“Only Malachi Martin, consummate Vatican insider and intelligence expert, could reveal the untold story behind the Vatican’s role in today’s winner-take-all race against time to establish, maintain and control the first one-world government… It is not too much to say, in fact, that the chosen purpose of John Paul’s papacy—the engine that drives his papal grand policy and determines his day-to-day, year-by-year strategies—is to be the victor in that competition, now well under way. For the fact is that the stakes John Paul has placed in the arena of geopolitical contention include everything—himself, his papal persona, the age-old Petrine Office he now embodies, and his entire Church Universal, both as an institutional organization unparalleled in the world and as a body of believers united by a bond of mystical communion.”

Publisher: Touchstone
Paperback: 734 pages

As a research pharmacologist, Ronald K. Siegel took the same drugs as his subjects in an effort to truly understand their experiences. In this study of the waking nightmare of paranoia, Siegel seeks to identify with patients who are “hallucinating without the use of artificial intoxicants.” The limbic system is the “neurological hideaway of the paranoia demon” but the psychological and biological triggers that engender paranoia are complex. Siegel pursues these origins like a sometimes terrified and often gleeful private eye; he emerges with mesmerizing stories which suggest a compassionate, scientifically rigorous Clive Barker. In many of the most horrifying accounts, cocaine is the ingredient which turns a bad situation into a tragic one:
• A Christmas shipment of pure Bolivian rock cocaine results in a massive “bug invasion.” Siegel sees numerous subjects covered with large, gummy lesions where they tried to dig the hallucinated creatures out of their bodies. One coke fiend shows up at his home with vials labelled “H” and “P” for “hands” and “penis”—the sites from which he has excavated the “bugs” in a sleepless three-day blitz with the help of his old high school dissecting kit and a stereo microscope.
• A beautiful, socially isolated waitress/ballet dancer interprets the placement of silverware by her love object, a gay waiter, as messages of desire. Her own desire, frustration, and paranoid obsession mount. Finally, she choreographs a dance for him which, in a twisted take on the romantic ballet Giselle, ends in murder.
• A father of five is left unemployed, humiliated and depressed by a debilitating shipyard accident followed by a false arrest. His discovery of cocaine leads to a three-year war against a spectral invasion of bugs, worms, snakes and midgets, which he records via an elaborate system of video cameras and microphones located throughout his house. His arsenal includes several propane torches, one converted into a flamethrower and dubbed “Mr. Discipline,” a term probably used by his sadistic father. MH

Publisher: Touchstone
Paperback: 310 pages

“Recounts the panoramic history of oil—and the struggle for wealth and power that has always surrounded oil. This struggle has shaken the world economy, dictated the outcome of wars and transformed the destiny of men and nations. The Prize is as much a history of the 20th century as of the oil industry itself… The cast is enormous: from wildcatters and rogues to oil tycoons, and from Winston Churchill and Ibn Saud to George Bush and Saddam Hussein.”

Publisher: Touchstone
Paperback: 887 pages
Illustrated

The autobiography of one of the most important and influential musicians in the world. With an uncensored candor and a stellar wit, Miles recounts the major events of his life: his upbringing in East St. Louis where, still a teenager, he first saw Dizzy and Bird and made up his mind to become a musician; his journey to New York ostensibly to study at Juilliard but in fact to apprentice himself to Charlie Parker (a musical education at once intense, tragic and uproarious—Miles’ recounting of a cab ride they once took together is hilarious); his pioneering of “cool jazz”; his later forays into electric funk. Looking back over a lifetime of musical experimentation, Miles recalls his work with numerous jazz giants, most notably Bird, Dizzy, Monk, Trane and especially (despite an impatience toward white people bordering on bigotry) Gil Evans. Maddening, mercurial, irreverent and extremely funny, the book is punctuated with uncomfortable details—rampant promiscuity, failed marriages, recurring drug addictions—anyone else would have understandably played down or excluded altogether. It’s a credit to Quincy Troupe that he was able to capture and sustain Miles’ uniquely vernacular tone throughout—the reader has the sense of listening to a man spin out the story of his extraordinary life in unsparing detail. Read the book, heed the music. MDG

Publisher: Touchstone
Paperback: 446 pages
Illustrated