwart terrorism, and become avenging heroes. But fate and faith have a twist in store for Jon as the captive girl they call Snake causes him to confront the reflection of what he's become in her eyes. Will the appeal of a blind faith be enough to sustain Jon’s allegiance? Or will he be unable to deny the viper glimpsed within himself?