Back pain manifests itself in many different forms, attacks without warning, and damages its victims' physical and emotional health. Everyone suggests a different cure for the effects of a weak core: surgeons want to cut, chiropractors want to adjust, physical therapists want to perform physical therapy. In The End of Back Pain, neurosurgeon Partick Roth, M.D., reveals that, more often than not, back pain is caused by a set of underdeveloped core muscles that control the stability and alignment of the spine that are not being used. He details a specialized exercise program to strengthen and develop those muscles to relieve, control, and even prevent chronic pain. The End of Back Pain helps patients view the body from a totally different perspective, and inspires readers to push their bodies in order to cure its maladies. After years of treating back pain, Dr. Roth has seen time and time again that a back that is not used to its full capacity is a back that is unhealthy. When we don't use our backs, we are not utilizing the core set of muscles designed to help us stay strong, increase stamina, and look our very best.

Dark stories of failed dreams and contemporary desperation in Los Angeles. In a rundown Los Angeles apartment building—the titular Starlite Terrace—Patrick Roth unfurls the tragic linked stories of Rex, Moss, Gary, and June, four neighbors, in a sort of burlesque of the Hollywood modern. In each of their singular collisions with fame, Roth’s dark prose presages a universal and mythical fate of desperation.   In “The Man at Noah’s Window,� Rex shares the story of his father, a supposed hand double for Gary Cooper in High Noon. In “Eclipse of the Sun,� Moss, who lives in fear of the next holocaust, awaits a visit from the long-lost daughter he has tracked down. In “Rider on the Storm,� Gary, a rock drummer and born-again Christian, who “almost played� on the Turtles’ 60s-hit “Happy Together,� strives to find an escape from his personal guilt. And in “The Woman in the Sea of Stars,� June, a former Hollywood studio secretary whose husband once cheated on her with Marilyn Monroe, makes the best of a disconnected life until she emerges reborn through ashes strewn in the illuminated swimming pool of the Starlite Terrace.   In each of these four tales of wannabes and almost-weres, Roth's L.A. portraits unfold in rare style, and, in Krishna Winston’s masterful translation, the hopeless, loveless perversion of an Ed Ruscha-inspired California becomes a compelling pageant of all-American grotesques that is not to be missed.