Books published by publisher Metro Books

From the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creatorSince the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin—but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers.A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century.

From renowned human rights lawyer Michael Sfard, an unprecedented exploration of the struggle for human rights in Israel's courtsA farmer from a village in the occupied West Bank, cut off from his olive groves by the construction of Israel’s controversial separation wall, asked Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard to petition the courts to allow a gate to be built in the wall. While the gate would provide immediate relief for the farmer, would it not also confer legitimacy on the wall and on the court that deems it legal? The defense of human rights is often marked by such ethical dilemmas, which are especially acute in Israel, where lawyers have for decades sought redress for the abuse of Palestinian rights in the country’s High Court—that is, in the court of the abuser.In The Wall and the Gate, Michael Sfard chronicles this struggle—a story that has never before been fully told— and in the process engages the core principles of human rights legal ethics. Sfard recounts the unfolding of key cases and issues, ranging from confiscation of land, deportations, the creation of settlements, punitive home demolitions, torture, and targeted killings—all actions considered violations of international law. In the process, he lays bare the reality of the occupation and the lives of the people who must contend with that reality. He also exposes the surreal legal structures that have been erected to put a stamp of lawfulness on an extensive program of dispossession. Finally, he weighs the success of the legal effort, reaching conclusions that are no less paradoxical than the fight itself. Writing with emotional force, vivid storytelling, and penetrating analysis, Michael Sfard offers a radically new perspective on a much-covered conflict and a subtle, painful reckoning with the moral ambiguities inherent in the pursuit of justice. The Wall and the Gate is a signal contribution to everyone concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and human rights everywhere.

When the people of Flint, Michigan, turned on their faucets in April 2014, the water pouring out was poisoned with lead and other toxins. Through a series of disastrous decisions, the state government had switched the city’s water supply to a source that corroded Flint’s aging lead pipes. Complaints about the foul-smelling water were dismissed: the residents of Flint, mostly poor and African American, were not seen as credible, even in matters of their own lives.It took eighteen months of activism by city residents and a band of dogged outsiders to force the state to admit that the water was poisonous. By that time, twelve people had died and Flint’s children had suffered irreparable harm. The long battle for accountability and a humane response to this man-made disaster has only just begun.In the first full account of this American tragedy, Anna Clark's The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail―and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.

On the eve of World War I, they had the world at—and watching—their feet, enchanting New York, London, and Paris with their dizzying steps. The intimate and tragic biography of America's pioneering ballroom couple.Vernon and Irene Castle were the world’s first true celebrity couple. He, an Englishman, was tall, poised, and slim, a template for the Hollywood idols who would follow. She, a New Yorker, was a glorious, modern beauty, with her haired cropped into a "shock," a disdain for crippling corsets, and a love of a martini and a good time. Together, they beat the censors and made their vibrant dancing acceptable for all. In the fashionable quarters of New York they opened a dance school and night clubs to which Society flocked. They broke the rules by touring with black musicians, and led the way forward to the Charleston-galloping Gatsby Generation. They enlightened and enchanted from London to Paris to New York. Launching one racy dance craze after another, they taught the world to dance— and often dress—the way we do today. Yet the whirlwind story of perhaps the most influential dance team ever is also one of tragedy. Their timing, so perfect in everything else, saw Vernon Castle, at the height of their fame, return to England to enlist in the Royal Flying Corps; he saw action as a pilot on the Western Front, winning the Croix de Guerre, while his wife made special appearances to support the Allied war effort. And then, in February 1918, he was killed in a flying accident in Texas, while training American pilots for war. Irene received a last note from him: "When you receive this letter I shall be gone out of your sweet life. You may be sure that I died with your sweet name on my lips. . . . be brave and don’t cry, my angel." She and many others did cry, for as far as the world was concerned Vernon and Irene Castle could have danced all night, and forever.

Even for nonmilitary buffs, the power and massive lines of aircraft carriers inspire awe. Now readers can get a close-up look at these behemoths in this lavishly illustrated volume. It tells the story of the development of these immense vessels, describes their technological and military history, and profiles the carriers-and the planes that fly from them-that roam the oceans today. With more than 150 black-and-white and color pictures, including images of early prototypes, this is an invaluable reference.

The stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the AmazonIn 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

Based on long-lost recordings, a set of riveting and revealing conversations with America's great cultural provocateurThere have long been rumors of a lost cache of tapes containing private conversations between Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded over regular lunches in the years before Welles died. The tapes, gathering dust in a garage, did indeed exist, and this book reveals for the first time what they contain.Here is Welles as he has never been seen before: talking intimately, disclosing personal secrets, reflecting on the highs and lows of his astonishing Hollywood career, the people he knew—FDR, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier, David Selznick, Rita Hayworth, and more—and the many disappointments of his last years. This is the great director unplugged, free to be irreverent and worse—sexist, homophobic, racist, or none of the above— because he was nothing if not a fabulator and provocateur. Ranging from politics to literature to movies to the shortcomings of his friends and the many films he was still eager to launch, Welles is at once cynical and romantic, sentimental and raunchy, but never boring and always wickedly funny.Edited by Peter Biskind, America's foremost film historian, My Lunches with Orson reveals one of the giants of the twentieth century, a man struggling with reversals, bitter and angry, desperate for one last triumph, but crackling with wit and a restless intelligence. This is as close as we will get to the real Welles—if such a creature ever existed.

