Describes the splintering of African-American culture in the 1980s and examines the dichotomy between influential Black entertainers, athletes, politicians, and spiritual leaders and the rampant drug use and crime that ravaged once-vital black neighborhoods.

"With gangsters on his tail and his meager savings in hand, crime reporter Jeremy Mercer fled Canada in 1999 and ended up in Paris. Broke and almost homeless, he found himself invited to a tea party among the riffraff of the timeless Left Bank fantasy known as Shakespeare & Co. In its present incarnation, Shakespeare & Co. has become a destination for writers and readers the world over, trying to reclaim the lost world of literary Paris in the 1920s....

"San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets is an essential archive of the Beat Generation, a rich moment is a fortunate place. America, somnolent, conformist, and paranoid in the 1950s, was changed forever by a handful of people who refused an existence of drudgery and enterprise, opting instead for a life of personal, spiritual, and artistic adventure. In these intimate, free-wheeling conversations, a baker's dozen of the poets of San Francisco...

"The Barbizon tells the story of New York's most glamorous women-only hotel, and the women-both famous and ordinary-who passed through its doors. World War I had liberated women from home and hearth, setting them on the path to political enfranchisement and gainful employment. Arriving in New York to work in the dazzling new skyscrapers, they did not want to stay in uncomfortable boarding houses; they wanted what men already had-exclusive residential...

Now in paperback, this lively bestseller traces the history of Scotland's many contributions to our culture, drawing on the most recent research of scholars and historians to demonstrate just how central the Scots have been throughout the rise of the West.

"Presents a photographic journey to the places that inspired the eerie small-town settings of King's novels" with "authoritative text explaining how and where each location fits in a setting for Stephen King's work"--Cover.

A series of prose poems describes the author's life while she was growing up in Houston, Texas, from her eleventh birthday in 1965 through her eighteenth in 1972, and beyond.

"In the spring of 1940, the aspiring but unknown writer Albert Camus and budding scientist Jacques Monod were quietly pursuing ordinary, separate lives in Paris. After the German invasion and occupation of France, each joined the Resistance to help liberate the country from the Nazis, ascended to prominent, dangerous roles, and were very lucky to survive. After the war and through twists of circumstance, they became friends, and through their passionate...

Much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities made it America's central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory. And even as Chicago led the way in creating mass-market culture, its artists pushed back in their own distinct voices. Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story...