We are always hearing about the Next Big Thing. Whether it is a new iPhone or the New World, the freshest and newest inventions, discoveries, and fads loom large in the public mind. The impact that everyone thinks these "next big things" will have is often more important than the actual impact it generates. After all, if it fails, it will be almost immediately forgotten. The Next Big Thing searches through 3,000 years of Western culture to find the colorful and key steps (and missteps) that led us to where we are today. Paradigm-shifting events, such as the spread of ethical monotheism and the invention of the printing press, stand beside such cultural ephemera as the aborted U.S metric campaign and the misbegotten vogue for smart drinks. Each entry features the historical context of that Next Big Thing as well as an overview of its legacy, including photos, sidebars, trivia, and quotes.

Part "Weird U.S." and part "Roadside America," GROSS AMERICA offers families a road trip through the USA that would delight the King of Bad Taste John Waters and the unflappable guys on MTV's "Jackass." Sure, you could use your vacation days to take the family to the beach again. Or, you could plan a trip to see brains in jars, frozen dead guys, and visit a factory that makes candy-coated insects. You can:
head down to Houston, Texas, and walk inside a 27-foot model of the human intestinal systemvisit a Civil War battlefield embalming dioramahead over to explorers Lewis & Clark's latrineslook at the world's largest fungusvisit the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver Citytouch the oldest human turdrecoil from a massive human hairball that grew for seven years before it was surgically removed from the stomach of a 12-year-old girl who suffered from compulsive hair nibblingsee the corroded mandible of a Tyrannosaurus Rex at the nation's largest natural history museum in Chicagovisit the first funeral home to offer flameless cremation servicesmake a pilgrimage to Chicago to visit America's last remaining plastic vomit factoryjourney to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see a dog poop-fueled streetlamptravel to Nederland, Colorado, for "Frozen Dead Guy Days," an annual celebration of at-home cryogenics experimentsspend some time among the preserved human brains at Philadelphia's Mutter Museumtake in the acclaimed cockroach dioramas of Plano, Texas Gross America is a coast-to-coast catalog of the most grandly gross science experiments, beautifully bizarre art, and delightfully disgusting historical sites that America has to offer. Part travel atlas, part trivia guide, Gross America presents these United States as you've never seen them before--weird, wonderful, strange, and totally, utterly gross.