Ian Brady is one of the most notorious and reviled serial killers in Britain. With his co-conspirator, Myra Hindley, he perpetrated the Moors Murders in which five children were abducted, assaulted, and murdered. Dr. Chris Cowley is a forensic psychologist who is in the unique position of having exclusive access to Brady. For six years, he has been conducting groundbreaking research by corresponding with and visiting him in prison. By gaining his trust, Cowley has been able to take an unrivalled look inside the mind of a serial killer. In this in-depth and revealing book, Dr. Cowley reproduces letters and transcripts of conversations with Brady that have never been published before. Using this fresh perspective and original material, he is able to shed new light on what went wrong in Brady’s formative years to set him on a path of crime, how Hindley became the lethal factor that started Brady’s murder cycle, as well as revealing Brady’s unflinching account of being caught and convicted of serial murder and his thoughts and emotions concerning Hindley as he moves into his eighth year on hunger strike. This important study provides information that will prove essential in our understanding of the psychology of serial killers. By broadening our knowledge of these complex issues, we can increase the likelihood of catching murderers and perhaps even prevent their terrible crimes from taking place.

Your Star Wars IQ is about to jump into hyperspace. You’re holding the most complete Star Wars trivia book you can find—packed with questions about all your favorite major characters: the good guys and the bad. Test your knowledge of the ships, the planets, the technology, the droids, and many creepy creatures. You¹ll also get the inside scoop on the special effects and loads of behind-the-scenes trivia. Over 1,000 questions in all! Some questions may seem easy. Some may seem impossible. But once you watch the movies, you can answer almost every question yourself. Or just turn to the back! As Yoda might say, if an expert you aren’t now, reading this book smarter will make you. As a boy, Mark Shulman watched Star Wars eight times in the summer of 1977. He wasn’t yet aware that he was researching this book. Mark is the author of more than 90 books for both children and adults including: The Brainiac Box: 600 Things Every Smart Person Should Know, Mom and Dad are Palindromes, Attack of the Killer Video Book, and The Voodoo Revenge Book. He also has written a series of books for The Discovery Channel and an autobiography of Shamu the Whale. Mark lives with his family in Manhatooine.

From the acclaimed author of Listen, Liberal and What’s the Matter with Kansas, a scathing collection of his incisive commentary on our cruel times―perfect for this political momentWhat does a middle-class democracy look like when it comes apart? When, after forty years of economic triumph, America’s winners persuade themselves that they owe nothing to the rest of the country?With his sharp eye for detail, Thomas Frank takes us on a wide-ranging tour through present-day America, showing us a society in the late stages of disintegration and describing the worlds of both the winners and the losers―the sprawling mansion districts as well as the lives of fast-food workers.Rendezvous with Oblivion is a collection of interlocking essays examining how inequality has manifested itself in our cities, in our jobs, in the way we travel―and of course in our politics, where in 2016, millions of anxious ordinary people rallied to the presidential campaign of a billionaire who meant them no good.These accounts of folly and exploitation are here brought together in a single volume unified by Frank’s distinctive voice, sardonic wit, and anti-orthodox perspective. They capture a society where every status signifier is hollow, where the allure of mobility is just another con game, and where rebellion too often yields nothing.For those who despair of the future of our country and of reason itself, Rendezvous with Oblivion is a booster shot of energy, reality, and moral outrage.

Your Star Wars IQ is about to jump into hyperspace. You’re holding the most complete Star Wars trivia book you can find—packed with questions about all your favorite major characters: the good guys and the bad. Test your knowledge of the ships, the planets, the technology, the droids, and many creepy creatures. You¹ll also get the inside scoop on the special effects and loads of behind-the-scenes trivia. Over 1,000 questions in all! Some questions may seem easy. Some may seem impossible. But once you watch the movies, you can answer almost every question yourself. Or just turn to the back! As Yoda might say, if an expert you aren’t now, reading this book smarter will make you. As a boy, Mark Shulman watched Star Wars eight times in the summer of 1977. He wasn’t yet aware that he was researching this book. Mark is the author of more than 90 books for both children and adults including: The Brainiac Box: 600 Things Every Smart Person Should Know, Mom and Dad are Palindromes, Attack of the Killer Video Book, and The Voodoo Revenge Book. He also has written a series of books for The Discovery Channel and an autobiography of Shamu the Whale. Mark lives with his family in Manhatooine.