Bøger af Mike Sager

"The wry and knowing Mike Sager has written a saucy and kinetic L.A. novel. Celebrity gets fully toasted in this engaging romp about show business and the clash of cultures high and low, where the talk is tough before the shooting starts. The spotlight, it seems, can sometimes be a very dark place." -Ron Carlson, author, Return to Oakpine, co-director, MFA Program in Fiction Writing, University of California, Irvine.In this artful page-turner, a beloved superstarlet, a controversial billionaire Hip Hop mogul, and a television writer/producer idled by a demoralizing strike are linked together improbably by murder, domestic heartbreak, a sex video . . . and their inclusion on a secret subscription list for an exclusive designer strain of medical marijuana. Over a span of three seemingly ordinary days and nights in Los Angeles, the world wobbles on its digital axis, and futures are forever changed.Hollywood, January 2008. The Writers Guild of America is on strike. An increasingly peevish viewing audience is relegated to a starvation diet of reruns and old movies. What happens when a series of shocking, deadly, and prurient events boils over into a perfect storm of serendipitous, round-the-clock programming? And what becomes of the major players, whose lives are inalterably masticated by the public's right to know?High Tolerance is the second novel by the award-winning Rolling Stone and Esquire journalist Mike Sager, whose work has inspired a number of films, including the classic Boogie Nights. He summons his considerable descriptive and narrative powers-and three decades behind the scenes covering celebrities, gangs, drugs, and crime-to weave together a raw and insightful tale of complicated lives in the shifting racial landscape of turn-of-the-century Los Angeles, the dream factory from which the American Zeitgeist is exported around the globe.

In the summer of 1988, about six months into the First Palestinian Intifada-an uprising by Palestinians against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip-journalist Mike Sager, a Jew, was sent by the Washington Post Sunday Magazine to investigate the human toll of the uprising. While much was known about the political situation at the time, little had been reported about the actual conditions of Palestinians living as refugees in squalid camps on or near lands that were once owned by their ancestors.Once in Jerusalem, walking through the Old City on a Shabbat evening after visiting the Western Wall, Sager met Bassem Hallak. Hallak was a Muslim and the proprietor of a family shop specializing in Palestinian antiquities on the Via Dolorosa, the cobbled street over which Jesus Christ is said to have carried his cross on the way to his crucifixion. At times, Hallak, who spoke English, German, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic, worked as a tour guide and as a translator for visiting journalists. Meanwhile, he was secretly working as part of the resistance movement that spawned the Intifada.Within a few days, Sager had engaged Hallak as a guide and translator, and for the next six weeks, these two men, close in age but from wildly different backgrounds, crisscrossed the Holy Land together. They visited hospitals, cities, and refugee camps, witnessing the toll of the struggle, clashing at times with Israeli forces, and ultimately building a friendship as they learned that their similarities and growing affection far outweighed their differences.The controversial story was spiked by the magazine. It was later published to critical acclaim in a 2004 collection called Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print.Hallak died of a heart attack in late 2014, at the age of 54, in his family's home in the Mount of Olives, while awaiting an ambulance, which had been held up at various checkpoints on the way to his aid.

Bestselling author Mike Sager's fourth collection showcases his deftly-written journalism at its best and most mature, a riveting marriage of crime reportage and you-are-there literary anthropology. The book's centerpiece examines the rise and fall of football RoboQuarterback Todd Marinovich-a previously unpublished, thirty-plus thousand-word "nonvella" version of his ASME-award-winning Esquire story, the inspiration for ESPN's acclaimed documentary, The Marinovich Project. Other true stories include up-close visits with super-celebrity Paris Hilton, South Asian Republican hopeful Gov. Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, Ultimate Fighting Championship impresario Dana White, and coaching phenom Pete Carroll. Plus: A man who spent twenty-nine years in prison for a crime he did not commit. A Muslim immigrant who worked to save the life of the white supremacist who tried to kill him. The best-dressed man in America. An ugly guy in a town that worships beauty. A farm in the mountains where wounded marine veterans are taking care of their own. And "The Porn Identity," where a divorced dad takes to the road to find former starlets and rediscover his mojo. "Mike Sager writes with uncommon grace and, always, with respect for those who give him their time. His stories cut to the bone of our common humanity." -Paul Hendrickson, author of Seminary and Hemingway's Boat, on The Someone You're Not

