Looks Can Kill: A Doctor’s Journey through Steroids, Addiction and Online Fitness Culture

By Riam Shammaa, with Patricia Pearson

(Random House Canada, January 2020)

A leader in sports medicine reveals the prevalence of anabolic steroids and appearance-enhancing drugs for recreational use, and explodes the myths and silence around these dangerous drugs of choice for the Instagram era.

From fitspiration vlogs touting “fit” as the new skinny to magazines imploring men to get “shredded” and “massive” in the gym, fitness stars and elevated body-image standards are driving a burgeoning industry meant, ostensibly, to make us all more healthy. But are those images of rippling abs, bulging shoulders and tiny waists truly inspiring good health? In Looks Can Kill, leading sports doctor (and former champion powerlifter) Riam Shammaa exposes the dirty secret of online fitness culture: rampant steroid and drug use, not only amongst its Instagram stars and wellness gurus, but eagerly enjoined by millions seeking to emulate a new beauty ideal (and its myth, of being all-natural).

Never mind the high-profile cases of athletes Marion Jones and Lance Armstrong. Steroids and other pharmaceuticals are being sold and consumed in life-threatening quantities online and through the backrooms of gyms and fitness centres, and the people buying them range from teen girls trying to look good on Instagram to middle-aged men who can’t say good-bye to their youthful physiques.

This is a vivid, eye-opening and compassionate journey alongside a young doctor as he discovers an underworld of misinformation and misdirected ambition, drug abuse and lives cut short for the glory of competition, pageantry or the mistaken belief that we need to be fantastically beautiful in order to be fit.

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Dr. Riam Shammaa is an expert in musculoskeletal medicine, pain medicine and regenerative and translational medicine. Having completed his residency in family medicine at McGill University and a fellowship in sports medicine at the University of Toronto, Dr. Shammaa was appointed lead physician at the 2015 Pan Am Games and has served in a similar role for many other sports organizations. Today, he is the medical director of the Canadian Centres for Regenerative Therapy. A pioneer in stem cell therapy, he conducted the first spinal discs repair using stem cells in Canada and lectures at the University of Toronto on Musculoskeletal diseases.

Patricia Pearson is an award-winning author and the recipient of three Canadian National Magazine Awards, the Arthur Ellis Award for best Canadian nonfiction crime writing, and a North American Travel Journalism Association award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Toronto Life, Reader’s Digest, the Toronto Star, National Post, The Guardian, the New York Times, More, the Globe and Mail, The Daily Telegraph, Business Week, NPR, CBC Television, The History Channel, and TV Ontario, among many others. In 2003, she was a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, Canada’s version of the Mark Twain prize.

Cruel to Be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe

By Will Birch

(Da Capo, August 2019)

Described as “Britain’s greatest living songwriter,” Nick Lowe has made his mark as a pioneer of pub rock, power-pop, and punk rock and as a producer of Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, the Damned, and the Pretenders. He has been a pop star with his bands Brinsley Schwarz and Rockpile, a stepson-in-law to Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, and is the writer behind hits including “Cruel to Be Kind” and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding.” In the past decades, however, he has distinguished himself as an artist who is equally acclaimed for the second act of his career as a tender yet sharp-tongued acoustic balladeer.

Biographer Will Birch, who in addition to being a music writer was a drummer and songwriter with The Records, has known Lowe for over forty years and melds Lowe’s gift as a witty raconteur with his own authoritative analysis of Lowe’s background and the cultural scenes he exemplifies. Lowe’s parallel fame as one of the best interviews in the business will contribute to this first look into his life and work–and likely the closest thing fans will get to an autobiography by this notoriously charming cult figure.

This is not an authorized biography, but Lowe has given it his spiritual blessing and his management and label are fully on board. Cruel to Be Kind is the colorful yet serious account of one of the world’s most talented and admired musicians.

