Wicked Good Burgers fearlessly incorporates new techniques, inspirations, and ingredients to take the burger to the next level.

Intergalactic travelers had their Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Evolutionists had Darwin's The Origin of Species. And now Mainers can have their very own manual for the good life in Maine. Styled around the Dangerous Book for Boys, The Wicked Good Book is a pithy, nostalgic, practical, and irreverent guide to getting the most out of living in the Pine Tree State. It includes helpful tips on everything from outsmarting blackfly attacks to living to tell about a moose attack. Also included are the necessary quotes that all lovers of Maine should know by heart; important historical moments; essential gear to wear in the woods, in the Old Port, and at bedtime. Plus, limericks to amuse; hunting tips on how to bag the bird or deer; a guide to the Mine sky; the 7 Wonders of Maine; the correct way to chop a tree' how to prepare for a Maine winter like it might be your last; identification of native flora and fauna; and more. A blend of hearty survival skills with everyday common sense and a fair amount of humor provides for the Uber-Maine experience.

A single mom struggles to solve the puzzle of a son with Asperger's syndrome in this touching, winsome comic melodrama. Rory Falcon is a bundle of exasperating eccentricities-perpetual pacing, mile-a-minute talkativeness, an obsession with lawn mowers and antique gas cans, an incorrigible refusal to follow instructions or tolerate constraints-combined with a good heart that only his adoptive mother Archer can see. But as he pushes 16 years old, his quirks escalate to drinking, joyriding and muscular rages that can end with him blackening his mom's eye. Archer, a frantically multitasking lawyer who's up for a judgeship, blames her mothering skills for Rory's behavior because there's no one else to blame-least of all her ex-husband Wayne, a whiny man-child still looking to break into a theater career. Then Rory and a high-school hellion named Trish hare off in a stolen car to find Rory's birth mother, and Archer embarks on a journey to recover her son and unearth buried family secrets that stretch all the way back to the Salem Witch Trials. In this entertaining dysfunction romp, the authors cut the pathos with tart humor and vivid characterizations. Hurricane Rory is an indelible portrait of a high-functioning autistic kid who's both off-putting and magnetic; veering between wild, foul-mouthed tantrums, plangent sweetness and locked-down obliviousness, he's as much a mystery to himself as to everyone else. Archer is another vibrant tangle of contradictions; determined to play the stalwart authority figure, she feels like a wreck and a failure-a tiger mom who is nonetheless in serious danger of collapsing in vodka-soaked sniffles into the arms of a comforting teenager. As she walks a fraying maternal tightrope-with plenty of pratfalls-Lewis and Faircloth give readers a hilarious and moving study of familial love that's all the stronger for its conflicts and misgivings. A funny, frazzled tale of extreme parenting. Lewis, Joanne and Amy Faircloth WICKED GOOD Trestle Press $2.99 e-book March 24, 2011

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Winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature Winner of the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award A Massachusetts Center for the Book "Must-Read" Finalist for the New England Society Book Award Finalist for the Boston Authors Club Julia Ward Howe Book Award The bestselling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters reclaims the daring freelance sailors who proved essential to the winning of the Revolutionary War. The heroic story of the founding of the U.S. Navy during the Revolution has been told many times, yet largely missing from maritime histories of America’s first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels that truly revealed the new nation’s character—above all, its ambition and entrepreneurial ethos. In Rebels at Sea, best-selling historian Eric Jay Dolin corrects that significant omission, and contends that privateers, as they were called, were in fact critical to the American victory. Privateers were privately owned vessels, mostly refitted merchant ships, that were granted permission by the new government to seize British merchantmen and men of war. As Dolin stirringly demonstrates, at a time when the young Continental Navy numbered no more than about sixty vessels all told, privateers rushed to fill the gaps. Nearly 2,000 set sail over the course of the war, with tens of thousands of Americans serving on them and capturing some 1,800 British ships. Privateers came in all shapes and sizes, from twenty-five foot long whaleboats to full-rigged ships more than 100 feet long. Bristling with cannons, swivel guns, muskets, and pikes, they tormented their foes on the broad Atlantic and in bays and harbors on both sides of the ocean. The men who owned the ships, as well as their captains and crew, would divide the profits of a successful cruise—and suffer all the more if their ship was captured or sunk, with privateersmen facing hellish conditions on British prison hulks, where they were treated not as enemy combatants but as pirates. Some Americans viewed them similarly, as cynical opportunists whose only aim was loot. Yet Dolin shows that privateersmen were as patriotic as their fellow Americans, and moreover that they greatly contributed to the war’s success: diverting critical British resources to protecting their shipping, playing a key role in bringing France into the war on the side of the United States, providing much-needed supplies at home, and bolstering the new nation’s confidence that it might actually defeat the most powerful military force in the world. Creating an entirely new pantheon of Revolutionary heroes, Dolin reclaims such forgotten privateersmen as Captain Jonathan Haraden and Offin Boardman, putting their exploits, and sacrifices, at the very center of the conflict. Abounding in tales of daring maneuvers and deadly encounters, Rebels at Sea presents this nation’s first war as we have rarely seen it before.

Today’s writers need more spunk than Strunk: whether it's the Great American e-mail, Madison Avenue advertising, or Grammy Award-winning rap lyrics, memorable writing must jump off the page. Copy veteran Constance Hale is on a mission to make creative communication, both the lyrical and the unlawful, an option for everyone. With its crisp, witty tone, Sin and Syntax covers grammar’s ground rules while revealing countless unconventional syntax secrets (such as how to use—Gasp!—interjections or when to pepper your prose with slang) that make for sinfully good writing. Discover how to: *Distinguish between words that are “pearls” and words that are “potatoes” * Avoid “couch potato thinking” and “commitment phobia” when choosing verbs * Use literary devices such as onomatopoeia, alliteration, and metaphor (and understand what you're doing) Everyone needs to know how to write stylish prose—students, professionals, and seasoned writers alike. Whether you’re writing to sell, shock, or just sing, Sin and Syntax is the guide you need to improve your command of the English language.

An in-depth view of the way popular female stereotypes were reflected in—and were shaped by—the portrayal of women in Disney’s animated features. In Good Girls and Wicked Witches, Amy M. Davis re-examines the notion that Disney heroines are rewarded for passivity. Davis proceeds from the assumption that, in their representations of femininity, Disney films both reflected and helped shape the attitudes of the wider society, both at the time of their first release and subsequently. Analyzing the construction of (mainly human) female characters in the animated films of the Walt Disney Studio between 1937 and 2001, she attempts to establish the extent to which these characterizations were shaped by wider popular stereotypes. Davis argues that it is within the most constructed of all moving images of the female form—the heroine of the animated film—that the most telling aspects of Woman as the subject of Hollywood iconography and cultural ideas of American womanhood are to be found. “A fascinating compilation of essays in which [Davis] examined the way Disney has treated female characters throughout its history.” —PopMatters