The very talented, intelligent, and beautiful Susan Sarandon is anything but the typical Hollywood actress. A woman for whom commitment and causes are equally important as her next starring role, Sarandon has been passionately promoting political and social change from the start of her illustrious career. This first biography of Susan Sarandon highlights the real person behind the screen image, exploring her idealism, values, and combative spirit in the service of higher goals, while also celebrating her stunning film career.
Renowned celebrity biographer Marc Shapiro traces Sarandonfs life from her strict Catholic upbringing in suburbia and her early days of protest in high school for civil rights and against the Viet Nam War to her more recent involvement with women and childrenfs rights in Nicaragua, the AIDS quilt project, ACT UP, the disruption of an Academy Awards ceremony to protest the internment of Haitians with HIV, and many other ongoing projects. Shapiro also discusses her first career successes through high-profile roles in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pretty Baby, Atlantic City, and Thelma and Louise, as well as her openly unconventional relationships with directors Louis Malle and Franco Amuri, and actor Tim Robbins.
So motivated is Sarandon by her convictions that she often chooses roles to reflect larger issues. She agreed to play in the film Dry White Season to draw attention to the evils of apartheid, and her opposition to the death penalty resulted in her Academy Award-winning performance in Dead Men Walking. Over the years she has paid a price for her activist positions, and supposedly she has accumulated a sizable FBI file. Nonetheless, she has proved time and again that she is always ready to speak out and act up whenever she believes it will do some good.
No ordinary biography, Susan Sarandon is a captivating page-turner about a sexy, alluring, and passionately committed actress who has broken every conventional rule.

Pete Brown is a lot of things. A major songwriting talent who was responsible for Cream's classic musical moments, important collaborations with Jack Bruce and such notable experiments in jazz and rock as The Battered Ornaments, Graham Bond and countless progressive music groups. A talented poet who helped pioneer the emerging UK Beat scene in the sixties, making history with his earliest performances and going poetic toe to toe with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso. He was also a child of war and the memories of The Blitz are still with him to this day. He is an anarchist at heart who believes in the mantra of telling it like it is and has done as much through the decades of a songwriter, musician, producer and poet. Within certain circles Pete Brown is a legend, a creative force of nature who is constantly on the move to the next big thing. To much of the world, Pete Brown is an unknown quantity, known for his Cream fame and not much else. With this book, Pete Brown: The Poet Who Rocks, the creative whirlwind will be on full display. This is Pete Brown. Now his story can be told.

Hawaii's own Grammy-nominated musician was carving out a growing reputation as a professional surfer when an accident left him too injured to compete at the highest level. Jack Johnson switched to making surf movies but gradually found his voice as a singer-songwriter.

Initially a cult favorite among surfers, he has now crossed over to the mainstream, acclaimed as a "Dylan for the twenty-first century." His third album, 2005's "In Between Dreams, " sold over two million copies worldwide and continues to ride high in album charts, and he has just picked up a BRIT Award for International Breakthrough Act.

Acclaimed George Harrison biographer Marc Shapiro has conducted hours of new interviews with those who knew Johnson both as a surfer and a musician, to produce a compelling portrait of one of rock's most original new stars.

You first dug him on "That '70s Show." You daydreamed you'd somehow be part of one of his outrageous hoaxes on "Punk'd." And "The Butterfly Effect" gave you butterflies in your stomach. Now here's the inside scoop on America's most glamorous and adorable goofball-turned-superstar -- a biography of Ashton Kutcher that asks the important questions, like whether he's just one lucky dude or one of the savviest entertainers of his generation. You be the judge.

From his humble beginnings in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to his early days as a model, to how he landed the role of Mike Kelso on the hit sitcom "That '70s Show," here is everything you ever wanted to know about Ashton Kutcher. Find out why he studied biomedical engineering in college, why he pretended to end the run of the MTV show in which he'd punk'd his way to the top, and why he's so hellbent on landing dramatic roles. Here's the dish on his family, his outlook on life, his controversial relationship with megastar Demi Moore...and more -- like all the basics: stats, quirky habits, you name it.

Featuring fantastic photos and cool quotes, "Ashton Kutcher: The Life and Loves of the King of Punk'd" -- like Ashton himself -- has it all! It's a must-have for any fan.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems, OPODIS 2014, Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, in December 2014. The 32 papers presented together with two invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 98 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on consistency; distributed graph algorithms; fault tolerance; models; radio networks; robots; self-stabilization; shared data structures; shared memory; synchronization and universal construction.

Ron Paul is well read. He speaks in complete sentences. And his views are often so far right that they make sense. Did I mention that he's a Republican with Tea Party tendencies? Find out what makes this Presidential hopeful tick when Bluwater's Political Power: Ron Paul, written by New York Times bestselling author Marc Shapiro, has readers on either side of the aisle agreeing to disagree.

Lindsay Lohan was on the fast track to the top when, suddenly, alcohol, drug problems, arrests, stints in rehab, too much partying, and, yes, jail time derailed her celebrity train! Find out how Lindsay fought the law - and the law won!