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“[Cruel to Be Kind] makes clear that Lowe’s contributions to pop music have been many and mighty–and certainly worthy of celebration with a biography…sure to please old-time admirers of an essential rocker.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“In leisurely, insightful prose…Will Birch offers a solid biography for Lowe’s devoted fans.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[Will Birch] has written a sunny book about the genial and underappreciated Lowe, following his career through its many incarnations… [A]n enjoyable portrait.”
—Booklist

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Will Birch is a music journalist, drummer, and songwriter based in the UK. In the 1970s he performed with the bands Kursaal Flyers (“Little Does She Know”) and The Records (“Starry Eyes”), before moving into record production and music journalism. He is the author of No Sleep Till Canvey Island – The Great Pub Rock Revolution (Virgin Books 2000). Co-agented with The Soho Agency.

What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal

By E. Jean Carroll

(St. Martin’s Press, July 2019)

A darkly funny and very personal attempt to answer the question by America’s longest running advice columnist.

When E. Jean Carroll—possibly the liveliest woman in the world and author of Ask E. Jean in Elle Magazine — realized that her eight million readers and question-writers all seemed to have one thing in common—problems caused by men—she hit the road. Criss-crossing the country with her blue-haired poodle Lewis Carroll, E. Jean stopped in every town named after a woman between Eden, Vermont and Tallulah, Louisiana to ask women the crucial question: What Do We Need Men For?

E. Jean gave her rollicking road trip a sly, stylish turn when she deepened the story, creating a list called “The Most Hideous Men of My Life,” and began to reflect on her own sometimes very dark history with the opposite sex. What advice would she have given to her past selves—as Miss Cheerleader USA and Miss Indiana University? Or as the fearless journalist, television host and eventual advice columnist she became? E. Jean intertwines the stories of the outspoken people she meets on her road trip with her own history of bad behavior (from mafia bosses, media titans, boyfriends, husbands, a serial killer, and others) creating a decidedly dark yet hopeful, hilarious and thrilling narrative. Her answer to the question What Do We Need Men For? will shock men and delight women.

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“A work of comic genius.”
—The New Yorker

“[O]ne of the definitive books of the #MeToo movement.”
—Bustle

“What [the book] offers…is a kind of literary impressionism, based on 75 years of lived experience―a sense of what it feels like to have pulsing veins and fiery nerves and a teeming mind and be caught within the cold infrastructures of sexism.”
—The Atlantic

“[What Do We Need Men For?] is somehow hilarious, in the way that only E. Jean could have written it…. It’s really wonderful.”
—O Magazine

“Carroll’s new memoir/manifesto, What Do We Need Men For?, is a master class in making a person believe…. Fantastically written but so friendly to follow.”
—Paste Magazine

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E. Jean Carroll wrote the celebrated monthly advice column “Ask E. Jean” for Elle magazine for over 25 years. The most popular advice columnist in the United States, her “Ask E. Jean” column had over eight million readers. She has been a contributing editor at Esquire, Outside, and Playboy, and has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, and other publications. She received an Emmy nomination for her writing on Saturday Night Live. She is currently suing President Trump for defamation, a motion she says to be filing on “behalf of every woman who has ever been harassed, assaulted, silenced, or spoken up only to be shamed, fired, ridiculed and belittled.”

No Walls and the Recurring Dream

By Ani DiFranco

(Viking, May 2019)

• A New York Times Bestseller

In her new memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, Ani DiFranco recounts her early life from a place of hard-won wisdom, combining personal expression, the power of music, feminism, political activism, storytelling, philanthropy, entrepreneurship, and much more into an inspiring whole. In these frank, honest, passionate, and often funny pages is the tale of one woman’s eventful and radical journey to the age of thirty. Ani’s coming of age story is defined by her ethos of fierce independence—from being an emancipated minor sleeping in a Buffalo bus station, to unwaveringly building a career through appearances at small clubs and festivals, to releasing her first album at the age of 18, to consciously rejecting the mainstream recording industry and creating her own label, Righteous Babe Records.

In these pages, as in life, she never hesitates to question established rules and expectations, maintaining a level of artistic integrity that has inspired and challenged more than a few. Ani continues to be a major touring and recording artist as well as a celebrated activist and feminist, standing as living proof that you can overcome all personal and societal obstacles to be who you are and follow your dreams.

