Praise for Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times
""Dennis McDougal is a rare Hollywood reporter: honest, fearless, nobody's fool. This is unvarnished Jack for Jack-lovers and Jack-skeptics but, also, for anyone interested in the state of American culture and celebrity. I always read Mr. McDougal for pointers but worry that he will end up in a tin drum off the coast of New Jersey.""
-- Patrick McGilligan, author of Jack's Life and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light
Praise for Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty
""A great freeway pileup--part biography, part dysfunctional family chronicle, and part institutional and urban history, with generous dollops of scandal and gossip.""
-- Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker
""McDougal has managed to scale the high walls that have long protected the Chandler clan and returned with wicked tales told by angry ex-wives and jealous siblings.""
--The Washington Post
Praise for The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood
""Real glamour needs a dark side. That is part of the fascination of Dennis McDougal's wonderful book.""
--The Economist
""Thoroughly reported and engrossing . . . the most noteworthy trait of MCA was how it hid its power.""
--The New York Times Book Review
""Over the years, I've read hundreds of books on Hollywood and the movie business, and this one is right at the top.""
-- Michael Blowen, The Boston Globe

Praise for Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times
"Dennis McDougal is a rare Hollywood reporter: honest, fearless, nobody's fool. This is unvarnished Jack for Jack-lovers and Jack-skeptics but, also, for anyone interested in the state of American culture and celebrity. I always read Mr. McDougal for pointers but worry that he will end up in a tin drum off the coast of New Jersey."
-- Patrick McGilligan, author of Jack's Life and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light
Praise for Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty
"A great freeway pileup--part biography, part dysfunctional family chronicle, and part institutional and urban history, with generous dollops of scandal and gossip."
-- Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker
"McDougal has managed to scale the high walls that have long protected the Chandler clan and returned with wicked tales told by angry ex-wives and jealous siblings."
--The Washington Post
Praise for The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood
"Real glamour needs a dark side. That is part of the fascination of Dennis McDougal's wonderful book."
--The Economist
"Thoroughly reported and engrossing . . . the most noteworthy trait of MCA was how it hid its power."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Over the years, I've read hundreds of books on Hollywood and the movie business, and this one is right at the top."
-- Michael Blowen, The Boston Globe

The ultimate biography of the musical icon.

Bob Dylan is a music hero to generations. He's also an international bestselling artist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and an Oscar winner for "Things Have Changed." His career is stronger and more influential than ever. How did this happen, given the road to oblivion he seemed to choose more than two decades ago?

Dylan's 72, and this final act of his career is more interesting than ever--yet the classic biographies like "Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades "(first published 1991, updated 2001) and even his own "Chronicles: Volume One" (published 2005) came too soon to cover this act.

Now this groundbreaking biography digs deep into Bob Dylan lore--including subjects Dylan himself left out of "Chronicles: Volume One." "Dylan: The Biography" moves beyond analysis of lyrics or well-worn biographical facts to focus on why this beloved artist's American odyssey has touched so many souls--and how both Dylan and his audience have changed along the way. What happened during the past two decades to transform a heroin addict into one of the most astonishing literary and musical icons in American history?

Through extensive interviews and connections with Dylan's friends, family, sidemen, and fans, "Los Angeles Times" journalist Dennis McDougal builds a new understanding of Dylan, as well as the real story behind the myths. Was his romantic life, especially with Sara Dylan, much more complicated than it appears? Was his motorcycle accident a cover for drug rehab? What really happened to Dylan when his career fell apart, and how did he find his way back? To what does "he "attribute his astonishing success? McDougal's interviews and meticulous research offer a revealing new understanding of these older questions--and of the new chapter Dylan is writing in his life and career.

Aboard the spy ship U.S.S. Argosy in the war-tossed waters off the coast of Vietnam, three young American sailors form an unlikely bond. Each has fled an America they were raised to love but somehow no longer understand. When forced to choose whether to face combat or stay and fight the war in the streets, they sign up for a war that reflects the conflict that raged inside each of them. The one thing of which they were certain was that the only people in the world they could depend on were each other. As their friendship deepens in the bars and brothels from Hong Kong to Subic Bay, Ernie Brigham and his companions slowly become aware of a dark secret aboard the U.S.S. Argosy. Upon their return to the America they left behind, they are changed at best, lost and damaged at worst, but ultimately sobered by a war that never should have been fought. In the tradition of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, and Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, The Candlestickmaker recalls a Vietnam that seared disenchantment into a post World War II generation who learned to question authority at all levels. A coming-of-age story bookended by revelations that shatter readers' illusions about patriotism, government, and the nature of modern warfare, The Candlestickmaker takes readers on a voyage that will guarantee they never read the Mother Goose nursery rhyme to their children in quite the same way again.

