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When Jose Canseco burst into the Major Leagues in the 1980s, he changed the sport -- in more ways than one. No player before him possessed his mixture of speed and power, which allowed him to become the first man in history to belt more than forty home runs and swipe more than forty bases in the same season. He won Rookie of the Year, Most Valuable Player, and a World Series ring.

Canseco shattered the mold of the out-of-shape baseball player and ushered in a new era of superathletes who looked like bodybuilders, made outrageous salaries, and enjoyed rock-star lifestyles. And the ticket for this ride? Steroids. Behind the gaudy stats and the glamour of his public life, Canseco cultivated a secret just about everyone in MLB knew about, one that would alter the game of baseball and the way we view our heroes forever. Canseco made himself a guinea pig of the performance-enhancing drugs that were only just beginning to infiltrate the American underground. Anabolic steroids, human growth hormones -- Canseco mixed, matched, and experimented to such a degree that he became known throughout the league as "The Chemist." He passed his knowledge on to trainers and fellow players, and before long, performance-enhancing drugs were running rampant throughout Major League Baseball. Sluggers scooping up pitches at their ankles and blasting them out of the park, pitchers cranking fastballs inning after inning -- Canseco showed the players how to customize their doses to sculpt the bodies they wanted, and baseball as we know it was the result.

Today, this issue has crept out of the closet and burst into the headlines as players balloon to herculean proportions and hundred-year-old records are not only broken, but also demolished. In this shocking memoir, Canseco sheds light on a life of dizzying highs and debilitating lows, provides the answers to questions about steroids that millions of fans are only now beginning to ask -- and suggests that, far from being a passing trend, the steroid revolution is only a taste of things to come.

Who's juiced? According to Canseco's authoritative account, more than you think. And baseball will never be the same.

From Santa Rosa to San Francisco to Vallejo, from Walnut Creek to Oakland to Newark, and from San Bruno to San Jose to Los Gatos, this Newcomer’s Handbook® provides its readers with the most up-to-date information on housing styles, costs, and trends; redevelopment; and all the other niceties of Bay Area life, including education! and childcare, transportation, cultural life, and much more..
Price: $14.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The second book in the "Perspectives on Contemporary Sculpture" series from the newly inaugurated ISC Press, Conversations on Sculpture includes interviews with Richard Serra, Maya Lin, Richard Deacon, Wolfgang Laib, James Turrell, Xu Bing, Liza Lou, Mario Merz, Richard Tuttle, Maurizio Cattelan, and other prominent and emerging artists from the U.S., China, the U.K., Italy, Germany, Cuba, Argentina, Nigeria, Portugal, Brazil, Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands, Korea, Spain, and Ghana.

The two volumes, A Sculpture Reader and Conversations on Sculpture, are an invaluable history of contemporary sculpture, installation art, new media, and public art..
Price: $19.77 [Notify me when price goes down.]

As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and home-owner politics. Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension.

American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership.

Using the East Bay as a starting point, Robert Self gives us a richly detailed, engaging narrative that uniquely integrates the most important racial liberation struggles and class politics of postwar America.