Books about Madhouse from Amazon.com

In his most provocative and caustically funny book yet, Greg Palast, author of the national bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, once again gives us the straight scoop on the stories that Big Media won’t report. Digging up reams of documents marked “secret” and “confidential,” Palast provides the latest lowdown on Bush’s secret plans to seize Iraq’s oil, the fix planned for the 2008 election, who drowned New Orleans, and the horror and the humor of the War on Terror. With diligent detective work, moral outrage, and a keen sense of the absurd, Palast takes on the “armed and dangerous clowns that rule us” as only he can..
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The “top journalist in America and the funniest” (Randi Rhodes, Air America), takes his previous New York Times bestseller a step further with hot undercover dispatches— hanging out the dirty underpants of the “armed and dangerous clowns that rule us.”

A White House spokesman said, “We hate that sonovabitch.” They’re not alone: From corporate suites to Osama’s cave, they fear what Britain’s Guardian calls “investigations up there with Woodward and Bernstein—and a lot funnier.” But Greg Palast’s fanatic following (nearly two million readers of his Web column) has made him “a cult fave among progressives” (Village Voice) who can’t wait for his next release.

Palast’s old-style gum-shoe detective work to dig out the info on the War on Terror, greed- dripping schemes to seize little nations with lots of oil, the hidden program to steal the 2008 election, and the media biases that keep it unreported are the meat and bones of this BBC television reporter’s new book. Armed Madhouse is illustrated with dozens of documents marked “secret” and “confidential” that have walked out of file cabinets and fallen into Palast’s hands.

You won’t find Palast in The New York Times (except its bestseller list), but you will read his reports on the hottest Web sites worldwide, hear him regularly on Air America and the Pacifica radio networks, and see his stories reappearing as the basis for Eminem’s hit video “Mosh,” Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and sampled by a dozen of today’s top platinum rock artists. BACKCOVER: “The greatest investigative journalist in America.”
—ALAN CHARTOCK, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

“The type of investigative reporter you don’t see anymore—a cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes.”
—JIM HIGHTOWER

“Courageous reporting.”
—MICHAEL MOORE

“Upsets all the right people!”
—NOAM CHOMSKY.
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In his witty and warm history of Worcester State Hospital, founded in 1833 as the first state insane asylum established in this nation, Dr. Enoch Callaway reflects not just on the events in this fortress-like place, but also on how those events parallel advances and failures in the field of psychiatry itself. In addition to patient/psychiatrist vignettes showing treatment techniques of the period--from farm work to early electric shock therapy and insulin treatments that put schizophrenics in a 90-minute coma--Callaway also offers sharp insight into "natural" treatments that showed remarkable results and unexpected recoveries stimulated by tools as simple as a hand mirror. At times, Worcester may seem brutal, at other times its simplicity seems pure and caring. There are marvelous successes, and times when the facility seems no more than a warehouse for the mentally ill. Callaway argues that this history offers lessons about the treatment--and options for better treatment--of the mentally ill in society today. Throughout the text, the author weaves in comparisons to books and movies about the mentally ill and the facilities that have housed them. He includes literary works such as Madness in the Streets, Out of the Shadows and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, as well as cinematic classics like The Snake Pit, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and A Beautiful Mind. Each either reflects or directly opposes procedures, patients, treatments, tribulations, or compassion as they existed at Worcester. Asylums such as Worcester were places that sheltered the mentally ill from harm they might do themselves and others, and from the criminal justice system. With asylums near extinct now, the mentally ill are again being herded into the criminal justice system where they get little to no mental health care. Can the successes and failures of a hospital that closed a half-century ago guide us toward something better? Readers from all walks of life will find this text at once absorbing, disturbing, amusing, painfully serious, and tremendously insightful..
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Elizabeth Jane Cochrane (wrote as Nellie Bly) (1864- 1922) was an American journalist, author, industrialist, and charity worker. She is most famous for an undercover exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within. She is also well-known for her record-breaking trip around the world. Bly focused her early work for the Dispatch on the plight of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on female factory workers. She travelled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent. In 1888, Nellie suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, mimicking Jules Verne's book Around the World in Eighty Days. In 1894 she retired from journalism, and became the president of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co. For a time she was one of the leading women industrialists in the United States, but mismanagement forced her into bankruptcy. Forced back into reporting, she covered such events as women's suffrage convention in 1913. Her works include: Ten Days in a Mad House (1887) and Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890)..
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KNOCKIN' ON EVIL'S DOOR

Werewolves. Trolls. Sea Monsters. Rain of toads. Skyquakes. Sunnydale is being besieged by dark forces. But even with Buffy providing her unique style of damage control while Giles is hospitalized out of town, it's more than one Slayer can handle -- especially since the abominations are coming from a centuries-old portal through time and space.

Somehow, the hell-hole must be found and corked at its source. For Buffy, Angel, and the rest of her gang, that means a road trip to Boston where an ailing Gatekeeper resides over a supernatural mansion that has been, until recently, holding the world's worst monsters at bay. Once there, Buffy discovers the catastrophic truth: the magical structure houses thousands of rooms, all of which are doorways to limbo's "ghost roads," and all of which may bring her face-to-face with the most nefarious forces in hell and on earth -- forces bent on horrific plans far worse than the Slayer ever imagined..
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John Ordway is an artist obsessed with his work. In New York City that preoccupation merely aroused the ire of feminist art critics, but now that he and his girlfriend, Jamie, a potter and weaver, have retreated to tiny Delphi, Iowa, he finds himself the object of a more pointed suspicion. Then Jaime leaves him, and one of his local models is attacked. Surrounded by judgment and no longer able to view his work with detachment, he is forced to question the impulses that drive him to it. As events spin out of control, he must answer questions of urgent personal importance: What is the fate of a body in the world? And what does it mean for a man to see a woman truly? Art collides with life, painfully and revealingly, in this evocative first novel, which brings a poet's sensibility to the charged question of women's bodies and men's desires. Subtly conceived and artfully executed, THE MADHOUSE NUDES is part love story, part mystery, a brave exploration of guilt and innocence..
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