Awesome Excesses Album and Music Offers

Savor the inside scoop on over-the-top superstars

"I'm not a paranoid, deranged millionaire. . . . I'm a billionaire!"

"Acting is an empty and useless profession."

"Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere else."

"I'm interested in being provocative and pushing people's buttons."

Which screen icons gave us the quotes above? How do stars get away with self-indulgent, unrestrained behaviors-or do they? In The Hollywood Book of Extravagance, longtime industry insider and Hollywood historian James Robert Parish gives you a provocative look behind the scenes at the lavish indulgences and larger-than-life egos of Tinseltown's rich and famous. The featured celebrities range from heartthrobs to industry tycoons, and from yesterday's matinee idols to today's hottest celebs. The stars are grouped according to their excesses: ego, neurosis, partying, power, rich living, and romancing. You'll devour little-known details on the excesses and exploits of notables ranging from Mae West to Madonna, Greta Garbo to Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando, Bela Lugosi to John Belushi, Zsa Zsa Gabor to Paris Hilton, Errol Flynn to Jude Law, and many more..
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"Deliciously dramatic .. The Beautiful Fall crackles with excitement "-New York Times Book Review

In the 1970s, Paris fashion exploded like a champagne bottle left out in the sun. Amid sequins and longing, celebrities and aspirants flocked to the heart of chic, and Paris became a hothouse of revelry, intrigue, and searing ambition. At the center of it all were fashion's most beloved luminaries - Yves Saint Laurent, the reclusive enfant terrible, and Karl Lagerfeld, the flamboyant freelancer with a talent for reinvention - and they divided Paris into two fabulous halves. Their enduring rivalry is chronicled in this dazzling exposé of an era: of social ambitions, shared obsessions, and the mesmerizing quest for beauty.


"Fascinating." -New York Times


"Addictive." -Philadelphia Inquirer


"It's like US Weekly, 1970s style." -Gotham


"A story constructed as exquisitely as a couture dress. . . . It moves stylishly forward, with frequent over-the-shoulder glances at some very dishy background." -BostonGlobe.
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A sublime and dramatic narrative about the high-chic fashion wars of 1970s Paris, in the tradition of Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

Paris in the '70s was running at full tilt--a new order was coming into view amid hedonism, ambition, and outrageous decadence. This was a fashion revolution, the beginning of fashion as rock-star spectacle, and the world went wild for it. Alicia Drake writes about the dramatic collision and rivalry between two titanic geniuses, Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, whose clashes sparked that tumultuous decade. Americans came to Paris in droves--from Andy Warhol and Jerry Hall to Bianca Jagger and Jessica Lange--to be part of this irresistible moment. Others came just to catch sight of Karl Lagerfeld strutting around the cafés in his high heels and furs. Drake vividly captures the stunning highs and heartbreaking lows, the glorious achievements and dramas of an era when style reigned in the most glamorous of cities..
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Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) was on of the most successful writers of her time; indeed, the two most popular English novels in the early eighteenth-century were Robinson Crusoe and Haywood’s first novel, Love in Excess. As this edition enables modern readers to discover, its enormous success is easy to understand. Love in Excess is a well crafted novel in which the claims of love and ambition are pursued through multiple storylines until the heroine engineers a melodramatic conclusion.

Haywood's frankness about female sexuality may explain the later neglect of Love in Excess. (In contrast, her accomplished domestic novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, has remained available.) Love in Excess and its reception provide a lively and valuable record of the challenge that female desire posed to social decorum.

For the second Broadview edition, the appendix of eighteenth-century responses to Haywood has been considerably expanded..
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On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a post on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement about Bear Stearns & Co., the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank: “In my book, they are insolvent.”

This seemed a bold and risky statement. Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding.

Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun.

How this happened – and why – is the subject of William D. Cohan’s superb and shocking narrative that chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Bear Stearns serves as the Rosetta Stone to explain how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making wrought havoc on the world financial system.

Cohan’s minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breathless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the cascading series of events that would doom the firm, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke began to realize the dire consequences for the world economy should the company go bankrupt.

But HOUSE OF CARDS does more than recount the incredible panic of the first stages of the financial meltdown. William D. Cohan beautifully demonstrates why the seemingly invincible Wall Street money machine came crashing down. He chronicles the swashbuckling corporate culture of Bear Stearns, the strangely crucial role competitive bridge played in the company’s fortunes, the brutal internecine battles for power, and the deadly combination of greed and inattention that helps to explain why the company’s leaders ignored the danger lurking in Bear’s huge positions in mortgage-backed securities.

The author deftly portrays larger-than-life personalities like Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns’ miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman whose memos about re-using paper clips were legendary throughout Wall Street; his profane, colorful rival and eventual heir Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and became a symbol of the reasons for the firm’s demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won the astonishing endgame of the saga (the Bear Stearns headquarters alone were worth more than JP Morgan paid for the whole company).

Cohan’s explanation of seemingly arcane subjects like credit default swaps and fixed- income securities is masterful and crystal clear, but it is the high-end dish and powerful narrative drive that makes HOUSE OF CARDS an irresistible read on a par with classics such as LIAR’S POKER and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE.

Written with the novelistic verve and insider knowledge that made THE LAST TYCOONS a bestseller and a prize-winner, HOUSE OF CARDS is a chilling cautionary tale about greed, arrogance, and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequences for all of us.

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The author of How to Stop Looking for Someone Perfect and Find Someone to Love helps readers discover what about themselves keeps them from getting what they want. Reprint. 150,000 first printing. $100,000 ad/promo. Tour..
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With her passion for fine food and, above all, her appetite for love and life, Gael Greene traces her rise from a Velveeta cocoon in the Midwest to powerful critic of New York magazine. Love and food, foreplay and fork play, haute cuisine and social history--all become inextricably linked as the author lifts the lid on her most provocative subject yet--herself. Along the way there are tales of her saucy erotic adventures and intimate portraits of the culinary icons of our time--Julia Child, André Soltner, James Beard, among others--and revealing dissections of New York's legendary "in" spots, including Elaine's, Le Bernardin, Le Cirque, Odeon, and Balthazar..
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