She earned nearly $2 million, partly from her book Mark of Voodoo, but now it’s thirty months in federal prison for “voodoo chief” and “shaman psychologist” and convicted tax fraudster Sharon Caulder. Having practiced a lucrative form of psychotherapy by which clients in Northern California paid $300 a pop to have Caulder perform exorcisms and [...]
He’s got a hunch that Oprah Winfrey doesn’t like black men, and he’s talking about it on radio shows nationwide. Syracuse University finance professor Boyce Dewhite Watkins, author of What If George Bush Were a Black Man?, fuels his claim by pointing to the recent feud between Winfrey and Ice Cube — who, along with [...]
He wasn’t hanging out at the prison library to bone up on botany or read the entire ouevre of Rumer Godden. Instead, Rudolfo García-Lopez was scouring the shelves for books containing maps of Texas, photocopying them to aid in his escape plan. After cutting through a prison fence and climbing serpentine wire to break out [...]
A Muslim organization in Indonesia is striving to set a world record by creating the largest-ever replica of the Koran. Made of massive batik sheets and measuring about seven feet by three feet (2.250m by 1.15m), the faux holy book took ten years to complete and will be publicly unveiled for the first time, according [...]
An Illinois school-board member has just lost her bid to have nine popular books banned from the required-reading list in the state’s second-largest district. Lesley Pinney, the mother of a local high-school grad, sought to ban Beloved by Toni Morrison, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, The Awakening by Kate [...]
In 2004, Neal David Sutz of Scottsdale, Arizona sued Dr. Phil McGraw and Paramount after refusing to sign a document allegedly required of all the TV show’s audience members specifying that they are not mentally ill or under psychiatric care. Sutz talked about his suit on Howard Stern’s show, and plugged his documentary film-in-progress about [...]
Tempers are flaring in Australia, where a wildly controversial author has just been appointed to the board of the national broadcasting corporation. Keith Windschuttle is a University of New South Wales professor and historian whose 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History boldly claimed that his fellow historians conspired to fib in misrepresenting their nation’s [...]
She’s on trial in London for murdering an old woman, and 18-year-old Kemi Adeyoola claims that the pile of notes which lawmakers are calling her “murder manual” are instead the manuscript for a novel-in-progress. She wrote the notes while in jail for shoplifting when she was sixteen. After serving that sentence, Adeyoola became a prostitute, [...]
In a bold marketing move, the Prime Shine Express Car Wash in California’s agricultural San Joaquin Valley area has released its first comic book, Adventures of Prime Shine Man: Attack of the Pesky Critters. In the book, brightly colored birds and insects (“Miss Kito,” “Superfly,” “Chuck Berries,” etc.) assault a jeeplike vehicle whose young-couple inhabitants [...]
When he’s not fomenting Mexican revolution as the spearhead of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), appearing sporadically masked with knives at his waist and a bullet-belt slung around his neck, accompanied by his deformed-rooster mascot, elusive guerrilla Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos is a novelist. Due in September from New York’s Akashic Books, The Uncomfortable [...]