Heart of Dankness
Heart of Dankness

Author: Mark Haskell Smith

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2012-04-03

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0307720551

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Reporting for the Los Angeles Times on the international blind tasting competition held annually in Amsterdam known as the Cannabis Cup, novelist Mark Haskell Smith sampled a variety of marijuana that was unlike anything he’d experienced. It wasn’t anything like typical stoner weed, in fact it didn’t get you stoned. This cannabis possessed an ephemeral quality known to aficionados as “dankness.” Armed with a State of California Medical Marijuana recommendation, he begins a journey into the international underground where super-high-grade marijuana is developed and tracks down the rag-tag community of underground botanists, outlaw farmers, and renegade strain hunters who pursue excellence and diversity in marijuana, defying the law to find new flavors, tastes, and effects. This unrelenting pursuit of dankness climaxes at the Cannabis Cup, which Haskell Smith vividly portrays as the Super Bowl/Mardi Gras of the world's largest cash crop.

Heart of Dankness
Heart of Dankness

Author: Mark Haskell Smith

Publisher: Signal

Published: 2012-04-03

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0771039719

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Moneyball meets the documentary "The Union: The Business Behind Getting High" in this non-fiction book that explores the culture of cannabis, from its humble beginnings as a textile fiber in 2727 BC, to its illegalization during the Great Depression, to its increasing use as medicinal treatment -- all culminating in the annual event for marijuana aficionados everywhere: the Cannabis Cup. After spending three years researching his novel Baked, Mark Haskell Smith turns his focus on the one event that intrigued him in the fascinating world of the cannabis culture: the Cannabis Cup competition. What makes a strain of marijuana award-winning? he wonders. Who would risk everything to grow the good stuff? Is this really a nearly $100 billion a year industry? Alternating between California, the hub of the legalization and decriminalization debate, and Amsterdam, where the world's preeminent cannabis festival takes place each year, Mark discovers a compelling world where science meets agriculture, and hedonism toes the line of criminality. Combining wit, curiosity, and frankness, Heart of Dankness reveals the world of underground botany and outlaw farming, where "strain hunters" risk fines, imprisonment, and reputation to develop amazing weed -- and, ultimately, battle for the coveted Cannabis Cup, and millions of dollars.

Baked
Baked

Author: Mark Haskell Smith

Publisher: Black Cat

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0802170765

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While selling premium mango-flavored marijuana, botanist Miro is nearly killed by a sniper and struggles to figure out who wants him dead, an investigation marked by an obsessive cop, a kinky paramedic, and a Mormon missionary.

Dirt
Dirt

Author: Bill Buford

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 0385353197

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“You can almost taste the food in Bill Buford’s Dirt, an engrossing, beautifully written memoir about his life as a cook in France.” —The Wall Street Journal What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France. But what was meant to be six months in a new and very foreign city turns into a wild five-year digression from normal life, as Buford apprentices at Lyon’s best boulangerie, studies at a legendary culinary school, and cooks at a storied Michelin-starred restaurant, where he discovers the exacting (and incomprehensibly punishing) rigueur of the professional kitchen. With his signature humor, sense of adventure, and masterful ability to bring an exotic and unknown world to life, Buford has written the definitive insider story of a city and its great culinary culture.

Delicious
Delicious

Author: Mark Haskell Smith

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 2006-04

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780802142481

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When the greedy owner of a Las Vegas movie catering company tries to muscle in on a local, family-owned business in Honolulu, it leaves a very bad taste in the mouths of the natives, and the battle for paradise begins for Joseph, a young Hawaiian chef. As far as Joseph's father Sid is concerned, this is an invasion on par with Captain Cook and the mainlanders have to be stopped at all costs. As Joseph defends his family he encounters a TV producer rebounding from a bad breakup and suffering from an unrelenting chemically induced erection, the producer's androgynous New Age-y assistant, and a trash-talking lap-dance-addicted stroke survivor. Adding to this frenetic luau is Joseph's old-school Polynesian uncle, his bodybuilder cousin, and his politically correct, retro-Hawaiian girlfriend. With the lines drawn and the locals breathing fire down their necks, the Sin City boys decide to enlist the services of an ecstasy-popping ex-Marine hit man. Then things go horribly wrong-or, depending on how you look at it, just right. Mark Haskell Smith's "Delicious" is an uproarious, delectably dark mystery that offers a take on Hawaii that definitely hasn't been endorsed by the tourist bureau.

