This revealing profile “disappears down the rabbit hole [into] the largest gated retirement community in the world” and what it discovers is “fascinating” (The New York Times). When his next-door neighbors pick up and move from New England to an age-restricted “active adult” development in Florida called The Villages, Andrew D. Blechman is astonished by their stories—and determined to investigate. Sprawling across two zip codes, with a golf course for every day of the month, two downtowns, its own newspaper, radio, and TV station, The Villages is a prefab paradise for retired Baby Boomers, where “not having children around seems to free [them] to act like adolescents” (The New York Times). In the critically acclaimed Leisureville, Blechman delves into this senior utopia, offering a hilarious firsthand report on everything from ersatz nostalgia to the residents’ surprisingly active sex life. Blechman also traces the history of this phenomenon, travelling to Arizona to find out what pioneering developments like Sun City and Youngtown have become after decades of segregation. Blending incisive social commentary and colorful reportage, “Blechman describes this brave new world with determined good humor and considerable bemusement” (Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe).

Blechman delves into life in a gated retirement community and offers a hilarious, first-hand report on all its peculiarities. He also takes a serious look at the consequences of such instant cities and examines the implications of millions of Americans dropping out of society.

"Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman, authors of Weird U.S., present."

Chronicles skateboarding's rise in popularity, interweaving the stories of early skaters while discussing how innovations in board design enabled new tricks as the sport evolved.

An "affectionate, touchingly empathetic" (Janet Maslin, The New York Times) look at old age in America today Welcome to Canterbury Tower , an apartment building in Florida, where the residents are busy with friendships, love, sex, money, and gossip-and the average age is eightysix. Journalist Dudley Clendinen's mother moved to Canterbury in 1994, planning-like most the inhabitants-to spend her final years there. But life was not over yet for the feisty southern matron. There, she and her eccentric new friends lived out a soap opera of dignity, nerve, and humor otherwise known as the New Old Age. A Place Called Canterbury is both a journalist's account of the last years of the Greatest Generation and a son's rueful memoir of his mother. Entertaining and unsparing, it is essential reading for anyone with aging parents, and those wondering what their own old age might look like.

They have been worshipped as fertility goddesses and revered as symbols of peace. Domesticated since the dawn of humankind, they have been crucial to wartime communications for every major historical superpower from ancient Egypt to the United States and are credited with saving thousands of lives. One delivered the results of the first Olympics in 776 BC and another brought the news of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo more than 2500 years later. Charles Darwin relied heavily upon them to help formulate and support his theory of evolution. Yet today the pigeon is reviled as a rat with wings. How did we come to misunderstand one of humanity's most steadfast companions?In Pigeons, Andrew D. Blechman travels across the United States and Europe in a quest to chronicle the bird's transformation from beloved friend to feathered outlaw.