The Rise and Fall of a Super Freak: And Other True Stories of Black Men Who Made History, is a pocket collection of stories, by award-winning journalist Mike Sager, about American Black men whose lives significantly affected the direction and zeitgeist of American culture. Rick James, known to all as Super Freak, was the first to wear African-inspired braids; his powerful funk beats powered the rollicking 1980s and can still be heard in music today. Sager met music''s King of Funk within the thick granite walls of historic Folsom State Prison, where James was serving the final weeks of a sentence for assault, false imprisonment, and furnishing drugs, the result of two separate crack-fueled incidents. After James left prison, the two men remained friends. Eric "Eazy E" Wright was a crack dealer who formed, along with icons Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, the seminal rap group Niggas Wit Attitude. Eazy''s business practices and lifestyle set the bar for hip hop. But in the end, shockingly, he succumbed to AIDS. Black motorist Rodney Glenn King''s videotaped beating, at the hands of Los Angeles police, was a watershed moment in American racial history, focusing massive public attention for the first time on the issue of racially motivated police brutality and the perils of driving while black. King''s sacrifices paved the way for movements like Black Lives Matter and worldwide calls for racial equality. A look at what happened that fateful night, from both inside and outside of King''s vehicle. Freeway Rick Ross didn''t invent crack. But he probably did more than anyone else to cause its spread. The way he sees it, Ross was a banker in a shadow economy-an American capitalist in the grand tradition of our country''s rags-to-riches folklore, bringing jobs and riches to his people and himself. How one illiterate man from South Central Los Angeles changed the course of history.*With additional interior art by WBYK.

Some say he was a breakthrough academic and visionary shaman. Others say he was a sham. Either way, Carlos Castaneda shaped a generation of mystical thinkers and magic mushroom eaters.In 1968, at the height of the psychedelic age, Castaneda published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, the first of twelve books describing his apprenticeship to an Indian shaman, and his journeys to the "separate reality" of the sorcerers'' worlds.Like Herman Hesse''s Steppenwolf and Aldous Huxley''s The Doors of Perception, The Teachings of Don Juan and its sequels became essential reading for legions of truth seekers. Castaneda himself became a cult figure-seldom seen, nearly mythological, a cross between Timothy Leary and L. Ron Hubbard: a short, dapper, Buddha-with-an-attitude who likened his own appearance to that of a "Mexican bellhop."Though Castaneda had more than ten million books in print in seventeen languages, he lived in wily anonymity for nearly thirty years, doing his best, in his own words, to become "as inaccessible as possible." Most people figured he had a house somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, where he''d studied with his own teacher, a leathery old Indian brujo named Don Juan Matus.In truth, Castaneda lived and wrote for most of that time in Westwood Village, a neighborhood of students and professors in Los Angeles, not far from UCLA and Beverly Hills. Upon his death in 1998, things became even more murky.A year-long investigation into the mysterious life and impeccable death of Carlos Castaneda, as told by his wife, his adopted son, his mistresses, and his followers.

Now with new cover, new interior art, and vintage movie posters added."John Holmes was every man''s gigolo, a polyester smoothie with a sparse mustache, a flying collar, and lots of buttons undone. He wasn''t threatening. He chewed gum and overacted. He took a lounge singer''s approach to sex, deliberately gentle, ostentatiously artful, a homely guy with a pinkie ring and a big dick who was convinced he was every woman''s dream." -from "The Devil and John Holmes."John Curtis Holmes had the longest, most prolific career in the history of pornography. He had sex on-screen with two generations of leading ladies, from Seka and Marilyn Chambers to Traci Lords, Ginger Lynn, and Italian Member of Parliament Cicciolina. The first man to win the X-Rated Critics Organization Best Actor Award, Holmes was an idol and an icon, the most visible male porn star of his time.Holmes started in the business around 1968 and made more than two thousand movies. But after descending into a world of drugs and crime, he became the central figure in one of the most publicized mass murders in L.A. history, the 1981 Wonderland Avenue killings in Laurel Canyon, in which four people were brutally bludgeoned to death. Holmes was tried and acquitted of the crimes in 1982. He died from complications of AIDS on March 13, 1988.Read the story that inspired the movies Boogie Nights, with Mark Walhberg, and Wonderland, with Val Kilmer and Lisa Kudrow. Now with restored edits, updated information, new cover and interior art by Austraila''s famous illustration team WBYK, and photos of old Holmes movie posters. The collection includes three bonus stories. "Little Girl Lost," about the life and death of beautiful porn starlet Savannah, among the first of the Vivid Girls; "Deviates in Love" about swingers and amateur porn; and "The Porn Identity," about a divorced man''s search for retired porn starlets in an effort to get his mojo back.

