Leather Soul

‘A young, naive kid, with a brand-new football. Over time, the leather aged from the bumps along the trail. The Footscray winters and some glorious liniment-scented afternoons. All of the laughs, the scraps, the yarns and characters. The game. It all left a mark on me, on my soul.’ Bob Murphy has never been a typical footballer. Music buff, Age columnist and Winnebago driver, he is as comfortable in a quiet corner of a Fitzroy café or the front bar of a grungy pub as he is in the locker room. Murphy takes the reader inside his 17-year career, including his three years as captain of the Bulldogs, exploring the people, places and events that shaped him: from playing backyard cricket in 1980s Warragul to Community Cup with Paul Kelly in the 2000s, and from the joy of marrying his high-school crush to the agony of a season-ending ACL ruptures. How did the country kid with a gypsy’s heart become an All-Australian captain? What’s it like to have your club win the grand final for the first time in 62 years and have to cheer from the sidelines? How does it feel to realise you can no longer do the things that made you great? The celebrated Australian football bard Martin Flanagan has long insisted Bob Murphy has a book in him like no footballer has written. Leather Soul proves him right.

What makes genuine leather genuine? What makes real things real? In an age of virtual reality, veneers, synthetics, plastics, fakes, and knockoffs, it's hard to know. Over the centuries, men and women have devoted enormous energy to making fake things seem real. As early as the fourteenth century, fabric was treated with special oils to make it resemble leather. In the 1870s came Leatherette, a new bookbinding material. The twentieth century gave us Fabrikoid, Naugahyde, Corfam, and Ultrasuede. Each claims to transcend leather's limitations, to do better than nature itself—or at least to convince consumers that it does. Perhaps more than any other natural material, leather stands for the authentic and the genuine. Its animal roots etched in its pores and in the swirls of its grain, leather serves as cultural shorthand for the virtues of the real over the synthetic, the original over the copy, the luxurious over the shoddy and second-rate. From formica, vinyl siding, and particle board to cubic zirconium, knockoff designer bags, and genetically altered foods, inspired fakes of every description fly the polyester pennant of a brave new man-made world. Each represents a journey of scientific, technical, and entrepreneurial innovation. Faux Real explores this borderland of the almost-real, the ersatz, and the fake, illuminating a centuries-old culture war between the authentic and the imitative.

Since the beginning of the leather industry in America, Peabody and leather have always been considered synonymous. The Civil War and Reconstruction Era brought great prosperity to the industry, and by the late 19th century, the leather industrys success was firmly established in Peabody. After the great Boston fire of 1872, many leather shops in Boston were completely destroyed, leaving Peabodys tanneries unrivaled. In 1894, Arthur C. Lawrence and his A. C. Lawrence Leather Company arrived in Peabody, employed thousands of workers, and secured the citys place in history as the largest manufacturer of calf and sheep skins in the world, earning Peabody the title of Leather Capital of the World.

Edgar Award-winning travel writer spends an autumn living in one of America's spookiest tourist destinations: Salem, Massachusetts Salem, Massachusetts, may be the strangest city on the planet. A single event in its 400 years of history—the Salem Witch Trials of 1692—transformed it into the Capital of Creepy in America. But Salem is a seasonal town—and its season happens to be Halloween. Every October, this small city of 40,000 swells to close to half a million as witches, goblins, ghouls, and ghosts (and their admirers) descend on Essex Street. For the fall of 2015, occult enthusiast and Edgar Award–winning writer J.W. Ocker moved his family of four to downtown Salem to experience firsthand a season with the witch, visiting all of its historical sites and macabre attractions. In between, he interviews its leaders and citizens, its entrepreneurs and visitors, its street performers and Wiccans, its psychics and critics, creating a picture of this unique place and the people who revel in, or merely weather, its witchiness.

This book is a comprehensive, historical bible on the subject of urban street dance and its influence on modern dance, hip hop, and pop culture. Urban street dance—which is now referred to across the globe as "break dance" or "hip-hop dance"—was born 15 years prior to the hip hop movement. In today's pop culture, the dance innovators from "back in the day" have been forgotten, except when choreographic echoes of their groundbreaking dance forms are repeatedly recycled in today's media. Sadly, this is still the case when dance moves that were engendered from 1965 through the 1970s on the streets of Reseda, South Central Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, and Fresno, CA; or in the Bronx in New York City, are utilized by modern performers. In Underground Dance Masters: Final History of a Forgotten Era, an urban street dancer who was part of the scene in the early 1970s sets the record straight, blowing the lid off this uniquely American dance style and culture. This text redefines hip hop dance and the origins of a worldwide phenomenon, explaining the origins of classic forms such as Funk Boogaloo, Locking, Popping, Roboting, and B'boying—some of the most important developments in modern dance that directly affect today's pop culture.