Martin Torgoff's Books

Can't Find My Way Home

America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000

By: Martin Torgoff

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Can't Find My Way Home

America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000

By: Martin Torgoff

Can't Find My Way Home is a history of illicit drug use in America in the second half of the twentieth century and a personal journey through the drug experience. It's the remarkable story of how America got high, the epic tale of how the American Century transformed into the Great Stoned Age. Martin Torgoff begins with the avant-garde worlds of bebop jazz and the emerging Beat writers, who embraced the consciousness-altering properties of marijuana and other underground drugs. These musicians and writers midwifed the age of marijuana in the 1960s even as Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) discovered the power of LSD, ushering in the psychedelic era. While President John Kennedy proclaimed a New Frontier and NASA journeyed to the moon, millions of young Americans began discovering their own new frontiers on a voyage to inner space. What had been the province of a fringe avant-garde only a decade earlier became a mass movement that affected and altered mainstream America. And so America sped through the century, dropping acid and eating magic mushrooms at home, shooting heroin and ingesting amphetamines in Vietnam, snorting cocaine in the disco era, smoking crack cocaine in the devastated inner cities of the 1980s, discovering MDMA (Ecstasy) in the rave culture of the 1990s. Can't Find My Way Home tells this extraordinary story by weaving together first-person accounts and historical background into a narrative vast in scope yet rich in intimate detail. Among those who describe their experiments with consciousness are Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Robert Stone, Wavy Gravy, Grace Slick, Oliver Stone, Peter Coyote, David Crosby, and many others from Haight Ashbury to Studio 54 to housing projects and rave warehouses. But Can't Find My Way Home does not neglect the recovery movement, the war on drugs, and the ongoing debate over drug policy. And even as Martin Torgoff tells the story of his own addiction and recovery, he neither romanticizes nor demonizes drugs. If he finds them less dangerous than the moral crusaders say they are, he also finds them less benign than advocates insist. Illegal drugs changed the cultural landscape of America, and they continue to shape our country, with enormous consequences. This ambitious, fascinating book is the story of how that happened.

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Page Count

560

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

0743258630

ISBN 13

9780743258630

Smoke Signals

A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

By: Martin A. Lee

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Smoke Signals

A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational and Scientific

By: Martin A. Lee

In this book the author, an investigative journalist, traces the social history of marijuana from its origins to its emergence in the 1960s as a defining force in an ongoing culture war. He describes how the illicit marijuana subculture overcame government opposition and morphed into a multibillion-dollar industry. In 1996, Californians voted to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes. Similar laws have followed in several other states, but not without antagonistic responses from federal, state, and local law enforcement. The author draws attention to underreported scientific breakthroughs that are reshaping the therapeutic landscape: medical researchers have developed promising treatments for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, chronic pain, and many other conditions that are beyond the reach of conventional cures. This book is an examination of the medical, recreational, scientific, and economic dimensions of the world's most controversial plant.

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Page Count

529

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1439102619

ISBN 13

9781439102619

The War Against Cliche

Essays and Reviews 1971-2000

By: Martin Amis

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The War Against Cliche

Essays and Reviews 1971-2000

By: Martin Amis

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection, Martin Amis, "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (TIME), takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and Penthouse Forum, William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton, and more. "[Written] with intelligence and ardor and panache.... Speaks not just to a lifetime of reading but also to a fascination with individual writers." —The New York Times Here, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. Above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches—not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.

