The story of the African-American family who brought crack cocaine to Detroit in the 1980s and made millions by running the business with McDonald's-like efficiency. It's a staggering portrayal of the ineluctable convergence between addiction and capitalism in Reagan's America.
Crowhurst was the British yachtsman who faked his positions during a 1968 round-the-world yacht race and then, when discovery of his subterfuge became inevitable, threw himself into the sea. His abandoned boat was found drifting in the Atlantic, its logbook filled with monomaniacal metaphysical speculation.
Abbott was the imprisoned murderer Norman Mailer befriended via mail correspondence and who murdered again after he'd won early release. Besides the Mailer-Abbott letters, this book contains an astonishing philosophical disquisition by the self-taught Abbott, who absorbed quantities of Marx, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche while serving time.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
A contested theory, but I believe it. Jaynes' view is that sometime between the period described in The Iliad and the composition of The Odyssey, the human corpus callosum was formed and the mind became uni- rather than bicameral. This book will, among other things, make you look at all forms of religious enthusiasm in an altogether new light.
St. Kilda is a micro-archipelago 60 miles west of Scotland where, until a century ago, a community had lived in almost complete isolation for 700 years. MacLean tells its remarkable story exceptionally well and with considerable sensitivity.
The story of the Ik, a hill tribe in Uganda whose members, in the face of resource-depleting drought, resolved to starve rather than migrate. A compelling depiction of the skull beneath the skin of all human communities, and a kind of anthropological counterpoint to Primo Levi's If This Is a Man.
— Will Self's new novel,Phone, completes a modernist trilogy that he launched with 2012'sUmbrella.