Mike Sager has been called "the Beat poet of American Journalism." Vetville collects the best his stories about the Marine Corps. Together this tetralogy of long form pieces charts a life story arc of the modern Devil Dog. It begins at Camp Pendleton, CA, on field exercises with Lieutenant Colonel Bob Sinclair and his BN One-Four-the 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment-as they prepare to invade Afghanistan, the first wave of American combatants sent to war after the deadly terrorist attacks of 9/11. "You realize that your country has been attacked," he says. "You wanna strike back."From there, we head to the Wounded Warriors Barracks at Camp Lejeune where we meet Ringo, Cebula, Wildman, Lieutenant Colonel Maxwell, and the rest of the men recuperating together at a unique barracks where wounded Marines harness their esprit de corps to help one another through emotional and physical recovery. We hear their battlefield stories of war and heroism. And their stories of injury and despair. And we discover the soft center that lives beneath the tough exterior shell of the Marine Corps mystique-a deep love of comrades and country. "Wounded Warriors" was awarded a number of awards, including The Military Writers Society of America Founder's Award.In "Vetville" we visit a small farm in the mountains of Tennessee, where a Marine sergeant, in an effort to save himself and others, has opened his doors to veterans whose deep wounds don't necessarily show. And, we catch up with John Cebula, one of the men encountered aboard the Wounded Warriors barracks. Without a supportive network around him, he has turned to drugs. Finally, in "Fifty Grand in San Diego," we focus on the return to civilian life after the corps, with a look at a modern version of the American Dream-an ex-Marine playing Mr. Mom and finding his silver cloud in a dirty diaper.Wounded Warriors was awarded: *The American Author's Association Golden Quill Award*The Military Writers Society of America Founder's Award"Entertaining and fascinating. At the end of the book, you will find yourself changed in some way. Call it empathy, or just a compassionate response to have seen and become aware of another man's pain and suffering; but you will remember these men that you read about long after putting this book to rest." --Military Writers Society of AmericaSager has written a gripping account of how these Marines are coping with their combat-altered lives. An experienced interviewer, he lets the Marines' stories speak for themselves…Powerful stuff." --Leatherneck, Magazine of the Marines

From ground zero of the deadliest wildfire in California history to the cozy living room of super-spokesmodel Brooke Burke; from the recording studio with gangsta-rap pioneer Ice Cube to the tour bus with the Satanic metal band Slayer; this tough but lyrical collection of seventeen stories, by award-winning Esquire and Rolling Stone writer Mike Sager, brings into sharp focus the rich but confusing state of modern American life- its values, virtues, obsessions, and hypocrisies. A second edition of the author's bestselling collection, with updated material and new author's note. Domestic Goddess Roseanne Barr battles Multiple Personality Disorder… Swingers attend a "fantasy weekend" in Pensacola… Twelve-year-olds joyride in stolen cars through the ruins of the Newark ghetto… Desmond the butler services the hoi polloi on Park Avenue… Football Hall-of-Famer Mike Ditka enjoys his summer vacation of golf, cigars, and private jets… Newly minted dot.com billionaire Mark Cuban buys himself an NBA basketball team…Deeply focused long-form narrative journalism from the writer who has been called "the Beat poet of American journalism- that rare reporter who can make literature out of shabby reality."

"In Stoned Again, Mike Sager refers to himself as a "drugs correspondent," but that's legitimately humble smoke that belies what's really going on here. While there's plenty of weed, heroin, ‘shrooms, and crack (not to mention plenty of Ricky James, bitch) in these pages, what is most evident on every page is the remarkable reporting, empathy, craftsmanship, and storytelling that have rightly placed Mike Sager among the journalistic legends of our time." --Maximillian Potter, author, Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World’s Greatest Wine From the brutal days and nights of life inside a crack gang in Los Angeles, to the artistic miseries of young heroin addicts on the ultra-hip lower east side of New York; from the Sonoran desert where Carlos Castaneda made his earliest shamanic discoveries, to the cell at Folsom Prison where the author first encountered the King of Funk, Rick James, to the modest headquarters of the Church of Realized Fantasies, where the Pope of Pot presided over the first highly organized marijuana delivery service, Stoned Again: The High Times and Strange Life of a Drugs Reporter takes you to places you didn’t necessarily want to go on your own. But with Sager as your guide, you can’t wait to head to the next destination. Sager has been called “the Beat poet of American journalism, that rare reporter who can make literature out of shabby reality.” Nowhere is that skill more in evidence than when he writes about the seamier sides of life. Kirkus Reviews called him “Virgil in the modern American inferno.” "Mike Sager is a journalistic icon and a literary force. A whole generation of writers has been shaped and guided by his work. This is a seminal collection by a master of the form." --Wil S. Hylton, author, Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II

From fallen porn star John Holmes to jailed pop star Rick James, to the assassination of Irish reporter Veronica Guerin, this collection by the award-winning "Esquire" and "Rolling Stone" journalist brings pop culture's underbelly into dark focus.