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“[P]art feminist and social-justice manifesto, part bracing road story…. [A] deep and thoughtful current runs throughout DiFranco’s memoir.”
—The Washington Post

“No Walls and the Recurring Dream is unapologetic, steadfast and vulnerable.”
—Associated Press

“DiFranco is a natural storyteller, infusing these pages—with their frequent offbeat anecdotes, unusual characters, and significant episodes—with wit, humor, and perspective. . . . [She] has defied convention yet remained true to herself. A must for her fans, this riveting, thought-provoking work will also appeal to anyone who enjoys a well-written autobiography.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“[DiFranco] manages to shed new light on how a young, talented woman created enough momentum to slingshot herself beyond her town’s suffocating gravitational pull and create an entirely new solar system, populated with an orbit of planets and moons of her own devising.”
—Rolling Stone

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Ani DiFranco is a Grammy Award-winning singer, multi-instrumentalist, poet, songwriter, activist, and businesswoman. She has released more than 20 albums, and is one of the first independent musicians to create her own label, Righteous Babe Records, www.righteousbabe.com (based in Buffalo, NY). She is widely known as an activist and feminist icon, and the Righteous Babe Foundation supports causes ranging from abortion rights to gay visibility. DiFranco has received eight Grammy Award nominations and won the Best Recording Package Grammy for the album Evolve in 2004. She received the Woody Guthrie Award, as well as the Woman of Courage Award by the National Organization of Women. She is based in New Orleans.

Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading

By Robert Christgau

(Duke University Press, April 2019)

“Together, these collections [Book Reports and Is It Still Good to Ya?] make the sneaky case that Christgau is not just the Dean of American Rock Critics…but one of America’s sharper public intellectuals of the past half century, and certainly one of its most influential—not to mention one of the better stylists in that cohort…. Christgau’s best work is in his essays.”
—The New Yorker

In this generous collection of book reviews and literary essays, legendary Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau showcases the passion that made him a critic—his love for the written word. Many selections address music from blackface minstrelsy to punk and hip-hop, artists from Lead Belly to Patti Smith, and fellow critics from Ellen Willis and Lester Bangs to Nelson George and Jessica Hopper. But Book Reports also teases out the popular in the Bible and 1984 as well as pornography and science fiction, and analyzes at length the cultural theory of Raymond Williams, the detective novels of Walter Mosley, the history of bohemia, and the 2008 financial crisis. It establishes Christgau as not just the Dean of American Rock Critics, but one of America’s most insightful cultural critics as well.

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“[A] substantial collection of nearly 100 eclectic, thought-provoking, and idea-laden book reviews. . . . [Christgau’s] range of topics is impressive, and his references are prolific. These sprightly, highly opinionated ‘adventures of an autodidact’ reveal Christgau to be a highly literate, astute, and discerning book critic.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“There are few critics working today with the life-long commitment, focus, and curiosity of Robert Christgau. Book Reports doesn’t scan the over half-century of the man’s work, and that’s what makes it all the more impressive. He’s still searching, still pulling volumes from the shelves, looking at new or old ideas, cracking open the spines of preconceived notions all in the service of taking just one more look before walking away with the promise of yet another return.”
—Popmatters

“Robert Christgau, writing on books, is enthralling and energetic, and as persuasive and argument-sparking as he is on records. He sees them both as entrances into a thousand subject matters, but also as formal objects—that’s to say, books. His stock is his comprehensive confidence, no matter the arena; so often, as declaring The Country and the City to be Raymond Williams’s essential book—he’s stunningly right. Book Reports made me glance at my shelf longingly where a run of compilations of his ‘Consumer Guides: Books of the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s’ (and beyond) might sit, but alas. If we’re not that lucky, we’re lucky enough to have this generous compendium of his longer-form stuff.”
—Jonathan Lethem

“You hope any book you read would be insightful, funny, rude, deeply researched, and filled with humanity. Well most books don’t have those qualities, but all of Robert Christgau’s book reviews do.”
—Nelson George

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Robert Christgau has been a rock critic since 1967. A longtime senior editor and chief music critic at The Village Voice, he has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Blender. He is currently a contributor at BarnesandNoble.com, and his record blog Expert Witness appears every Friday at Noisey. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NAJP senior fellowship at Columbia University, and a Ferris Teaching Fellowship at Princeton, he taught at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music from 2005 to 2016. He lives in New York City.

Manual For Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

By Kate Brown

(W.W. Norton, March 2019)

A chilling exposé of the international effort to minimize the health and environmental consequences of nuclear radiation in the wake of Chernobyl.