This is an account of the media family that created and cashed in on the Los Angeles Times. It tells how a second-rate newspaper rose to national greatness, only to become a casualty of war - a civil war within the family that owned it. It spans the American century, from 1884, when the Chandler family gained control of the just-born daily, through April 2000, when they sold it to the Tribune Company. Above all, Privileged Son chronicles the life of Otis Chandler, the Times' chief architect after 1960, whose flamboyant exploits in and out of the publisher's suite changed the perspective of the newspaper, and Los Angeles, forever. Using scores of insider sources, Dennis McDougal, the author of The Last Mogul includes accounts of political graft and early mob connections among one of L.A.'s most prominent families. The Chandlers, who helped establish the national careers of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and several other major political figures, controlled Los Angeles and the Times Mirror Corporation with a capriciousness that is seldom seen.

The reviewer of the Boston Globe said point blank: "Over the years, I've read hundreds of books on Hollywood and the movie business, and this one is right at the top." As the elusive, tyrannical head of the Music Corporation of America (MCA) until the 1990s, Lew Wasserman was the most powerful and feared man in show business for more than half a century. His career spanned the entire history of the movies, from the silent era to the present, and he was guru to Alfred Hitchcock, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and Jimmy Stewart, and to a new generation of filmmakers beginning with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. For more than four years, Dennis McDougal interviewed over 350 people who knew the man with the giant dark horn-rimmed glasses-colleagues, relatives, rivals-and drew on tens of thousands of pages of documents to produce this extraordinary and first-ever portrait of a legend and his times, a book that the New York Times Book Review called "thoroughly reported and engrossing" and that the Daily News called, simply, "a bombshell."

The true story of Theresa Knorr, the twisted child abuser who murdered her daughters—with the help of her sons—told by a former New York Times reporter.   In June 1985, Theresa Cross Knorr dumped her daughter Sheila’s body in California’s desolate High Sierra. She had beaten Sheila unconscious in their Sacramento apartment days earlier, then locked her in a closet to die. But this wasn’t the first horrific crime she’d committed against her own children.   The previous summer, Knorr had shot Sheila’s sister Suesan, then ordered her son to dig the bullet out of the girl’s back with a knife to hide the evidence. The infection that resulted led to delirium—at which point Knorr and her two sons drove Suesan into the mountains, doused her with gasoline, and set her on fire.   It would be almost a decade before her youngest daughter, Terry Knorr Graves, revealed her mother’s history of unfathomable violence. At first, she was met with disbelief by law enforcement and even her own therapist. But eventually, the truth about her monstrous abuse emerged—and here, an award-winning journalist details the jealousy, rage, and domineering behavior that escalated into homicide and shattered a family.    A former reporter for the New York Times and Los AngelesTimes and the author of true-crime classics including Angel of Darkness, about serial killer Randy Kroft, and Blood Cold, about Robert Blake and Bonny Lee Bakley, Dennis McDougal reveals the shocking depths of depravity behind a case that made headlines across the nation.  

They were a California success story, with ties that reached all the way to Ronald Reagan. But when police were called to the neat, expensive Miller home they found a monstrous death scene. Hailed as "compelling" and "riveting", this is the tragic true story of how even a "perfect" family can be destroyed when touched by suicide, matricide, and violent mental illness.

Since he was seven, Cary Stayner had dreamed of capturing women . . . and killing them

They were crimes that grabbed headlines around the world and stunned America. Four women dead, their bodies charred and horribly mutilated. Now Dennis McDougal, acclaimed author of the spellbinding true crime tour de force Mother's Day, brings his considerable investigative and narrative skills to the Yosemite murders to give you the most complete account of what really happened. Drawing on several personal conversations with the confessed killer and interviews with the victims' families, McDougal presents the definitive story, and answers many lingering questions. What demons drove this quiet handyman and nudist colony habitue to burn, mutilate, and murder four women he didn't even know?  How did he overpower a woman and two teenaged girls?  And most disturbing, did the glory-seeking FBI actually hinder the investigation, leaving the killer free to kill once more before he was caught?

THE YOSEMITE MURDERS offers valuable insight into these savage and senseless murders in the heart of America's most beautiful wilderness.