The only content we will consider removing is spam, Mendelson’s irreplaceable guide to stain removal spans four pages, from adhesive tape to crayon to mustard all the way to urine. He traveled in the African nation for nine months, visiting sites of slaughter, interviewing war criminals in prison camps, gathering the stories of those who escaped by the skin of their teeth. He approached the story from two widely disparate perspectives: from the small towns and cities where doctors’ belief in Big Pharma’s lies about the nonaddictive properties of new drugs like OxyContin led to overprescription and pill mills, and from the obscure Mexican state of Nayarit, where local clans mounted a fully vertically integrated heroin trade, controlling every aspect from growing the poppies to delivering dope to customers’ doors. (A bald eagle in flight looks like “a coat thrown into the air, ragged and enormous.”) But the true subject of this gorgeously sorrowful book is the drive toward self-destruction, and what it means to live close to a person who can’t resist its siren call. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. slanderous attacks on other members, Take, for example, his notes on the perfectly lovely Company song “The Little Things You Do Together”: He bemoans the song’s glibness, calls its tight rhyme schemes “as tiresome as they are elaborate,” and mourns a quatrain he replaced with one he now sees as worse. As a result, Armstrong’s take on fundamentalism has shaped our understanding of the phenomenon more than perhaps any other thinker’s. A Certain Kind of Fire That No Water Could Put Out. If you were a semifeckless, amply flawed but eminently clever twentysomething Gen Xer at the turn of the 21st century, and you were writing a memoir about how your parents died within five months of each other when you were a senior in college, leaving you to care for your 8-year-old brother, you faced a choice. Grant by Ron Chernow. Read 33 166 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Only flag lists that clearly need our attention. 2007: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal, Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom', The Other America: Poverty in the United States, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-40, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, What It Takes: The Way to the White House, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll, New African American Histories and Biographies to Read Now. But years of hunting surf also create unlikely friendships, from the Hawaiian kids of Finnegan’s Oahu childhood to the “goofyfoot dancer” who helps Finnegan find waves in the cold waters off Long Island, a quick subway ride from the longtime New Yorker journalist’s apartment. This deeply researched, profoundly empathetic story of cultural miscommunication in medicine focuses on the case of Lia Lee, the doted-on youngest daughter in a family of Hmong refugees in rural Northern California. It explains to readers how the average men and women (as opposed to the ‘Great men of history’) have been the main driving force behind change. In this moving memoir-as-investigation of her own father’s hidden life, Alison Bechdel combines the skills of an experienced cartoonist—expressive drawing, concise storytelling, mordant humor—with the ingenuity and curiosity of a reporter. Her charming, mercurial father drank too much and broke promises, while her mother simply rejected her. 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