Governments and journalists tell us that though Chernobyl was “the worst nuclear disaster in history,” a reassuringly small number of people died (44), and nature recovered. Yet, drawing on a decade of fine-grained archival research and interviews in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Kate Brown uncovers a much more disturbing story—one in which radioactive isotypes caused hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Scores of Soviet scientists, bureaucrats, and civilians documented stunning increases in cases of birth defects, child mortality, cancers, and a multitude of prosaic diseases, which they linked to Chernobyl. Worried that this evidence would blow the lid on the effects of massive radiation release from weapons testing during the Cold War, international scientists and diplomats tried to bury or discredit it. A haunting revelation of how political exigencies shape responses to disaster, Manual For Survival makes clear the irreversible impact on every living thing not just from Chernobyl, but from eight decades of radiation from nuclear energy and weaponry.

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“With bountiful, devastating detail, Brown describes how doctors, scientists, and journalists—mainly in Ukraine and Belarus—went to great lengths and took substantial risks to collect information…. Radiation has a special hold on our imagination…. But Manual for Survival asks a larger question about how humans will coexist with the ever-increasing quantities of toxins and pollutants that we introduce into our air, water, and soil. Brown’s careful mapping of the path isotopes take is highly relevant.”
—New York Review of Books

“Exemplary … Brown is an indomitable researcher.”
—The Observer

“[A] troubling book, passionately written and deeply researched…the book moves from science to thriller and realm of conspiracy… there is no doubt about Brown’s gift for vivid narrative. Her conclusion is chilling.”
—Sunday Times

Astonishingly thorough…. [a] revelatory masterpiece.”
—Orion

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Kate Brown is a Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the recipient of many fellowships, including those from the John D. Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and her books have won many prizes, including the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for the Best Book in International European History and their Dunning and Beveridge prizes.

I Never Called It Rape: The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape

(HarperCollins, February 2019)

A new edition of the 1988 classic text that exposed the extreme prevalence of rape in America, coining the term acquaintance rape and establishing the disturbing statistics on sexual assault that still hold just as true today—now featuring an original preface from Gloria Steinem, a new introduction by Salamishah Tillet, an updated afterword by Mary P. Koss, Ph.D., as well as an updated resources section.

In 1988, Robin Warshaw wrote I Never Called It Rape, the ground-breaking book that revealed a staggering truth: in a study of students on college campuses, 25% of women were the victims of rape or attempted rape. Over 80% of these women knew their assailants.

Warshaw based her reportage on the first large-scale study into rape ever, conducted by Ms. magazine in the late 80s. Thirty years later, we now have a wealth of statistics on date rape. The disturbing truth is that the figures have not diminished. That our culture enables rape is not just shown by the numbers—the outbreak of allegations against serial rapists from Bill Cosby to Harvey Weinstein and the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, a man who was recorded bragging about sexual assault, have further amplified this horrifying truth.

With over 80,000 copies sold to date, I Never Called It Rape has served as a guide to understanding rape as a cultural phenomenon for tens of thousands—providing women and men with strategies to address our rape endemic and survivors with the context and resources to help them heal from their experiences. This book pulls the wool from all our eyes on the pervasiveness of rape and sexual assault today.

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“Essential . . . It is nonpolemical, lucid, and speaks eloquently not only to the victims of acquaintance rape but to all those caught in its net.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Painstakingly researched . . . chilling.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Provocative and important.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A devastating portrait of men who rape women they know… based on first-person accounts, scholarly studies and data from a nationwide survey of college campuses.”
—Publishers Weekly

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When Ms. magazine was launched as a “one-shot” sample insert in New York magazine in December 1971, few realized it would become the landmark institution in both women’s rights and American journalism that it is today. The founders of Ms., many of whom are now household names, helped to shape contemporary feminism. Ms. was the first national magazine to make feminist voices audible, feminist journalism tenable, and a feminist worldview available to the public. Today, the magazine remains an interactive enterprise in which an unusually diverse readership is simultaneously engaged with each other and the world. Ms. continues to be an award-winning magazine recognized nationally and internationally as the media expert on issues relating to women’s status, women’s rights, and women’s points of view. For more about Ms., visit http://msmagazine.com.