We Killed - The Rise of Women in American Comedy

Gene Mingo grew up as a mischievous kid in Akron, Ohio, with a challenging childhood and love for high school football. After a stint in the US Navy, he found his way back to football. In 1960, he joined the American Football League as a placekicker, halfback, and return specialist for the Denver Broncos?but that was just the beginning.

Gene has been inducted into the America Football League Hall of Fame, reflecting an illustrious career that included the first punt return for a touchdown in the AFL and two years spent leading the AFL in scoring. History considers him to have been the first African American placekicker in the AFL. Life isn?t lived only on the football field, however; outside the game, number twenty-one had troubles.

Perhaps due to finding success too quickly, Gene developed a tendency to fall in with a bad crowd. His poor choices led to near tragedy, but he always found a home on the football field. Gene Mingo?s story isn?t simple. It wasn?t easy being a black man in a white man?s world, and Gene had some internal demons of his own as well. Still, his story is that of legend, and the trials and tribulations of this spectacular athlete deserve to be remembered forever.

This book is awesome awful!

Did you know that "awful" first originated as a compliment? How about the fact that it was perfectly fine for someone to defecate in their living room? Or that at one time a bully was actually a sweetheart?

You may think that these things sound outlandish, but hundreds of years ago, the words "awful," "defecate," and "bully" meant something entirely different than what we know today. The Unexpected Evolution of Language reveals the origins of 208 everyday terms and the interesting stories behind their shift in meaning.

• Awful - worthy of respect or fear; inspiring awe
• Bimbo - slang for a stupid, inconsequential man
• Defecate - to purify; cleanse
• Invest - to clothe; to dress
• Nice - foolish; stupid
• Relay - hunting term meaning fresh pack of hounds

From "aftermath" and "sophisticated" to "empty" and "prestige," you will aboslutely love seeing just what kind of damage time has done to the English language.

One of the twentieth century’s most colorful characters brought back to life in this biography by the author of All About All About Eve

With Inventing Elsa Maxwell, Sam Staggs has crafted a landmark biography. Elsa Maxwell (1881-1963) invented herself–not once, but repeatedly. Built like a bulldog, she ascended from the San Francisco middle class to the heights of society in New York, London, Paris, Venice, and Monte Carlo. Shunning boredom and predictability, Elsa established herself as party-giver extraordinaire in Europe with come-as-you-are parties, treasure hunts (e.g., retrieve a slipper from the foot of a singer at the Casino de Paris), and murder parties that drew the ire of the British parliament. She set New York a-twitter with her soirees at the Waldorf, her costume parties, and her headline-grabbing guest lists of the rich and royal, movie stars, society high and low, and those on the make all mixed together in let-'er-rip gaiety. All the while, Elsa dashed off newspaper columns, made films in Hollywood, wrote bestselling books, and turned up on TV talk shows. She hobnobbed with friends like Noel Coward and Cole Porter. Late in life, she fell in love with Maria Callas, who spurned her and broke Elsa's heart. Her feud with the Duchess of Windsor made headlines for three years in the 1950s.

Inventing Elsa Maxwell, the first biography of this extraordinary woman, tells the witty story of a life lived out loud.

Once America’s capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country’s greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city’s worst crisis yet (and that’s saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neopastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists—all have been drawn to Detroit’s baroquely decaying, nothing-left-to-lose frontier.

With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new, Detroit-area native Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence. Throughout the city’s “museum of neglect”—its swaths of abandoned buildings, its miles of urban prairie—he tracks both the blight and the signs of its repurposing, from the school for pregnant teenagers to a beleaguered UAW local; from metal scrappers and gun-toting vigilantes to artists reclaiming abandoned auto factories; from the organic farming on empty lots to GM’s risky wager on the Volt electric car; from firefighters forced by budget cuts to sleep in tents to the mayor’s realignment plan (the most ambitious on record) to move residents of half-empty neighborhoods into a viable, new urban center.

Sharp and impassioned, Detroit City Is the Place to Be is alive with the sense of possibility that comes when a city hits rock bottom. Beyond the usual portrait of crime, poverty, and ruin, we glimpse a longshot future Detroit that is smaller, less segregated, greener, economically diverse, and better functioning—what could be the boldest reimagining of a post-industrial city in our new century.