Howard Hughes has always fascinated the public with his mixture of secrecy, dashing lifestyle, and reclusiveness. This is the book that breaks through the image to get at the man. Originally published under the title Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes.

Exposing the most controversial, little-known practices of America's most flawed system, "Time" magazine's Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team pulls back the curtain on the health care industry to explain exactly how things grew so out of control.
Dirty examination and operating rooms in doctor's offices and hospitals . . . Health care executives pulling in millions in bonuses for denying treatment to the sick . . . More than 100 million people with inadequate or no medical coverage . . . This may sound like the predicament of a third-world nation, but this is America's health care reality today. The U.S. spends more on health care than" any other nation," yet our benefits are shrinking and life expectancy is shorter here than in countries that spend significantly less per capita. Meanwhile, HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital chains reap tremendous profits, while politicians--beholden to insurers and drug companies--enact legislation for the benefit of the few rather than the many, while the entire system is on the verge of collapse.
In Critical Condition, award-winning investigative journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele expose the horror of what health care in America has become. They profile patients and doctors trapped by the system and offer startling personal stories that illuminate what's gone wrong. Doctors tell of being second-guessed and undermined by health care insurers; nurses recount chilling tales of hospital meltdowns; patients explain how they've been victimized by a system that is meant to care for them. Drug companies profit by selling pills in the same manner that Madison Avenue sells soap, while Wall Street rakes in billions by building up and then tearing down health care businesses. And politicians pass legislation perpetuating the injustices and out-right fraud the system encourages.
By analyzing the industry and offering an insightful prescription for getting it back on the right track, Critical Condition is an enormously compelling investigative work that addresses the concerns of every American.

American: Who Really Pays the Taxes? is a disturbing, eye-opening look at a tax system gone out of control. Originally designed to spread the cost of government fairly, our tax code has turned into a gold mine of loopholes and giveaways manipulated by the influential and wealthy for their own benefit.

If you feel as if the tax laws are rigged against the average taxpayer, you're right:
-- Middle-income taxpayers pick up a growing share of the nation's tax bill, while our most profitable corporations pay little or nothing.
-- Your tax status is effected more by how many lawyers and lobbyists you can afford than by your resources or needs.
-- Our best-known and most successful companies pay more taxes to foreign governments than to our own.
-- Cities and states start bidding wars to attract business through tax breaks -- taxes made up for by the American taxpayer.

Who really pays the taxes? Barlett and Stelle, authors of the best-selling america: What Went Wrong?, offer a graphic expose of what's wrong with our tax system, how it got that way, and how to fix it.

Selected by Library Journal as one of the hundred best books in science and technology for 1985. This book is an outgrowth of a series of articles that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer in November 1983. For eighteen months, the authors traveled some 20,000 miles, interviewing dozens of people and assembling more than 125,000 pages of documents. These included local, state, and federal government reports, state and federal court records, corporate files, congressional hearing transcripts, scientific studies, and internal memoranda of public agencies and private businesses. The resulting newspaper series provoked a much broader reaction than we had anticipated. In response to requests for copies of the articles, more than 25,000 reprints were sent to individuals and organizations in more than forty states and several foreign countries. Many of those who wrote urged the authors to expand the newspaper series into a book. In doing so, they updated the material and added new information, including sections on military waste, foreign reprocessing, and uranium mill tailings. We were tempted to delve into other areas, such as the design and construction of reactors and the economics of nuclear power. But we focused instead on waste-the amount produced, past efforts to manage it, and the politics of its disposal.

In The Great American Tax Dodge, a book that should infuriate and galvanize citizens everywhere, the best-selling authors of America: What Went Wrong? expose the millions of Americans who are dodging their income taxes at every honest taxpayer's expense. With the clarity, insight, and readability that earned them two Pulitzer Prizes, Donald Barlett and James Steele explain how Americans are cheating as never before, and why most are getting away with it. The authors relate the stories of a Manhattan couple who spent $1 million a month to maintain their lifestyle yet never paid income tax, a California couple who provided sport utility vehicles for their children at taxpayers' expense, an entrepreneur in Costa Rica who shows Americans how to hide their money in clandestine accounts offshore, and computer technicians at America's largest corporations who live tax-free. Barlett and Steele describe how the Internet has democratized tax cheating, as proliferating Web sites and their often mysterious operators offer every service imaginable to escape taxes. They discuss the double standard the IRS employs in tax audits--one for the rich and well-connected and another for everyone else--and how the Justice Department tries to jail powerless citizens accused of tax law violations while allowing the wealthy and influential to go free. This book also documents how Congress is deliberately undermining the income tax in order to replace it with a system that will provide the largest windfall ever for the richest Americans--and increase the burden on everyone else. And it spells out how executives like Kenneth L. Lay bankrolled campaigns to institute such a tax system, based on accounting principles eerily similar to those employed at Lay's Enron Corporation. Finally, the authors consider our chances for reestablishing what was once the fairest tax system in the world.