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Page Count

472

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

1101910259

ISBN 13

9781101910252

Bop Apocalypse

Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs

By: Martin Torgoff

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Bop Apocalypse

Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs

By: Martin Torgoff

The gripping story of the rise of early drug culture in America, from the author of the acclaimed Can't Find My Way Home With an intricate storyline that unites engaging characters and themes and reads like a novel, Bop Apocalypse details the rise of early drug culture in America by weaving together the disparate elements that formed this new and revolutionary segment of the American social fabric. Drawing upon his rich decades of writing experience, master storyteller Martin Torgoff connects the birth of jazz in New Orleans, the first drug laws, Louis Armstrong, Mezz Mezzrow, Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, swing, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, the Savoy Ballroom, Reefer Madness, Charlie Parker, the birth of bebop, the rise of the Beat Generation, and the coming of heroin to Harlem. Aficionados of jazz, the Beats, counterculture, and drug history will all find much to enjoy here, with a cast of characters that includes vivid and memorable depictions of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jackie McLean, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Borroughs, Jack Kerouac, Herbert Huncke, Terry Southern, and countless others. Bop Apocalypse is also a living history that teaches us much about the conflicts and questions surrounding drugs today, casting many contemporary issues in a new light by connecting them back to the events of this transformative era. At a time when marijuana legalization is rapidly becoming a reality, it takes us back to the advent of marijuana prohibition, when the templates of modern drug law, policy, and culture were first established, along with the concomitant racial stereotypes. As a new opioid epidemic sweeps through white working- and middle-class communities, it brings us back to when heroin first arrived on the streets of Harlem in the 1940s. And as we debate and grapple with the gross racial disparities of mass incarceration, it puts into sharp and provocative focus the racism at the very roots of our drug war. Having spent a lifetime at the nexus of drugs and music, Torgoff reveals material never before disclosed and offers new insights, crafting and contextualizing Bop Apocalypse into a truly novel contribution to our understanding of jazz, race, literature, drug culture, and American social and cultural history.

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Page Count

530

Publisher

Da Capo Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0306824760

ISBN 13

9780306824760

Can't Find My Way Home

America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000

By: Martin Torgoff

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Can't Find My Way Home

America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000

By: Martin Torgoff

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560

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

0743258630

ISBN 13

9780743258630

Bop Apocalypse

Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs

By: Martin Torgoff

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Bop Apocalypse

Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs

By: Martin Torgoff

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530

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Da Capo Press

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ISBN 10

0306824760

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9780306824760

Basketball Is in My Blood

A Basketball Addict’s Autobiography

By: Martin Groveman

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Basketball Is in My Blood

A Basketball Addict’s Autobiography

By: Martin Groveman

This book is dedicated to two groups of very special people. The first are those who were so instrumental in the attainment of my basketball dreams and accomplishments. Their contributions were both instructional and inspirational. Included in this select category are Venty Leib, Les Yellin, Abe Kleinman, Nat Holman, Dave Polansky, and Syd Levy. My mother and brother are among the honorees as their sacrifices and encouragement provided me with the opportunity to realize my goals. Lastly, my terrific sons, Jon and Seth, richly deserve inclusion. They have always proudly cheered me on even when believing it was time for me to hang up my sneakers. The second group are teammates, friends, and acquaintances with a love for basketball that have kept my round ball fires burning.

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Page Count

262

Publisher

Xlibris Corporation

Published Date

ISBN 10

1543470041

ISBN 13

9781543470048

American Fool

The Roots and Improbable Rise of John Cougar Mellencamp

By: Martin Torgoff

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American Fool

The Roots and Improbable Rise of John Cougar Mellencamp

By: Martin Torgoff

Profiles the Indiana-born rock star whose down-to-earth lyrics and hard rock sound have made him a hero of working-class America

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Page Count

222

Publisher

St Martins Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0312023197

ISBN 13

9780312023195

On the Wild Side

By: Martin Gardner

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On the Wild Side

By: Martin Gardner

I have always been intrigued by fringe science," writes Martin Gardner in the preface to this book, "perhaps for the same reason that I enjoy freak shows and circuses. Pseudoscientists, especially the extreme cranks, are fascinating creatures for psychological study. Moreover, I have found that one of the best ways to learn something about any branch of science is to find out where its crackpots go wrong."A unique combination of horse sense and drollery has made Martin Gardner the undisputed dean of the critics of pseudoscience. This bountiful collection of essays and articles will be wholeheartedly greeted by Gardner''s fans, as well as by new readers.This collection of articles - many of which first appeared in the Skeptical Inquirer, the New York Review of Books, and Free Inquiry - explores pseudoscience and strange religious beliefs with the author''s trademark wit and verve. Destined to be a classic of skeptical literature, this book covers a wide range of topics - including UFOs, rainmaking, ghosts, the Big Bang, ESP, Oral Roberts, as well as the early history of spiritualism and today''s bizarre "trance channeling" cults.

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Page Count

258

Publisher

Prometheus Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1616140593

ISBN 13

9781616140595

Book's by Martin Torgoff

Can't Find My Way Home

Can't Find My Way Home

Smoke Signals

Smoke Signals

The War Against Cliche

The War Against Cliche

Bop Apocalypse

Bop Apocalypse

Can't Find My Way Home

Can't Find My Way Home

Bop Apocalypse

Bop Apocalypse

Basketball Is in My Blood

Basketball Is in My Blood

American Fool

American Fool

On the Wild Side

On the Wild Side

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