Sweet Chaos

A social and cultural history of the Grateful Dead, America's greatest folk/rock institution, by a "National Book Critics Circle Award"-winning author. 8-page photo insert.

Three hundred years later, the ghosts from her past are hunting for revenge... The past always finds a way to bite you in the ass. As a three-hundred-year old vengeance demon, I’ve made a lot of enemies. The worst was Queen Maria, the Italian Court’s most devious succubus and a ruler who used me as a weapon of mass destruction to inflict pain and kill hundreds of humans in her torture chambers. Now she’s back, this time as a ghost, and she’s invited a new friend to the party—a vampire king who wants my head on a stake. Together they’re bringing a war to Chicago that will topple the carefully constructed world I’ve protected for centuries. But I’m Kali Sweet. I never run from my past…and I’m not about to hide from my present.

I was his weakness. He was my strength. Until I destroyed him.I was infatuated with Shane Wilder since the first time I saw him surfing. But we couldn't be together. Not yet, anyway. I was too young and screwed up. He was too focused on chasing his dream.So we became friends. We met on the rooftop for late-night confessions under the stars. Cruised along the Pacific Coast Highway with the wind in our hair and the sun on our faces.I took photos of all the beautiful and ugly and interesting things, while he traveled the world in search of the perfect waves.I told him I would wait for him. I never meant to lie.I never meant to ruin his life.I. Destroyed. Him. As his star faded, mine burned bright. But as everyone knows, all that glitters is not gold. Now I'm back after seven long years, hoping for a chance to right my wrongs and fix what I've broken. This time I can only hope that loving Shane Wilder will be enough to save him.

In this generous collection of book reviews and literary essays, legendary Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau showcases the passion that made him a critic—his love for the written word. Many selections address music, from blackface minstrelsy to punk and hip-hop, artists from Lead Belly to Patti Smith, and fellow critics from Ellen Willis and Lester Bangs to Nelson George and Jessica Hopper. But Book Reports also teases out the popular in the Bible and 1984 as well as pornography and science fiction, and analyzes at length the cultural theory of Raymond Williams, the detective novels of Walter Mosley, the history of bohemia, and the 2008 financial crisis. It establishes Christgau as not just the Dean of American Rock Critics, but one of America's most insightful cultural critics as well.

An untold Cold War story: how the CIA tried to infiltrate a radical group of U.S. military deserters, a tale that leads from a bizarre political cult to the heart of the Washington establishment Stockholm, 1968. A thousand American deserters and draft-resisters are arriving to escape the war in Vietnam. They’re young, they’re radical, and they want to start a revolution. Some of them even want to take the fight to America. The Swedes treat them like pop stars—but the CIA is determined to stop all that. It’s a job for the deep-cover men of Operation Chaos and their allies—agents who know how to infiltrate organizations and destroy them from inside. Within months, the GIs have turned their fire on one another. Then the interrogations begin—to discover who among them has been brainwashed, Manchurian Candidate-style, to assassinate their leaders. When Matthew Sweet began investigating this story, he thought the madness was over. He was wrong. Instead, he became the confidant of an eccentric and traumatized group of survivors—each with his own theory about the traitors in their midst. All Sweet has to do is find out the truth. And stay sane. Which may be difficult when one of his interviewees accuses him of being a CIA agent and another suspects that he’s part of a secret plot by the British royal family to start World War III. By that time, he’s deep in the labyrinth of truths and half-truths, wondering where reality ends and delusion begins.

Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in 'Switched-on Bach', this text conveys the consequences of a technology that would provide the soundtrack for a chapter in cultural history.

Four-year-old identical twins Jace and Jem—born of the Breedline species, a race of humans that have special powers and the gift to change into wolf form—were tragically present when their mother, Katlyn Gray, was murdered. Only one family member the twins had left was their uncle, Katlyn's brother, Jackson. Jackson was found brutally beaten where their mother was murdered and left for dead. No other family members reached out to take the boys after they were found alone, still in the house where their mother lay dead and their uncle unconscious. A married couple, physicians at the emergency room where the boys are taken to—John and Sarah Chamberlain—instantly fell in love with them and became their foster parents in hopes of later adopting them. Jackson reunites with his nephews after coming out of a coma three months after his attack and approves of his nephews’ new home with John and Sarah. He lets the couple adopt them only if they promise to let him stay close by the boys and build a relationship as they grow up. Jackson Gray is their only link to what the boys are and what they will become later. The shocking new life they discover has other unknown species and mystical creatures that all must be kept a secret from the human world. When they are introduced into the Breedline Covenant, they grow up learning all about the Breedline laws and what will happen to them when they reach the age of eighteen. As they get older, Jace struggled with the loss of his mother and all the flashbacks of her death. His life continues to spin out of control with more devastation when their real father that is possessed by a Chiang-shih demon returns. His brother Jem stands by his side, constantly trying to keep him from self-destruction, and total disaster. Just when Jace has lost all hope for living, he meets Tessa Fairchild, his Breedline bonded mate. They are instantly captivated by each other, as Tessa feels an alluring, seductive connection towards him. He's also the sexiest man she has ever laid eyes on, but she has been fighting her on own demons trying to figure out why she has been haunted by mysterious dreams about a black wolf since childhood. Plus she is ten years older than him. Why would he want to date an older woman when this sexy, hot, god of a man could have any woman he wants? As Jace tries to win her over, and earn her trust, he finds out Tessa has no knowledge of being born an identical twin and that she is a Breedline species.

This volume gathers together twenty articles from among the best scholarly writing on rock music published in academic journals over the past two decades. These diverse essays reflect the wide range of approaches that scholars in various disciplines have applied to the study of rock, from those that address mainly the historical, sociological, cultural and technological factors that gave rise to this music, to those that focus primarily on analysis of the music itself. This collection of articles, some of which are now out of print or otherwise difficult to access, provides an overview of the current state of research in the field of rock music, and includes an introduction which contributes to the ongoing debate over the distinction (or lack thereof) betweenrock andpop.