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.

Los Angeles Times Bestseller An “epic exploration” of the 2016 right-wing Oregon Occupation-"an excellent microcosm by which we might better understand our difficult national history and distressing political moment” (Maggie Nelson). In 2016, a group of armed, divinely inspired right-wing protestors led by Ammon Bundy occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the high desert of eastern Oregon. Encamped in the shadowlands of the republic, insisting that the Federal government had no right to own public land, the occupiers were seen by a divided country as either dangerous extremists dressed up as cowboys, or as heroes insisting on restoring the rule of the Constitution. From the Occupation's beginnings, to the trials of the occupiers in federal court in downtown Portland and their tumultuous aftermaths, Shadowlands is the resonant, multifaceted story of one of the most dramatic flashpoints in the year that gave us Donald Trump. Sharing the expansive stage with the occupiers are a host of others-Native American tribal leaders, public-lands ranchers, militia members, environmentalists, federal defense attorneys, and Black Lives Matter activists-each contending in their different ways with the meaning of the American promise of Liberty. Gathering into its vortex the realities of social media technology, history, religion, race, and the environment-this piercing work by Anthony McCann offers us a combination of beautiful writing and high-stakes analysis of our current cultural and political moment. Shadowlands is a clarifying, exhilarating story of a nation facing an uncertain future and a murky past in a time of great collective reckoning.