Famous for its revolutionary aspects in musical, political, sexual identity and consumerist ideas, punk rock also has its lesser-known gangster ethos as well, explained here by players in the various punk gangs.The Los Angeles, Orange County, and South Bay punk scenes, populated by blue collar kids who responded to the violence and aggression of punk songs and shows. A number of them formed punk gangs that got into beatings, drug dealing and murder. Among them, no gang was more not...

From 1987 to 1995, Bristol, England's Sarah Records was a modest underground success and, for the most part, a critical laughingstock in its native country-sneeringly dismissed as the sad, final repository for a fringe style of music (variously referred to as “indie-pop,” “C86,” “cutie” and “twee”) whose moment had passed. Yet now, more than 20 years after its founders symbolically “destroyed” it, Sarah is among the most passionately fetishized record labels of all time. Its rare releases ...

"Graf traces the development of Yeats's magical world-view and analyzes its essential concepts . . . exploring Yeats's mind in a fascinating and original way." —R. A. Gilbert, esoteric scholar, author of Gnosticism & GnosisW. B. Yeats Twentieth Century Magus is a comprehensive study of his magical practices and beliefs. Yeats moved through many different phases of spiritual development, believing that his life was an intellectual...

From Paris to Stalingrad, the Nazis systematically plundered all manner of art and antiquities, but the first and most valuable treasures they looted were the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire—now, bestselling author Sidney Kirkpatrick tells the riveting and never-before-told true story of how an American college professor turned Army sleuth recovered these cherished symbols of Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich before they could become a rallying point in the creation of a Fourth an...

The true-crime story of a Massachusetts nurse with a dark secret, by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Left Behind.At the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton, Massachusetts, Kristen Gilbert was known as a hardworking, dedicated nurse. Yet so many emergencies and sudden deaths occurred under Kristen's watch that others jokingly called her the “Angel of Death.” No one suspected the horrifying truth: that over the course of...

The epic horrors of psychopathic mastermind Eddie Lee Sexton from the New York Times bestselling author who “knows how to dramatize true crime” (Elmore Leonard).For years, Eddie Lee Sexton ruled his large family like Charles Manson. The depraved patriarch dominated his ragged brood of twelve children mentally, physically, and sexually, and enforced every cruelty imaginable, from vicious beatings to raping his daughters and fathering their children. Finally...

The definitive chronicle of underground music in the 1980s tells the stories of Black Flag, Sonic Youth, The Replacements, and other seminal bands whose DIY revolution changed American music forever.Our Band Could Be Your Life is the never-before-told story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan Eighties -- when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations, and other subversives re-energized Am...

The official line is clear: the United Kingdom does not "participate in, solicit, encourage or condone" torture. And yet, the evidence is irrefutable: when faced with potential threats to their national security, the gloves always come off.Drawing on previously unseen official documents and the accounts of witnesses, victims and experts, prize–winning investigative journalist Ian Cobain looks beyond the cover–ups, the equivocations, and the attempts to dismiss brutality as the work...

Mexico is in a state of siege. Since President Felipe Calderon declared a war on drugs in December 2006, more than 38,000 Mexican have been murdered. During the same period, drug money has infused over $130 billion into Mexico's economy, now the country's single largest source of income. Corruption and graft infiltrate all levels of government. Entire towns have become ungovernable, and of every 100 people killed, Mexican police now only investigate approximately five.But the marke...

When we think of serial killing, we tend to think of it as a perversion of contemporary society. The Human Predator makes an eye-opening case for the existence of serial killers throughout time—the motives and methods, the societies that spawned them, and the historical periods in which they lived . . . and killed.From Ancient Rome and the Dark Ages to the open roads of America, from the exploits of French religious zealot Gilles de Rais to such high-profile monsters as Je...

Keith Morris is a true punk icon. No one else embodies the sound of Southern Californian hardcore the way he does. With his waist-length dreadlocks and snarling vocals, Morris is known the world over for his take-no-prisoners approach on the stage and his integrity off of it. Over the course of his forty-year career with Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and OFF!, he's battled diabetes, drug and alcohol addiction, and the record industry . . . and he's still going strong.My Damage

In Violence Against Women, award-winning author Walter S. DeKeseredy offers a passionate but well-documented sociological overview of a sobering problem. He starts by outlining the scope of the challenge and debunks current attempts to label intimate violence as gender neutral. He then lays bare the structural practices that sustain this violence, leading to a discussion of long- and short-term policies to address the issue. DeKeseredy includes an examination of male complicity an...