Desert Island Discs has run on BBC radio since 1942 and its archive is now accessible. This book is the first to assess the programme from a scholarly perspective. Chapters by musicologists, sociologists, and media scholars are complemented by personal spins by 'castaways', who reflect on talking publicly about the role of music in their lives.

Featuring original contributions from today's leading music critics, Marooned is a revealing snapshot of the current state of pop music criticism. A follow-up and homage to Greil Marcus's rock-and-roll classic Stranded, Marooned asks the same question: What album would you bring to a desert island, and why? WITH ESSAYS BY: Matt Ashare * Tom Breihan * Aaron Burgess * Jon Caramanica * Daphne Carr * Jeff Chang * Ian Christie * Kandia Crazy Horse * John Darnielle * Laina Dawes * Geeta Dayal * Rob Harvilla * Jess Harvell * Michaelangelo Matos * Anthony Miccio * Amy Phillips * Dave Queen * Ned Raggett * Simon Reynolds * Chris Ryan * Scott Seward * Greg Tate * Derek Taylor * Douglas Wolk

Elliott Smith was one of the most gifted songwriters of the nineties, adored by worshipful fans for his subtly melancholic words and melodies. The sadness had its sources in the life. There was trauma from an early age, years of drug abuse and a chronic sense of disconnection that sometimes seemed almost self-engineered. Smith died violently in Los Angeles in 2003, under what some believe to be questionable circumstances, of a single fatal stab wound to the chest. By this time fame had found him, and record buyers who shared the listening experience felt he spoke directly to them from beyond: lonely, lovelorn, frustrated, fighting until he could fight no more. And yet, although his achingly intimate lyrics carried the weight of truth, Smith remained unknowable. In Torment Saint, William Todd Schultz gives us the first proper biography of the rock star, a decade after his death, imbued with affection, authority, sensitivity and long-awaited clarity. Torment Saint draws on Schultz's careful, deeply knowledgeable readings and insights, as well as on more than 150 hours of interviews with close friends, lovers, bandmates, peers, managers, label owners, and recording engineers and producers. This book unravels the remaining mysteries of Smith's life and his shocking, too-early end. It will be an indispensable examination of his life and legacy, both for Smith's legions of fans as well as readers still discovering his songbook.

David Icke marks his 20th year of uncovering astounding secrets and suppressed information with the publication of his most amazing book yet: Human Race Get off Your Knees : The Lion Sleeps No More. He takes the manipulation of the human race and the nature of reality to still new levels of understanding and he calls for humanity to rise from its knees and take back the world from the sinister network of families and non-human entities that covertly control us from cradle to grave. His most staggering revelation is that the Earth and the collective human mind is manipulated from the Moon, which, he says, is not a 'heavenly body, but an artificial construct - a gigantic 'spacecraft' (probably a hollowed-out 'planetoid') - which is home to the extraterrestrial group that has been manipulating humanity for aeons. Humanity is at a fork in the road and it is time to make a choice. Are we going to awaken to our true genius and potential as Infinite Consciousness? Or are we going to remain entrapped in body/mind and the manufactured illusions of the Moon Matrix? It is time to shake off the shackles, stop being Pavlov's dogs and grab reality by the balls and wake up to who we are truly meant to be.

In 1978, Greil Marcus asked twenty other writers on rock—including Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, Ellen Willis, Simon Frith, and Robert Christgau—a question: What one rock and roll album would you take to a desert island? The resulting essays were collected in Stranded, twenty passionate declarations that, appropriately, affirmed the solitary and obsessive activity that rock listening had become. Here are salutes, elegies, thank-you notes, and love letters to records such as the Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet , the Ramones' Rocket to Russia, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Something Else By the Kinks, and out-of-print classics by the Ronettes, Little Willie John, and Huey 'Piano' Smith; the whole is supplemented with Marcus's own invaluable annotated fifty-page discography, a “Treasure Island” of rock and roll. Stranded remains a classic of rock and roll literature, and perhaps the best possible answer to the question: What one rock and roll book would you take to a desert island?