A glimpse into the tortured world of James Bailey who suffers from a bizarre Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. But far from being a doom-laden account of mental illness, the result is rewarding, uniquely revealing and hilariously entertaining.

A riveting and moving memoir, written in crisp Hemingwayesque prose and set amid the wild, uninhibited surf culture of Malibu and Mexico in the late 1970s.

From the age of three, Norman Ollestad was thrust into the world of surfing and competitive downhill skiing by the intense, charismatic father he both idolized and resented. Yet it was these exhilarating tests of skill that ultimately saved his life when the chartered Cessna carrying them to a ski championship ceremony crashed 8,000 feet up in the California mountains, leaving his father and the pilot dead. The devastated eleven-year-old Ollestad had to descend the treacherous, icy mountain alone.

Crazy for the Storm is a powerful and unforgettable true story that illuminates the complicated bond between an extraordinary father and his extraordinary son.

After being dumped by his longtime girlfriend, twenty-eight-year-old Justin Halpern found himself living at home with his seventy-three-year-old dad. Sam Halpern, who is "like Socrates, but angrier, and with worse hair," has never minced words, and when Justin moved back home, he began to record all the ridiculous things his dad said to him:

"That woman was sexy. . . . Out of your league? Son, let women figure out why they won't screw you. Don't do it for them."

"Do people your age know how to comb their hair? It looks like two squirrels crawled on their heads and started fucking."

"The worst thing you can be is a liar. . . . Okay, fine, yes, the worst thing you can be is a Nazi, but then number two is liar. Nazi one, liar two."

More than a million people now follow Mr. Halpern's philosophical musings on Twitter, and in this book, his son weaves a brilliantly funny, touching coming-of-age memoir around the best of his quotes. An all-American story that unfolds on the Little League field, in Denny's, during excruciating family road trips, and, most frequently, in the Halperns' kitchen over bowls of Grape-Nuts, Sh*t My Dad Says is a chaotic, hilarious, true portrait of a father-son relationship from a major new comic voice.

Few stories in the annals of American counterculture are as intriguing or dramatic as that of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

Dubbed the “Hippie Mafia,” the Brotherhood began in the mid-1960s as a small band of peace-loving, adventure-seeking surfers in Southern California. After discovering LSD, they took to Timothy Leary’s mantra of “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” and resolved to make that vision a reality by becoming the biggest group of acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation, and literally providing the fuel for the psychedelic revolution in the process.

Just days after California became the first state in the union to ban LSD, the Brotherhood formed a legally registered church in its headquarters at Mystic Arts World on Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, where they sold blankets and other countercultural paraphernalia retrieved through surfing safaris and road trips to exotic locales in Asia and South America. Before long, they also began to sell Afghan hashish, Hawaiian pot (the storied “Maui Wowie”), and eventually Colombian cocaine, much of which the Brotherhood smuggled to California in secret compartments inside surfboards and Volkswagen minibuses driven across the border.

They also befriended Leary himself, enlisting him in the goal of buying a tropical island where they could install the former Harvard philosophy professor and acid prophet as the high priest of an experimental utopia. The Brotherhood’s most legendary contribution to the drug scene was homemade: Orange Sunshine, the group’s nickname for their trademark orange-colored acid tablet that happened to produce an especially powerful trip. Brotherhood foot soldiers passed out handfuls of the tablets to communes, at Grateful Dead concerts, and at love-ins up and down the coast of California and beyond. The Hell’s Angels, Charles Mason and his followers, and the unruly crowd at the infamous Altamont music festival all tripped out on this acid. Jimi Hendrix even appeared in a film starring Brotherhood members and performed a private show for the fugitive band of outlaws on the slope of a Hawaiian volcano.

Journalist Nicholas Schou takes us deep inside the Brotherhood, combining exclusive interviews with both the group’s surviving members as well as the cops who chased them. A wide-sweeping narrative of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll (and more drugs) that runs from Laguna Beach to Maui to Afghanistan, Orange Sunshine explores how America moved from the era of peace and free love into a darker time of hard drugs and paranoia.

Nicholas Schou is a full-time staff writer for OC Weekly. His writing has also appeared in numerous weeklies over the past decade, including LA Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Washington City Paper, the Sacramento News & Review, and the Village Voice. Schou is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Epidemic Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb.

Journalist Nicholas Shou takes us deep inside the Hippie Mafia's reign through the sixties and seventies. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love began as a small band of peace-loving, adventure-seeking surfers in Southern California. After discovering LSD, they resolved to become the biggest group of acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation, literally providing the fuel for the psychedelic revolution in the process. Shortly after California became the first state in the union to ban LSD, the Brotherhood began to sell countercultural paraphernalia and, before long, started to smuggle Colombian cocaine in minibuses across the California border.

