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.

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.

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!

The book contains dark thrillers and chilling horror. Short stories that are not for the faint of heart. If you enjoy a good unnerving thrill, then look no further.