A compelling look at animal welfare and factory farming in the United States from Mercy For Animals, the leading international force in preventing cruelty to farmed animals and promoting compassionate food choices and policies.Nathan Runkle would have been a fifth-generation farmer in his small midwestern town. Instead, he founded our nation’s leading nonprofit organization for protecting factory farmed animals. In Mercy For Animals, Nathan brings us into ...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELELR"A fine piece of muckraking, alarming without being alarmist. . . . Schlosser makes it hard to go on eating fast food in blissful ignorance.” – New York Times“One of the most important books on the precarious nature of the modern American food system.” – The ObserverIn 2001, Fast Food Nation was published to critical acclaim and became an international bes...

This acclaimed bestseller and modern classic has changed America’s relationship with food. It’s essential reading for kids who care about the environment and climate change.“What’s for dinner?” seemed like a simple question—until journalist and supermarket detective Michael Pollan delved behind the scenes. From fast food and big organic to small farms and old-fashioned hunting and gathering, this young readers’ adaptation of Pollan’s famous food-chain exploration e...

When Dave Barry is on the loose, no one is safe!What Dave Barry did for the men’s movement in his Complete Guide to Guys and for foreign relations when he did Japan he now does for . . . everything in America. The rapacious observer of Tupperware ladies and leisure concept salesmen sounds off on:Football—Football is more than just a game. It is a potential opportunity to see a live person lying on the ground with a bone sticking out of his leg, whi...

2012 IACP Award Winner in the Food Matters categorySupermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of Tomatoes," investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with...

Uncle John's latest compendium of the most bizarre and entertaining information imaginable: a Worldwide Weird-opedia!Good news: It's not you, the world really is going crazy! And Uncle John is barely sane enough to guide you through it all in this whirlwind tour of all things strange and weird. Yes, loyal Throne Room readers, these 432 all-new pages of pure crazy will shock and confound you . . . and make your side split open from laughing. (Uncle John takes no leg...

America's favorite investigative reporter, John Stossel, tackles our favorite myths in his characteristic style and challenges us to look at life differently. Myths and Misconceptions covered in the book include: Is the media unbiased? Are our schools helping or hurting our kids? Do singles have a better sex life than married people? Do we have less free time than we used to? Is outsourcing bad for American workers? Suburban sprawl is ruining America. Money makes people happier. The world ...

The founder of a peaceful haven for needy farm animals shares “enjoyable stories about her menagerie” and makes a powerful argument for vegan living (Publishers Weekly).Picking up where she left off in Where the Blind Horse Sings, Kathy Stevens regales us with more tales of the rescued animals at Catskill Animal Sanctuary (CAS)—some touching, some hilarious, all provocative. We meet Barbie, the broiler hen found hiding under a blue Honda in Brookl...

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, bestselling author, and Wheel of Fortune contestant Dave Barry exposes the shattering truth. Whether he's splashing with the U.S. sychronized swim team ("Picture a bunch of elegant swans swimming with a flailing sea cow") or reliving the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving ("We've decided to obliterate your culture, but first may we try the stuffing?"), Dave Barry proves that one man can make a difference--by having the guts to answer the questions few people bo...

A pioneering urban farmer and MacArthur “Genius Award” winner points the way to building a new food system that can feed—and heal—broken communities.The son of a sharecropper, Will Allen had no intention of ever becoming a farmer himself. But after years in professional basketball and as an executive for Kentucky Fried Chicken and Procter & Gamble, Allen cashed in his retirement fund for a two-acre plot a half mile away from Milwaukee’s largest public housing proje...

Second only to soda, bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the country. The brands have become so ubiquitous that we're hardly conscious that Poland Spring and Evian were once real springs, bubbling in remote corners of Maine and France. Only now, with the water industry trading in the billions of dollars, have we begun to question what it is we're drinking.In this intelligent, accomplished work of narrative journalism, Elizabeth Royte does for wate...

A witty, insightful, and affectionate examination of how and why we spend billions on our pets, and what this tells us about ourselvesIn 2003, Michael Schaffer and his wife drove to a rural shelter and adopted an emaciated, dreadlocked Saint Bernard who they named Murphy. They vowed that they'd never become the kind of people who send dogs named Baxter and Sonoma out to get facials, or shell out for $12,000 hip replacements. But then they started to get weird looks ...