After befriending Harvard philosophy professor and acid prophet, Timothy Leary, the Brotherhood created its most legendary drug: Orange Sunshine, the group's nickname for their trademark orange-colored acid tablet. Orange Sunshine made the Brotherhood famous at Grateful Dead concerts, at love-ins up and down the coast of California, giving them recognition among the Hell’s Angels, Charles Mason and his followers, and Jimi Hendrix himself.

Combining exclusive interviews with both the group’s surviving members as well as the cops who chased them, Shou shows us the history and cultural phenomena surrounding the Brotherhood. A wide-sweeping narrative of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll that runs from Laguna Beach to Maui to Afghanistan, Orange Sunshine explores how America moved from the era of peace and free love into a darker time of hard drugs and paranoia.

“Nicholas Schou manages—amazingly—to penetrate four decades of silence . . . The result is a mind-blowing scrap of found history, like something buried deep in the earth—and you cannot avert your eyes . . . With Orange Sunshine, Schou has crafted a definitive history of the dark side of the 1960s.”—Los Angeles Times

“Orange Sunshine is as close to an 'authorized' story as there's likely to be. Much of it reads more like fiction than history . . . the Brotherhood's story reads like some mystical adventure tale from a long-gone era. But for a peek at those heady times, Orange Sunshine is one worthy flashback.”—San Francisco Chronicle

"Journalist Nicholas Schou did yeoman's work digging into the story of the band of hippies that became a huge LSD cartel in the 1970s. He interviewed many former members, some of them not that happy to be found, earning their trust over some four years."—San Diego Union-Tribune

"OC Weekly reporter Nicholas Schou spent four years uncovering the brotherhood's surreal, largely unknown story, pulling together written accounts of its history and run-ins with the law and persuading brotherhood members to be interviewed decades after its demise . . . Read Schou's well-researched and compelling book to decide for yourself about the brotherhood's true legacy."—Orange Coast magazine

“His reporting is diligent, and his story comes mostly from the mouths of participants speaking for the first time on the record after decades of hiding deep underground. That story deserves to be told.”—Reason

"Orange Sunshine reads so much like classic Thomas Pynchon—with its mind-bending and hilarious tale of a secret society of mystic surfers who bomb Southern California with LSD—that the reader has to wonder: Is 'Nick Schou' a pseudonym?"—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, Planet of Slums, and In Praise of Barbarians

“Nick Schou has uncovered a bizarre, wild ride of a story that seems straight out of Easy Rider or Zabriskie Point—except it really happened. Orange Sunshine serves as a valuable time capsule from the American counterculture. It’s also one hell of a fun read.”—Rob Kirkpatrick, author of 1969: The Year Everything Changed

"Schou interviewed remaining Brotherhood members (who, unlike acid-gobbling pop musicians, seem to have largely retained their memories), gleaning impressive amounts of detail for his discussions of the ins and outs of the era’s drug trade and the moving of vast quantities of marijuana and hashish along with the LSD. Loaded with little-known historical mots, this is an excellent chronicle of a piece of history unlikely to be repeated."—Mike Tribby, Booklist

"Blue Cheer. Window Pane. Orange Sunshine. Maui Wowie. These were the brand names of the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, a culture led by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Chances are, if a brand of acid, pot or hashish was known to stoners, it first made its way into the underground market via the Brotherhood. Originally a marijuana-dealing motorcycle gang of toughs, the Brotherhood had a mass religious experience with LSD in 1965-they believed they'd found a lysergic shortcut to God. They resolved, under the charismatic leadership of John 'the Farmer' Griggs, whom Timothy Leary called 'the holiest man ever to live in this country,' to become apostles of acid with a mission to turn on the entire world. The Brotherhood established a church and a head shop called Mystic Arts World, which became the center of the psychedelic trade in Southern California and beyond. To fund their proselytizing, they smuggled high-quality marijuana from Mexico and introduced mind-blowingly potent hashish from Afghanistan, shipped via Pakistan to the United States in loaded VW campers. Before long, the Brotherhood had gone from acid church to 'hippie Mafia.' While Stewart Tendler and David May's The Brotherhood of Eternal Love (1984) approached this material as a true-crime story, journalist Schou (Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, 2006) lets the Brothers and their many customers and hangers-on tell the story, resulting in an intimate portrait of the secret society that helped forge and spread hippie culture . . . A fascinating read for any audience and essential history for anyone interested in the roots of psychedelia."—Kirkus Reviews

“Colorful . . . the mixture of lively freakery and stoned pomposity gives [Schou’s] portrait of countercultural excess an authentic period feel.”—Publishers Weekly

Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Save Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow.

Even as de Botton takes the reader along on his own peregrinations, he also cites such distinguished fellow-travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. The Art of Travel is a wise and utterly original book. Don’t leave home without it.