Among the Mansions of Eden is a fascinating and dishy exploration of Beverly Hills -- a rarefied community that has become a part of our country's mythos, a city renowned for its ostentatious displays of wealth. It takes you behind the gates of the rich and famous for an insider's view of the elite's rapturous and tragic attempts to realize the American Dream.
From Rodeo Drive to Beverly Hills High School, Among the Mansions of Eden tells the city's story by capturing the individuals who are emblematic of various factions of Beverly Hills society: The cast of unforgettable characters includes the late Milton Berle, who spent his last days surrounded by aging cronies in the cavernous ballroom of the Friars Club, haunted by the ghosts of the past; Fred Hayman, a former banquet manager who opened a boutique called Giorgio and transformed Rodeo Drive from a provincial retail district to a phantasmagoric midway that caters to the world's most affluent shoppers; Gavin de Becker, a poor kid from a broken home who became the security broker to the stars; Mark Hughes, the health-supplement wunderkind who parlayed a trunkful of vitamin pills into a billion-dollar empire known as Herbalife and planned to build his own San Simeon on the last undeveloped mountaintop in Beverly Hills; Jim Forester, a teenager with an overriding passion for a righteous buzz that led him on a Dante-esque journey through the city's underworld of pushers, delinquents, scam artists, and sleazoids; and Norm Zadeh, who used the millions he made as a hedge-fund manager to start a girlie magazine, fill a Beverly Hills mansion with curvaceous nymphets, and emulate the life of Hugh Hefner.
You'll also meet a fascinating array of con artists, hucksters, and libido-crazed pleasure seekers and gun fetishists who are willing to resort to whatever means necessary to steal a piece of the Beverly Hills Dream. Among the Mansions of Eden weaves their individual stories into a spellbinding tale of wealth, fame, and the lust for land, power, and social status in the most opulent city in America.

Among the Mansions of Eden: Tales of Love, Lust, and Land in Beverly Hills

History

Weddle, David

Americas

William Morrow

The first major biography of the film director recounts his life and career, from his stint as a script-writer for the television series, "Gunsmoke," in the fifties, through his string of movies, including The Wild Bunch in 1969.

'If They Move... Kill 'Em!": The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Grove Pr

The only major biography of Sam Peckinpah in print, David Weddle's If They Move...Kill 'Em! tells the wild story of Peckinpah's life with novelistic verve and does justice to one of the most important bodies of work in American cinema. Born into a clan of lumberjacks, ranchers, and frontier lawyers, David Samuel Peckinpah served in the Marines and then made his way to Hollywood, where he worked on a string of low-budget features before being hired as a writer for Gunsmoke in 1955. Quickly becoming the hottest writer in television, Peckinpah went on to direct a phenomenal series of features, including Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and The Wild Bunch. The life he led -- glamorous, wild, and beset by personal demons -- is as vivid as his films. A hopeless romantic and a grim nihilist, inspiration to such luminaries as DePalma, Scorsese, and Tarantino, Sam Peckinpah was an audacious American original. If They Move...Kill 'Em! is his wild and woolly story.

If They Move . . . Kill 'Em!: The Life and TImes of Sam Peckinpah

GROVE PRESS

Uneasy Peace. Worlds In Flux. Tests Of Faith. The Final Episode Was Only The Beginning. The Dominion War is over...or is it? Three months after the Allied victory against the invaders from the Gamma Quadrant, a surprise attack awakens the fear of renewed hostilities. At the same time, a senseless murder sets a space station commander on a path that will test the limits of her faith...while a strange discovery within the plasma storms of the Badlands propels an old soldier toward a rendezvous with destiny. Elsewhere, amidst the ruins of an ancient civilization, a young man is about to embark on a dangerous quest to fill the hole in his life -- one left by the loss of his father. So begins the unprecedented, authorized continuation of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine®, springing from the seven-year television odyssey of Captain Benjamin Sisko and his crew aboard a Federation starbase at the edge of the final frontier. Following the serial format and evolving character arcs that were the hallmarks of the TV series, the new Deep Space Nine novels pick up where the show left off, daring to imagine what happened after the final episode. Now the first five tales of that critically acclaimed storyline are collected in one massive volume. Originally published as the two-part Avatar, Abyss, Demons of Air and Darkness, and the novella "Horn and Ivory," Twist of Faith revisits the aftermath of the Dominion War, the pivotal planet Bajor, its mysterious connection to the timeless Prophets of the wormhole, as well as the familiar faces, new friends, and uncertain allies whose fates intertwine at the crossroads of the galaxy. With an introduction by New York Times bestselling author David R. George III (Mission: Gamma -- Twilight; The Lost Era: Serpents Among the Ruins; the Crucible trilogy), Twist of Faith takes the Deep Space Nine saga to a new level...exploring what was left behind, and what awaits beyond.

Twist of Faith: Deep Space Nine) (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

Literature & Fiction

Jeffrey Lang

S.D. Perry

keith-r-a-decandido

United States

GALLERY BOOKS

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Books by Weddle, David