When Southwest Airlines made its inaugural flight on June 18, 1971, experts predicted that the company wouldn't last more than ninety days. Some thirty-two years later, Southwest is the beleaguered airline Industry's only profitable major company-Money magazine has named Southwest Airlines' common stock the premier Investment of the last thirty years. Now Southwest's founding president and CEO (1970-78], Lamar Muse, offers a definitive account of the airline's scrappy beginning. The principles and practices that assured the company's success were, largely, Muse's own. Those same winning strategies continue to sustain the company through the market's ups and downs, In Southwest Passage, Muse delivers plain facts and informed opinions that replace convoluted outsider accounts of the company's history. For anyone wondering how the air Industry can renew itself, how Southwest achieved its dominance, or how business really works, this unique story has the answers.

Passage to Manhood is a groundbreaking and beautifully written ethnography that addresses the intersection of modernity, heroin use, and AIDS as they intersect in a new "rite-of-passage" among young ethnic-minority males in contemporary China.

Fat City is a vivid novel of allegiance and defeat, of the potent promise of the good life and the desperation and drink that waylay those whom it eludes. Stockton, California is the setting: the Lido Gym, the Hotel Coma, Main Street lunchrooms and dingy bars, days like long twilights in houses obscured by untrimmed shrubs and black walnut trees. When two men meet in the ring -- the retired boxer Billy Tully and the newcomer Ernie Munger - their brief bout sets into motion their hidden fates, initiating young Ernie into the company of men and luring Tully back into training. In a dispassionate and composed voice, Gardner narrates their swings of fortune, and the plodding optimism of their manager Ruben Luna, as he watches the most promising boys one by one succumb to some undefined weakness; still, "There was always someone who wanted to fight."