The marvelously compelling biography of Robert Ripley, the enigmatic cartoonist turned globetrotting millionaire who won international fame by celebrating the world's strangest oddities.

The author describes her privileged but lonely childhood, her tragic marriage to the charismatic Phil Graham, her struggles as the head of the Washington Post, and the colorful politicians and celebrities she has known.

"Award-winning journalist Dave Hoekstra interviews the people trying to keep the lights on at community newspapers across the country amid buyouts, declining revenues, fake news, and a pandemic. This is not another account of the death of local journalism-but rather a celebration of the community ties, perseverance, and empathy that's demonstrated in community newsrooms across the country"--

The first and only biography of Jann Wenner, the iconic founder of Rolling Stone magazine, and a romp through the hothouses of rock n' roll, politics, media, and Hollywood, from the Summer of Love to the Internet age. A fascinating and complex portrait of Jann Wenner that is also a biography of popular culture, celebrity, music, and politics in America over the last fifty years.

"When America entered World War II in 1941, [it] faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations. In 1943, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks, for troops to carry...

"What if there was an algorithm that could predict which novels become mega-bestsellers? Are books like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl the Gladwellian outliers of publishing? The Bestseller Code boldly claims that the New York Times bestsellers in fiction are predictable and that it's possible to know with 97% certainty if a manuscript is likely to hit number one on the list as opposed to numbers two through fifteen. The...

"Sticky fingers: the Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine is the story of how one man's ego and ambition captured the 1960s youth culture of rock and roll and turned it into a hothouse of fame, power, politics, and riches that would last for fifty years. Drawn from dozens of hours of interviews with Wenner, who granted Joe Hagan exclusive access to his vast personal archive of correspondence, rare documents, recordings, and never-before-seen...