In 1973, less than a hundred years after Henry James's "Daisy Miller" compared the innocence of Americans with the decadence of Europeans, Jim and Artie Mitchell arrived at the Cannes Film Festival for the screening of their magnum opus. When the lights came up and the credits rolled on "Behind the Green Door," the French audience showered America's bad-boy pornographers with wild applause. The formerly innocent Americans had returned to teach the Europeans about decadence.
"Bottom Feeders" is the compelling story of how a pair of irreverent brothers, the sons of an Okie cardshark, made pornography one more option in the mainstream consumer marketplace. It is also the story of how their moral disintegration ended in the violent death of Artie at the hands of his brother.
Award-winning author John Hubner set out to discover what kind of forces might drive a man to kill his brother. But his examination of the Mitchell story becomes much more than that. Long before mild-mannered Jim burst into Artie's house with his rifle blazing, the Mitchell Brothers had made a name for themselves as counterculture heroes who owned San Francisco's landmark O'Farell Theatre. Riding the free-love tide of sexual libertarianism, the brothers went from distribution of topless still photos to sexually explicit films and live sex shows that forced authorities to anchor legal rulings in the shifting sands of community standards. Along the way they produced "Green Door" (which became a mainstream blockbuster), fought seminal court battles, launched the career of famed "Ivory Snow Girl" Marilyn Chambers, were a focal point for underground celebrities like Hunter S. Thompson, and became known as the Peck's Bad Boys of San Francisco, who responded to harassment from the mayor by putting her office number on the theatre marquee.
But whether you're in the vanguard or the rearguard, porn is a dirty business. Hubner discovers that the morally twisted world of porn often attracts psychologically unstable people who are unable to escape from it. Artie Mitchell himself became the most striking example of this disintegration: an alcoholic and womanizer who never grew up.
"Bottom Feeders" effortlessly interweaves Artie and Jim's story with the social forces that helped shape them, from the Vietnam War to the supercharged rebellious atmosphere of San Francisco in the sixties. And finally we come to understand how two counterculture heroes-and the counterculture itself-burned themselves out.

With the narrative force of an epic novel and the urgency of first-rate investigative journalism, this important book delves into the daily workings and life-or-death decisions of a typical American family court system. It provides an intimate look at the lives of the parents and children whose fate it decides. A must for social workers and social work students, attorneys, judges, foster parents, law students, child advocates, teachers, journalists and anyone who cares about our nation's children.

A powerful, bracing and deeply spiritual look at intensely, troubled youth, Last Chance in Texas gives a stirring account of the way one remarkable prison rehabilitates its inmates.
While reporting on the juvenile court system, journalist John Hubner kept hearing about a facility in Texas that ran the most aggressive-and one of the most successful-treatment programs for violent young offenders in America. How was it possible, he wondered, that a state like Texas, famed for its hardcore attitude toward crime and punishment, could be leading the way in the rehabilitation of violent and troubled youth?
Now Hubner shares the surprising answers he found over months of unprecedented access to the Giddings State School, home to "the worst of the worst": four hundred teenage lawbreakers convicted of crimes ranging from aggravated assault to murder. Hubner follows two of these youths-a boy and a girl-through harrowing group therapy sessions in which they, along with their fellow inmates, recount their crimes and the abuse they suffered as children. The key moment comes when the young offenders reenact these soul-shattering moments with other group members in cathartic outpourings of suffering and anger that lead, incredibly, to genuine remorse and the beginnings of true empathy . . . the first steps on the long road to redemption.
Cutting through the political platitudes surrounding the controversial issue of juvenile justice, Hubner lays bare the complex ties between abuse and violence. By turns wrenching and uplifting, Last Chance in Texas tells a profoundly moving story about the children who grow up to inflict on others the violence that they themselves have suffered. It is a story of horror and heartbreak, yet ultimately full of hope.

"From the Hardcover edition."