A coast-to-coast catalog of the most grandly gross science experiments, beautifully bizarre art, and delightfully disgusting historical sites that America has to offer. Part travel atlas, part trivia guide, here is the United States as readers have never seen it before.

Part "Weird U.S." and part "Roadside America," GROSS AMERICA offers families a road trip through the USA that would delight the King of Bad Taste John Waters and the unflappable guys on MTV's "Jackass." Sure, you could use your vacation days to take the family to the beach again. Or, you could plan a trip to see brains in jars, frozen dead guys, and visit a factory that makes candy-coated insects. You can: head down to Houston, Texas, and walk inside a 27-foot model of the human intestinal system visit a Civil War battlefield embalming diorama head over to explorers Lewis & Clark's latrines look at the world's largest fungus visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City touch the oldest human turd recoil from a massive human hairball that grew for seven years before it was surgically removed from the stomach of a 12-year-old girl who suffered from compulsive hair nibbling see the corroded mandible of a Tyrannosaurus Rex at the nation's largest natural history museum in Chicago visit the first funeral home to offer flameless cremation services make a pilgrimage to Chicago to visit America's last remaining plastic vomit factory journey to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see a dog poop–fueled streetlamp travel to Nederland, Colorado, for “Frozen Dead Guy Days,” an annual celebration of at-home cryogenics experiments spend some time among the preserved human brains at Philadelphia's Mutter Museum take in the acclaimed cockroach dioramas of Plano, Texas Gross America is a coast-to-coast catalog of the most grandly gross science experiments, beautifully bizarre art, and delightfully disgusting historical sites that America has to offer. Part travel atlas, part trivia guide, Gross America presents these United States as you've never seen them before—weird, wonderful, strange, and totally, utterly gross.

Americans choose from a dizzying array of schools, loosely categorized as "public" and "private." How did these distinctions emerge, and what do they tell us about the relationship in the United States between public authority and private enterprise? Challenged by the rise of Catholic and other parochial schools in the nineteenth century, states sought to protect the public school monopoly through regulation. Ultimately, however, Robert N. Gross shows how the public policies that resulted produced a stable educational marketplace, where choice flourished.

The author analyzes evidence and empirical research to determine which groups are the happiest in America; and offers suggestions on how the government can help individuals maximize their happiness.

On his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was heralded by the New York Times as one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers. Controversial on the left and the right for his critiques of objectivity and political radicalism, Rorty experienced a renown denied to all but a handful of living philosophers. In this masterly biography, Neil...