Raw, unflinching images that tell the story of one man's struggle with mental illness, poverty, drug addiction, and profound isolation

The seven-time Grammy-nominated R&B and funk musician traces his decades-long career, his collaborations with fellow artists and the role of faith in helping him recover from addiction, cancer and homelessness.

Being Uncle Charlie is the intense, intimate and graphic story of one Canadian undercover cop who spent two decades infiltrating organized crime. From Russian and Italian mafias to notorious biker gangs, Bob Deasy gained access to and the acceptance of criminals who most cops in any country would never encounter or arrest, let alone befriend. Bob Deasy had an illustrious twenty-three-year career with the Ontario Provincial Police. Using little more than his quick wits, natural confidence and a deft mental equilibrium that allowed him to stay three chess moves ahead of his quarry, Deasy was the secret weapon behind some of the signature crime busts in Canadian history. Infiltrating the biker gangs and the Russian and Italian mobs, he also single-handedly set up international import-export businesses, faked contract hit jobs and executed one of the largest drug buys in OPP history. He also perfected the now controversial "Mr. Big" technique of posing as a crime kingpin to solicit unwitting confessions from suspects in long-dormant cold murder cases--a tactic he defends as he practised it, and with which he enjoyed a 100% success rate. Being Uncle Charlie is a nail-biting ride--sometimes comic, always entertaining--that reads like a one-man history of modern crime, told through the ground-level, insider's perspective of a cop who was able to blend in with the unsavoury, the desperate and the diabolical.

Hitchcock’s People, Places, and Things argues that Alfred Hitchcock was as much a filmmaker of things and places as he was of people. Drawing on the thought of Bruno Latour, John Bruns traces the complex relations of human and nonhuman agents in Hitchcock’s films with the aim of mapping the Hitchcock landscape cognitively, affectively, and politically. Yet this book does not promise that such a map can or will cohere, for Hitchcock was just as adept at misdirection as he was at direction. Bearing this in mind and true to the Hitchcock spirit, Hitchcock’s People, Places, and Things anticipates that people will stumble into the wrong places at the wrong time, places will be made uncanny by things, and things exchanged between people will act as (not-so) secret agents that make up the perilous landscape of Hitchcock’s work. This book offers new readings of well-known Hitchcock films, including The Lodger, Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie, as well as insights into lesser-discussed films such as I Confess and Family Plot. Additional close readings of the original theatrical trailer for Psycho and a Hitchcock-directed episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents expand the Hitchcock landscape beyond conventional critical borders. In tracing the network of relations in Hitchcock’s work, Bruns brings new Hitchcockian tropes to light. For students, scholars, and serious fans, the author promises a thrilling critical navigation of the Hitchcock landscape, with frequent “mental shake-ups” that Hitchcock promised his audience.