Limp Bizkit
Limp Bizkit

Author: Colin Devenish

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2000-10-13

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 031226349X

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Biography of one of the world's currently most successful bands whose albums have topped the charts worldwide and whose combination of rap, heavy metal and punk have set audiences alight wherever they perform. Illustrated with 8-page colour insert.

13 Treasures
13 Treasures

Author: Michelle Harrison

Publisher: Hachette+ORM

Published: 2010-04-01

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0316088773

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Tanya is no ordinary girl. She can see fairies. But not the fairies we imagine. Evil fairies who cast spells on her, rousing her from her sleep and propelling her out of bed. At wit's end with her daughter's inexplicable behavior, Tanya's mother sends her away to live with her grandmother at Elvesden Manor, a secluded countryside mansion on the outskirts of a peculiar Essex town. There is plenty to explore, as long as Tanya stays away from Hangman's Wood- a vast stretch of forest, full of catacombs and notorious for people losing their lives. Fifty years ago a girl vanished in the woods, a girl Tanya's grandmother will not speak of. As Tanya learns more about this girl, she finds herself dangerously close to vanishing into the fairy realm forever. Debut author Michelle Harrison weaves an intricate mystery into a beautiful and haunting fantasy that captures a rich world of fairy lore where only the color red can offer protection.

The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee
The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee

Author: Stewart Lee Allen

Publisher: Soho Press

Published: 2018-11-13

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1641290102

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"Absolutely riveting . . . Essential reading for foodies, java-junkies, anthropologists, and anyone else interested in funny, sardonically told adventure stories." —Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential Full of humor and historical insights, The Devil’s Cup is not only ahistory of coffee, but a travelogue of a risk-taking brew-seeker. In this captivating book, Stewart Lee Allen treks three-quarters of the way around the world on a caffeinated quest to answer these profound questions: Did the advent of coffee give birth to an enlightened western civilization? Is coffee the substance that drives history? From the cliffhanging villages of Southern Yemen, where coffee beans were first cultivated eight hundred years ago, to a cavernous coffeehouse in Calcutta, the drinking spot for two of India’s Nobel Prize winners . . . from Parisian salons and cafés where the French Revolution was born, to the roadside diners and chain restaurants of the good ol’ USA, where something resembling brown water passes for coffee, Allen wittily proves that the world was wired long before the Internet. And those who deny the power of coffee (namely tea drinkers) do so at their own peril.

Salty
Salty

Author: Mark Haskell Smith

Publisher: Black Cat

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 080217034X

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From the author of "Moist and Delicious" comes a raucous comic thriller where anything goes. Turk Henry, an overweight, unemployed rock star married to a supermodel, has discovered that Thailand is probably the last place a recovering sex addict should go on vacation, yet here he is, surrounded by topless groupies and haunted by the stares of hundreds of luscious bar girls. Turk's struggles with monogamy, however, pale beside a greater challenge when his wife is abducted by a group of renegade, shipless Thai pirates. As Turk, his life skills limited to playing bass and partying, navigates the back alleys of Bangkok and the deadly jungles of Southeast Asia to save his wife, "Salty" heats up and sweats bullets. Featuring skinflint American tourists, topless beaches, a hypochondriac U.S. government agent, suitcases loaded with cash, an overeager full-service personal assistant, a horny Australian commando, inventive prostitutes, and an urbane pirate with a fetish for alabaster skin, this is a hilariously entertaining, thoroughly debauched caper novel -- with a happy finish.