Author : Robert Kerbeck
Publisher : Mwc Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 17,68 MB
Release : 2019-11
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9781733470506
Blending investigative journalism and personal memoir, Malibu Burning brings you on the dramatic, life-threatening journey of real people fighting 2,000 degree flames to save entire neighborhoods.
Author : Mark Hayes
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 43,16 MB
Release : 2020-12-20
Category :
ISBN : 9780578822822
One day in August of a certain year, Malibu started to burn and go up in flames. The whole countryside was on fire. Houses, ranches, and livelihoods all burned to the ground. It was unreal. Malibu was burning. It was at this time that Mark saw people (clowns) online posting photos of their asses and naked bodies and lingerie shots holding up LA signs saying how sad they were that Malibu is burning. So sad. The next day Mark started writing sextpoems. Short, poetic tales describing his anguish for Malibu. The written equivalent of those photos. How it made him feel the same as those people. So sad. So horny. So so. The devastation just made everyone want to get naked, apparently. Ever since Mark has kept writing these sextpoems. People kept paying him to write more. He knows, ludicrous. Thousands and thousands of dollars to write more and more sextpoems. So really, this book is a bargain. Over 100 sextpoems. In chronological order. They're all there. Book two on the way. And yes. Mark knows. It's sad. He's sorry. Tut. So sad. So harny. So enjoy.
Author : Taylor Jenkins Reid
Publisher : Ballantine Books
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 35,55 MB
Release : 2021-06-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1524798665
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today • From the author of Daisy Jones & The Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo . . . ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Time, Marie Claire, PopSugar, Parade, Teen Vogue, Self, She Reads • “Irresistible . . . High drama at the beach, starring four sexy, surfing siblings and their deadbeat, famous-crooner dad.”—People Four famous siblings throw an epic party to celebrate the end of the summer. But over the course of twenty-four hours, the family drama that ensues will change their lives forever. Malibu: August 1983. It’s the day of Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over—especially as the offspring of the legendary singer Mick Riva. The only person not looking forward to the party of the year is Nina herself, who never wanted to be the center of attention, and who has also just been very publicly abandoned by her pro tennis player husband. Oh, and maybe Hud—because it is long past time for him to confess something to the brother from whom he’s been inseparable since birth. Jay, on the other hand, is counting the minutes until nightfall, when the girl he can’t stop thinking about promised she’ll be there. And Kit has a couple secrets of her own—including a guest she invited without consulting anyone. By midnight the party will be completely out of control. By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames. But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family’s generations will all come rising to the surface. Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them . . . and what they will leave behind.
Author : Mike Davis
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 497 pages
File Size : 20,22 MB
Release : 2022-02-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1786636255
A witty and engrossing look at Los Angeles' urban ecology and the city's place in America's cultural fantasies Earthquakes. Wildfires. Floods. Drought. Tornadoes. Snakes in the sea, mountain lions, and a plague of bees. In this controversial tour de force of scholarship, unsparing vision, and inspired writing, Mike Davis, the author of City of Quartz, revisits Los Angeles as a Book of the Apocalypse theme park. By brilliantly juxtaposing L.A.'s fragile natural ecology with its disastrous environmental and social history, he compellingly shows a city deliberately put in harm's way by land developers, builders, and politicians, even as the incalculable toll of inevitable future catastrophe continues to accumulate. Counterpointing L.A.'s central role in America's fantasy life--the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909--with its wanton denial of its own real history, Davis creates a revelatory kaleidoscope of American fact, imagery, and sensibility. Drawing upon a vast array of sources, Ecology of Fear meticulously captures the nation's violent malaise and desperate social unease at the millennial end of "the American century." With savagely entertaining wit and compassionate rage, this book conducts a devastating reconnaissance of our all-too-likely urban future.
Author : Robert Kerbeck
Publisher : Steerforth
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 37,70 MB
Release : 2022-02-22
Category : True Crime
ISBN : 1586423169
Winner of a 2023 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for Autobiography/Memoir “Kerbeck’s juicy memoir tells riveting tales [with] the thrill of a spy novel. . . Kerbeck bares all of his wild business secrets within the world of corporate espionage” — Foreword Reviews "Robert Kerbeck has mastered the art of social engineering, or what he calls 'rusing', and taken it to a whole new level." — Frank Abagnale, author of Catch Me If You Can B-list actor, A-list corporate spy. . . In the world of high finance, multibillion-dollar Wall Street banks greedily guard their secrets. Enter Robert Kerbeck, a working actor who made his real money lying on the phone, charming people into revealing their employers’ most valuable information. In this exhilarating memoir that will appeal to fans of The Wolf of Wall Street and Catch Me If You Can, unsuspecting receptionists, assistants, and bigshot executives all fall victim to “the Ruse.” After college, Kerbeck rushed to New York to try to make it as an actor. But to support himself, he’d need a survival job, and before he knew it, while his pals were waiting tables, he began his apprenticeship as a corporate spy. As his acting career started to take off, he found himself hobnobbing with Hollywood luminaries: drinking with Paul Newman, taking J.Lo to a Dodgers game, touring E.R. sets with George Clooney. He even worked with O.J. Simpson the week before he became America’s most notorious double murderer. Before long, however, his once promising acting career slowed while the corporate espionage business took off. The ruse job was supposed to have been temporary, but Kerbeck became one of the world’s best practitioners of this deceptive—and illegal—trade. His income jumped from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year. Until the inevitable crash… Kerbeck shares the lies he told, the celebrities he screwed (and those who screwed him), the cons he ran, and the money he made—and lost—along the way.
