Beer has inspired, influenced, and excited human beings for thousands of years and Alan D. Eames, the certified “king of beer,” has traveled the world uncovering The Secret Life of Beer. In this book, he reveals untold stories, lore, and references to beer in poetry, song, literature, and history. Readers will be astonished to learn the esoteric facts Eames has discovered, such as that in most ancient cultures only women were allowed to brew, and for much of history beer was considered a nourishing alternative to drinking water! From its origins among early civilizations to a hallowed place in the history of mankind, the art, the history, the culture, and the mystery of fermented beverages is the subject of historical fact, mythological speculation, and philosophical enquiry. The Secret Life of Beer! shares bits and pieces of this intriguing cultural history, along with quotes from such diverse beer drinkers as Nietzsche and Charles Darwin, in an inviting, highly browseable format.

The “highly entertaining and thoroughly reprehensible” #1 New York Times bestseller—now with sixteen pages of photos and a new introduction (The New York Times). My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way: I share my adventures with the world. --from the Introduction Actual reader feedback: "I find it truly appalling that there are people in the world like you. You are a disgusting, vile, repulsive, repugnant, foul creature. Because of you, I don’t believe in God anymore. No just God would allow someone like you to exist." "I’ll stay with God as my lord, but you are my savior. I just finished reading your brilliant stories, and I laughed so hard I almost vomited. I want to bring that kind of joy to people. You’re an artist of the highest order and a true humanitarian to boot. I'm in both shock and awe at how much I want to be you."

This is the first comprehensive book ever written on the sacred aspects of indigenous, historical psychotropic and herbal healing beers of the world.

Now seen as something to taste, savor, travel for, and talk about, beer really is the new wine. This new, up-to-date edition of The Beer Book features every significant brewery in every significant brewing nation, and showcases new beers and specialist beers, as well as the classics. With a visual catalog of more than 800 breweries, whistle-stop beer trails, and key beer facts throughout, The Beer Book is the indispensable guide to the world's favorite drink.

In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.

The multi-million bestselling novel about a young girl's journey towards healing and the transforming power of love, from the award-winning author of The Invention of Wings and The Book of Longings Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted Black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.