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Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire
Smells Like Dead Elephants is a brilliant collection from Matt Taibbi, “a political reporter with the gonzo spirit that made Hunter S. Thompson and P. J. O’Rourke so much fun” ( The Washington Post). Bringing together Taibbi’s most incisive and hilarious work from his “Road Work” column in Rolling Stone, Smells Like Dead Elephants shines an unflinching spotlight on the corruption, dishonesty, and sheer laziness of our leaders. Taibbi has plenty to say about George W. Bush, Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and all the rest, but he doesn’t just hit inside the Beltway. He gets involved in the action, infiltrating Senator Conrad Burns’s birthday party under disguise as a lobbyist for a fictional oil firm that wants to drill in the Grand Canyon. He floats into apocalyptic post-Katrina New Orleans in a dinghy with Sean Penn. He goes to Iraq as an embedded reporter, where he witnesses the mind-boggling dysfunction of our occupation and spends three nights in Abu Ghraib prison. And he reports from two of the most bizarre and telling trials in recent memory: California v. Michael Jackson and the evolution-vs.-intelligent-design trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Equally funny and shocking, this is excellent work from one of our most entertaining writers. .
Price: $5.99
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Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian
An Event That Forever Changed the Face of the West On April 17, 1837, the steamboat St. Peter's pulled away from a St. Louis dock and began its annual journey up the Missouri River. Its mission was to deliver supplies to fur trading posts on the upper Missouri. On that spring day, no one aboard the St. Peter's could have imagined the effect the voyage would have on Western history and the American Indian culture. The steamboat carried a shipment not listed on its manifest--a disease so horrible Indian parents sometimes killed their children to save them from terrible agony. Its scientific name was Variola major. Its common name was smallpox. Many natives knew it as "Rotting Face." R.G. Robertson details how the smallpox epidemic of 1837-1838 altered the political and social structure of Native American tribes. In less than a year the disease virtually destroyed the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arickara cultures. It claimed entire villages of Blackfeet, stripping that proud nation of its power and wealth, leaving it too weak to stop invasions by other tribes and white settlers. Before it ran out of human fuel, Rotting Face claimed an estimated 20,000 natives, doing more damage to the Northern Plains dtribes in one year than all the military expeditions ever sent against American Indians. Robertson details the history of smallpox and the profound impact the disease had in Europe, Asia and the Americas, where it killed or maimed rich and poor, royalty and peasant. Robertson's gripping and graphic account dispels some popular myths about the role of whites in the spread of this devastating disease..
Price: $6.35
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Rotting Goddess: The Origins of the Witch in Classical Antiquity
Witchcraft in antiquity, and particularly the Goddess Hekate, has never been seriously studied, but sidelined as an variety of magic, or as a purely literary phenomenon, or as identical to the much-later Salemists. Here, then, is the first complete and comprehensive study of the topic from the time of Homer to the Greek Magical Papyri (800 bc–400 ad), examining the slow stages by which Hekate was demonized and the mythology of the evil witch arose, and how it was not until hundreds of years later that the actual practice of witchcraft developed..
Price: $10.12
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Rotting in Dirtville
Dirtville’s dullsville, according to bored teen Milton Bloom. And how could it be otherwise? There’s no economy, few jobs (Milton chops and sells wood), and the adults all commute to neighboring towns every day. And his parents are no help — they were killed when their house unexpectedly collapsed. But something is happening. When the adults leave, teenage gangs form, terrorizing the town. And what about those stories of giant, seemingly indestructible humanoid Martians invading Earth? Milton, like the rest of the Dirtvillians, thinks he has more pressing things to think about (like increasing his income to subsistence levels), but when he learns that what killed his parents were those Martian monsters landing on their home, he, his girlfriend Betsy, and the rest of dreary Dirtville are forced to react to this strange new war. Rotting in Dirtville is an unforgettable foray into the alien invasion genre. .
Price: $7.09
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