Author : Jaime Lowe
Publisher : MCD
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 50,47 MB
Release : 2021-07-27
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0374721920
A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires. Shawna was overcome by the claustrophobia, the heat, the smoke, the fire, all just down the canyon and up the ravine. She was feeling the adrenaline, but also the terror of doing something for the first time. She knew how to run with a backpack; they had trained her physically. But that’s not training for flames. That’s not live fire. California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year — fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews. In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate — a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting. Lowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril.
Author : Carl Safina
Publisher : Holt Paperbacks
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 40,61 MB
Release : 2010-04-01
Category : Nature
ISBN : 1429984260
Part odyssey, part pilgrimage, this epic personal narrative follows the author's exploration of coasts, islands, reefs, and the sea's abyssal depths. Scientist and fisherman Carl Safina takes readers on a global journey of discovery, probing for truth about the world's changing seas, deftly weaving adventure, science, and political analysis.
Author : D. C. Taylor
Publisher : Crooked Lane Books
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 30,87 MB
Release : 2022-02-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1643857797
An ex-con hits the streets of L.A. to find her twin sister’s killer. Is it a mission of justice—or a quest for vengeance? Cody Bonner, identical twin, daughter of a major movie star, a teenage street kid in Los Angeles, a bank robber at nineteen, and a prison inmate at twenty. When she’s released after six years, she returns to L.A. with a purpose: to learn the truth about her sister Julie, who washed up on a Malibu beach a year earlier. The connection between the twins was so powerful that the day Julie died, Cody collapsed in the prison yard. Now that bond is driving her to seek justice—at any cost. Using bootleg skills she learned in prison, Cody begins to peel back the layers of mystery. Her search leads her to the darker alleys behind the dazzle of the film business, and into the world of high-powered agents, high-priced call girls, and men with a taste for sexual violence. As she homes in on her mother’s powerful agent, Harry Groban, a man with ugly accusations of abuse in his past, Cody becomes more deeply enmeshed in the life she left behind as a teenager: her mother’s star power, her former classmates-turned-producers, glitzy parties, and a handsome former love who knows all the players. Is Groban at the center? Could there be others who had a hand in Julie’s murder? As Cody gets closer to the truth, another ghost from her criminal past is stalking her—one that could put her back in prison for years.
Author : Gary Brecher
Publisher : Catapult
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 11,95 MB
Release : 2009-03-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1593763026
“[A] raucous, offensive, and sometimes amusing CliffsNotes compilation of wars both well-known and ignored.” —Utne Reader Self-described war nerd Gary Brecher knows he’s not alone, that there’s a legion of fat, lonely Americans, stuck in stupid, paper-pushing desk jobs, who get off on reading about war because they hate their lives. But Brecher writes about war, too. War Nerd collects his most opinionated, enraging, enlightening, and entertaining pieces. Part war commentator, part angry humorist à la Bill Hicks, Brecher inveighs against pieties of all stripes—Liberian generals, Dick Cheney, U.N. peacekeepers, the neo-cons—and the massive incompetence of military powers. A provocative free thinker, he finds much to admire in the most unlikely places, and not always for the most pacifistic reasons: the Tamil Tigers, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Danes of 1,000 years ago, and so on, across the globe and through the centuries. Crude, scatological, un-P.C., yet deeply informed, Brecher provides a radically different, completely unvarnished perspective on the nature of warfare. “Military columnist Gary Brecher’s look at contemporary war is both offensive and illuminating. His book, War Nerd . . . aims to explain why the best-equipped armies in the world continue to lose battles to peasants armed with rocks . . . Brecher’s unrefined voice adds something essential to the conversation.” —Mother Jones “It’s international news coverage with a soul and acne, not to mention a deeply contrarian point of view.” —The Millions
Author : Stuart Palley
Publisher : Schiffer Publishing
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 16,49 MB
Release : 2018
Category : Photography
ISBN : 9780764355738
From the towering pines of Shasta Trinity National Forest, to the chaparral scrub of San Diego's Mexican border, to Yosemite and the Western Sierras, trained wildland firefighter and photojournalist Stuart Palley documents California's raging wildfires and the forces behind them during the state's worst fire season in modern history. The dramatic images, a half-decade in the making, capture thesimultaneous beauty and destruction that wildfires bring as fire seasonsget longer and more deadly, expensive, and destructive.In the wake ofCalifornia's record-breaking series of wildfires in 2017, theimages encompass five fire seasons and forty-five fires. They are presented chronologicallyand culminate with the wine country fire siege that devastated Sonoma and Napa counties in October 2017 and the Thomas Fire in Southern California, the largest in recorded state history. This timely book defines the state's drought and urban sprawl challenges, drawing a broader picture ofglobal warming and its acute effects worldwide.
