Engaging and complex, sophisticated and quirky, gin has become a vital component in the mixing cups of a new breed of artisan drinksmiths. Its title an homage to Humphrey Bogart's lament in the 1942 film "Casablanca," offered is the guide to a journey around the upper echelon of the bartending profession in one-hundred-and-one recipes - exploratory gin-based concoctions developed in the progressive cocktail laboratories of American "gin joints," often bringing methods and flourishes of the kitchen to the glass with fresh juices, muddled fruit, infused syrups, earthy spices, and leafy herbs. With this volume as trusted companion, you'll be able to re-create their remarkable formulas with precision and authenticity. With each raised glass, offer a toast to gin - invented by the Dutch, refined by the British, and glamorized by Americans. Borrowing once again from Bogart, "Here's looking at you, kid."

Whatever the "something special' is that constitutes a man's man and an actor's actor, he had it - and in abundance. Raised by a genteel East Coast family with a doctor father and a well-known artist mother, Humphrey DeForest Bogart emerged from a minor theatrical career in the 1920s to become one of Hollywood's most distinctive leading men, typically cast as smart, playful, courageous, tough, occasionally reckless characters who lived in a world of dames, mugs, and coppers, yet anchored by a hidden moral code - hard-boiled cynics who ultimately show a noble side. In "The Maltese Falcon," when Sydney Greenstreet's Kasper Gutman, says to Bogart's Sam Spade, "By Gad, sir, you are a character - there's never any telling what you'll say or do next, except that it's bound to be something astonishing," he might just as well have been describing the real-life Humphrey Bogart. Here was a man who could charm the birds off the trees one minute, and tell a producer to go straight to hell the next. They threw away the mold when he moved on. This fizzy cocktail of a book lifts the veil off the movie tough guy to reveal the real-life tough guy. It provides an unvarnished portrait of a hard-drinking, prankish extrovert whose heart was as soft as his screen lines were hard. You get a little history and a bit of sociology. But the fun comes from the abundant helping of irreverence. His contemporaries as well as subsequent observers have plenty to say about Bogie - the good, the bad, and the ugly - and his own brash words provide an affectionate, perceptive portrait of a marvelous, contradictory man.

As late as the 1920s, when Eleanor Roosevelt's daughter Anna enrolled in Cornell's School of Agriculture, her grandmother complained that "Girls who went to college were very apt to be 'old maids' and become 'bookworms, ' a dire threat to any girl's chance of attracting a husband." In today's higher education landscape, when women earn fully half the degrees granted by Cornell in every category, this modest volume reminds readers of those devoted daughters of their Alma Mater whose cumulative strength pushed open the door for women in intellectual life, in politics, in industry - and includes the remarkable and influential who followed in their footsteps. It is not meant to provide a comprehensive nor complete academic reference, but rather an accessible distillation that recognizes many of the authentic heroines we already know, and introduces more than a few we ought to know.

It was a mythological New York, a smoke-filled era in which men were men and women were dames, a period when getting properly inebriated was a sign of character and top shelf was the elixir of life. Between World War II and the end of the Eisenhower era, Manhattan's place to be and to be seen was Toots Shor's, and for those who were part of the inner circle, it sure was fun while it lasted. Toots Shor was a stout, gregarious palooka who reigned over his men's club and served up food and strong drink with a heaping side of insults and put-downs. His gin joint exerted an almost tidal pull on athletes, writers, radio men, fight promoters, bookies, not to mention actors, pols and Broadway brokers. Like survivors clinging to the same life raft, they became inseparable, hanging out with boldface names including Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Jack Dempsey, Frank Gifford, Walter Cronkite, Yogi Berra, Mike Wallace, Edward R. Murrow, Earl Warren, Frank Costello, and Jimmy Hoffa. Shor's became the mother lodge for assembling after the big prize fights, baseball, basketball and hockey games. There athletes and fans argued and reminisced until the early hours of the morning. It all had to end, of course. And it did. But the compilation in "Saloonkeeper: Toots Shor in His Own Words and in the Words of Those Who Knew Him" offers a snootful of nostalgia, a booze-stained portrait of those dear dead days. His contemporaries as well as subsequent observers have plenty to say about Toots and his legendary saloon while the big guy's own words provide his reflections on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No kidding.

Updated and revised, this edition of THE JOHN WAYNE CODE presents a post-Bush perspective of Conservatism, contrasting wisdom and grit from an icon of the Old Right with a movement that's lost its soul. It's not an exaggeration to say that the modern Conservative movement in this country is dominated by propagandists and charlatans, people without intellectual integrity. Conservatives have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by the "Conservative Entertainment Industry." While they have been entrusted to lead the flock, they've led much of it far away from anything that resembles its core values. It will take John Wayne, an Elder of the Republican village, to put Republicans back in the saddle again. "Words are loaded pistols," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. John Wayne's words were as powerful as the six-guns he wore on his hips. THE JOHN WAYNE CODE is a must-read for every Republican and a valuable reference regardless of the reader's political ideology.