MAKING MICHAEL delves deep inside the career of one of the most successful, enigmatic and controversial entertainers of all time: Michael Jackson. Side-stepping sensationalism, journalist Mike Smallcombe enters unchartered territory as he takes you behind the scenes to reveal the real Jackson, a man few people ever got to know. Interviewing over sixty of Jackson's associates including managers, lawyers, music executives, producers, musicians and engineers - many of whom are speaking about ...

For half a century, Michael Jackson’s music has been an indelible part of our cultural consciousness. Landmark albums such as Off the Wall and Thriller shattered records, broke racial barriers, amassed awards, and set a new standard for popular music. While his songs continue to be played in nearly every corner of the world, however, they have rarely been given serious critical attention. The first book dedicated solely to exploring his creative work, Man in the Music...

"Reveals the grisly conditions in which the mentally ill were kept . . . [and] harrowing details of the inhumane and gruesome treatment of these patients."— Daily MailIn the first half of the nineteenth century, treatment of the mentally ill in Britain and Ireland underwent radical change. No longer manacled, chained and treated like wild animals, patient care was defined in law and medical understanding, and treatment of insanity developed.Focusin...

"[A]n eloquent, brave, big-hearted book…about the timeless anxieties and emotions of parenthood, and the modern twists thereon.”—James Fallows, The AtlanticLove That Boy is a uniquely personal story about the causes and costs of outsized parental expectations. What we want for our children—popularity, normalcy, achievement, genius—and what they truly need—grit, empathy, character—are explored by National Journal’s ...

New York Times Bestseller: The "gripping" true story of a beautiful Texas socialite, her ambitious husband, and a string of mysterious deaths ( Los Angeles Times).Joan Robinson Hill was a world-class equestrian, a glamorous member of Houston high society, and the wife of Dr. John Hill, a handsome and successful plastic surgeon. Her father, Ash Robinson, was a charismatic oil tycoon obsessed with making his daughter's every dream come true.R...

A "highly entertaining history [of] global hustling, cola wars and the marketing savvy that carved a niche for Coke in the American social psyche" ( Publishers Weekly).Secret Formula follows the colorful characters who turned a relic from the patent medicine era into a company worth $80 billion. Award-winning reporter Frederick Allen's engaging account begins with Asa Candler, a nineteenth-century pharmacist in Atlanta who secured the rights to the...

To amend Clausewitz on war, one might say that the trial in a courtroom is the pursuit of battle by other means. And, short of the horror on the battlefield, to be on trial is perhaps the most traumatic of all life experiences. Yet in the great trials of history much more than individual destinies are at stake. Fundamental issues of morality, political expediency, justice and social change are being engaged. How does one balance freedom of conscience against the public good? How does one c...

Winner of the Christopher Award: This bestseller tells the inspirational true story of a girl with cerebral palsy and the mother who wouldn't give up on her.In 1940, when Karen Killilea was born three months premature and developed cerebral palsy, doctors encouraged her parents to put her in an institution and forget about her. At the time, her condition was considered untreatable, and institutionalization was the only recourse. But in a revolutionary act of faith a...

“Michael Farquhar doesn’t write about history the way, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin does. He writes about history the way Doris Kearns Goodwin’s smart-ass, reprobate kid brother might. I, for one, prefer it.”—Gene Weingarten, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post columnistScandal! Intrigue! Cossacks! Here the world’s most engaging royal historian chronicles the world’s most fascinating imperial dynasty: the Romanovs, whose three-hundred-year reig...

A sweeping biography of one of the greatest and most provocative athletes of all timeDecades after his final fight, Muhammad Ali remains larger than life in the imagination of hundreds of millions of people around the world. He won the heavyweight championship at age twenty-two by conquering Sonny Liston in dramatic fashion. The political establishment stripped him of his prize when he refused induction into the United States Army during the height of the war in Vi...

A compellingly candid memoir that details Jackson's life in seclusion, by the bodyguards who were with him in his final days - with a new introduction to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Michael Jackson's death .Hounded by the tabloid media, driven from his self-made sanctuary, Neverland, Michael Jackson spent his final years moving from city to city, living with his three children in virtual seclusion -- a futile attempt to escape a world that wouldn't leave h...

An Edgar Award–winning author's true crime account of a grisly string of killings in Kentucky—and the shocking spectacle of greed that followed.Kentucky never deserved its Indian appellation "A Dark and Bloody Ground" more than when a small-town physician, seventy-seven-year-old Roscoe Acker, called in an emergency on a sweltering evening in August 1985. Acker's own life hung in the balance, but it was already too late for his college-age daughter, Tammy, savagely s...