In January 1981, Marta Falcon, mother of “Cocaine Cowboy” Willy Falcon, was kidnapped with a $500,000 ransom demanded for her release, as T.J. English explains in “The Last Kilo: Willy Falcon and the Cocaine Empire That Seduced America” (William Morrow, out now). For Falcon, the head of Miami’s Los Muchachos drug traffickers, the money was … Read more
There are two reasons to write a business book, according to Brad Stone, author of “The Everything Store.” You’re either writing a thriller or a how-to-manual. In “The Nvidia Way,” veteran technology journalist Tae Kim manages to do both. Kim charts the improbable rise of Nvidia from a fledgling three-person ‘90s era graphics chip startup, … Read more
It was April 7, 2004, and Nacoça Pio was one of the first to learn of the bloodbath. A leader of the Cinta-Larga — an indigenous tribe who for centuries lived in isolation in the Amazon Rainforest of Brazil — Pio knew that tensions were high between his people and the white diamond prospectors who … Read more
The owners of Plus Bus Boutique, a Los Angeles consignment shop that buys and sells plus-size fashions, noticed something odd this past summer. “We’ve had an alarming amount of the larger sizes coming in,” says co-owner Marcy Guevara-Prete. With Americans eating less thanks to the new class of weight-loss drugs, retailers are anticipating losses in … Read more
Edna Ferber did not want James Dean to play Jett Rink, the brutish ranch hand turned dissolute millionaire oil magnate from her 1952 novel “Giant.” ‘ She had imagined someone brawnier for the movie adaptation. At least someone more famous! Dean was a 24-year-old angel-faced ingénu whose film debut (in the 1955 drama “East of … Read more
ART Cats of the World Hannah Shaw and Andrew Marttila (Plume), $45Marttila’s “Shop Cats of New York” showed off Gotham’s cutest cats. Now he and his wife Shaw — known as The Kitten Lady on social media — have turned their lens on kitties around the globe, from Turkey to South Africa. Cone of Shame … Read more
E.A. Kahane was hooked on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade long before she saw it in person. The native New Yorker and a group of friends gathered annually at West 72nd Street and Central Park West the night before to watch the parade’s beloved oversized balloons being inflated. “It was an evening that we wouldn’t … Read more
Acting is an infamously insecure vocation. This applies just as much to gaining a foothold as sustaining an A-lister’s star career. One slip – one flop – and you can tumble into the mud. Fresh off winning an Oscar for Best Actress, ‘Catwoman” gave Halle Berry a multi-million paycheck; but was considered by critics one … Read more
“Who lives next door to you?” asks psychologist and true crime expert Emma Kenny in “The Serial Killer Next Door: Chilling True Stories of the Killers Hidden Among Us” (Mobius). “Perhaps a friendly postman or a businessman in a sharp suit? These are the faces you recognize, individuals as ‘ordinary’ as you or me. But it’s … Read more
Betül Tunç’s massive online popularity — she’s the culinary whiz behind the Instagram account @turkuazkitchen — was due to baby blues. A few years back, Tunç, a recent immigrant from Erzurum, Turkey, found herself living in the US with her husband, newborn son and a shaky grasp of English. “I was so alone, I was … Read more
Stacks of books have been written about the kings and queens of England and Henry the Eighth. But few books have chronicled the lesser-known side-characters in history until now with Adrian Bliss’s humorous – albeit strange new book, “The Greatest Nobodies of History [Ballantine Books]. Bliss is no historian. Rather, he’s a well known British … Read more
The Greenland shark is the oldest vertebrate on the planet, capable of living hundreds of years in cold waters thousands of feet deep. It is also uniquely smelly. Its body is designed to have the same salt concentration as the ocean — such that it neither loses nor gains water through osmosis — so it has to … Read more
When Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son was kidnapped in 1932 and his corpse was found two months later, it was considered the crime of the century. It took nearly three years before the boy’s abductor was caught, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation had nothing to do with the investigation or arrest, for two reasons. First, kidnapping … Read more
In her new book, “Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning,” anti-communist advocate Xi Van Fleet recounts all the troubling signs indicating that America’s present is rapidly coming to resemble China’s Maoist past. She should know. Xi was in school when the Cultural Revolution burst upon the Chinese landscape in 1966 with all the violence of a … Read more
In 1866, a group of New York’s finest decided that their fair city needed a museum. It would be a big museum. An important museum. A “national” museum that would bring great art and art education to the American people. A museum like the National Gallery in London, or the Louvre in Paris. (Never mind that … Read more
Each May, Hollywood glitterati descend upon Cannes for its annual Film Festival, which features — along with actors, directors and models — the Hotel Martinez at the center of the opulent affair. Film festival jury members snag luxurious rooms and suites within this historic Art Deco palace, the crown jewel of the French Riviera, which … Read more
Dorothy Parker did not like movies. She did not like Hollywood. And she really did not like the people who ran it. The native New Yorker — whose witty, urbane writing helped define the Roaring Twenties — couldn’t even deign to utter the words Los Angeles; she called it “out there.” Yet in 1929, at … Read more
When Navajo Ranger Stanley Milford Jr and partner Jon Dover were assigned to the department for investigating paranormal activity in Arizona and Utah’s Monument Valley, the pair couldn’t believe it. “Oh my goodness, we’re going to be like The X-Files,” said Dover. But as Milford reveals in ‘The Paranormal Ranger – A Navajo Investigator’s Search for … Read more
Seems like every town in America hosts some sort of food festival these days. There’s the quirky ones, like the Gilroy Garlic Festival, first launched in 1979, and the Waikiki Spam Jam, formerly held in Austin, Minn., home of Hormel Foods. Then there are the mac daddies, like Taste of Chicago, the country’s biggest, which … Read more
When John Madden began calling his local San Francisco radio station in 1997, it signaled the start of nearly 20 years of conversations between the football legend and morning-show host Stan Bunger, as the presenter writes in “Mornings With Madden: My Radio Life with an American Legend’ (Triumph Books, out Tuesday). John Madden’s iconic Morning Madness … Read more