Hula girls, palm trees and Tiki gods beckoned Ohioans of the 1950s and '60s as tropical hot spots sprang up in suburban neighborhoods and concrete jungles alike.The Kon Tiki restaurants of Cleveland and Cincinnati slung rum cocktails to patrons eager for escape to a South Seas paradise. Visitors to the famed Kahiki Supper Club of Columbus, the Tropics in Dayton and Toledo's Aku-Aku could spot celebrities swaying to the exotic sounds of steel guitars and native perc...

The Church of Tiki To aficionados of Polynesian Pop, the Kahiki Supper Club was and remains the touchstone for all things tiki. The epitome of a fad that started at the end of Prohibition, it has been rediscovered by each successive generation, with relics of the original "mothership" proudly displayed in tropical restaurants and bars throughout the country. Years after its razing in August 2000, the legacy of the Kahiki continues to inspire artists, entrepreneurs, and other visionaries, m...

Inspired by Florida's famed Mai-Kai restaurant, Bill Sapp and Lee Henry opened the Kahiki Supper Club in 1961. Patrons lined up for hours to see the celebrities who dined there--everyone from Betty White to Raymond Burr. Sapp and Henry set out simply to build a nice Polynesian restaurant and ended up establishing the most magnificent one of them all. Outside, two giant Easter Island heads with flames spouting from their topknots stood guard while customers dined in a faux tribal village wi...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest ... her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s BazaarJoan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks—of overheard dialogue, interv...

A Curious Man is the marvelously compelling biography of Robert “Believe It or Not” Ripley, the enigmatic cartoonist turned globetrotting millionaire who won international fame by celebrating the world's strangest oddities, and whose outrageous showmanship taught us to believe in the unbelievable.As portrayed by acclaimed biographer Neal Thompson, Ripley’s life is the stuff of a classic American fairy tale. Buck-toothed and cursed by shyness, Ripley turned his sense of bei...

From Lisa Birnbach, the author of The Official Preppy Handbook, comes True Prep, which looks at how the old guard of natural-fiber-loving, dog-worshipping, G&T-soaked preppies adapts to the new order of the Internet, cell phones, rehab, political correctness, reality TV, and . . . polar fleece.

With this volume filled with thousands of bizarrely fascinating facts, we're on a roll!Is there any other single book in the universe with this many awesome tidbits of bite-sized information? Nope. And that's a fact! At nearly 400 pages (with a handy index for your fact-seeking convenience), Wise Up! is a must-have for anyone who likes their information on the go. It's organized into hundreds of topics—everything from sports and entertainment to word origi...

The all-time champion and host of Jeopardy! gives you the chance to test your trivia mettle in this ingeniously organized book of 8,888 questions.For example–February 21: In 1912, on this day, Teddy Roosevelt coined the political phrase “hat in the ring,” so Ken Jennings fires off a series of “ring” questions. In 1979, who became the first NFL quarterback with four Super Bowl rings*?* What rings are divided by the Cassini Division? Also on this date, in 19...

Garner gathers a literary chorus to capture the joys of reading and eating in this comic, personal classic.Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for me, simply gone together. The book you’re holding is a product of these combined gluttonies.Dwight Garner, the beloved New York Times critic and the author of Garner’s Quotations, ser...

Cross-train your brain. All it takes is ten to fifteen minutes a day of playing the right games. (It’s fun.)Exercising your brain is like exercising your body—with the right program, you can keep your brain young, strong, agile, and adaptable. Organized on an increasing scale of difficulty from “Warm-up” to “Merciless,” here are 399 puzzles, trivia quizzes, brainteasers, and word game that are both fun and engaging to play, and are expertly designed to give your br...

Get ready to devour America. Adam Richman, the exuberant host of Travel Channel's Man v. Food and Man v. Food Nation, has made it his business to root out unique dining experiences from coast to coast.Now, he zeroes in on some of his top-favorite cities—from Portland, Maine, to Savannah, Georgia—to share his uproariously entertaining food travel stories, top finds, and some invaluable (and hilarious) cautionary tales. America the Edible also tells the sto...

Drink your way through history, learn tips from the best bartenders, and become a cocktail connoisseur with this fantastic guide.The Cocktail Companion spans the cocktail’s curious history from its roots in beer-swilling, 18th-century England through the illicit speakeasy culture of the United States Prohibition to the explosive, dynamic industry it is today. Learn about famous and classic cocktails from around the globe, how ice became one of the most imp...