JASON FAGONE

To be up on stage, shoving food in your face, beats everyday existence for most people. David Coondog OKarma, competitive eaterHungry Charles Hardy. Ed Cookie Jarvis. Sonya The Black Widow Thomas. Joey Jaws Chestnut. Will such names one day be looked back upon as the pioneers of a new manifestation of the irrepressible American appetite for competition, money, fame, and self-transformation? They will if the promoters of the newly emerging sport of competitive eating have their way. In Horsemen of the Esophagus, Jason Fagone reports on the year he spent in the belly of this awakening beast.Fagones trek takes him to 27 eating contests on two continents, from the World Grilled Cheese Eating Championship in Venice Beach, California, to Nagoya, Japan, where he pursues an interview with the legendary Takeru Kobayashi, perhaps the most prodigious eater in the world today, and to the Nathans Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island, the sports annual grand finale, where Kobayashi has eaten more than 50 dogs in 12 minutes. Along the way, Fagone discovers an absurd, sometimes troubling subculture on the make, ready to bust out of its county fair and neighborhood-fat-guys niche and grab a juicy piece of the big-time television sports/Vegas spectacle jackpot. Fagone meets promoters like George Shea, the P. T. Barnum of the International Federation of Competitive Eating (aka IFOCE, the governing body of all stomach-centric sport) and enters the lives of three gurgitators: David Coondog OKarma, a fiftyish, six-two house painter from Ohio whos not ready to become invisible; Bill El Wingador Simmons, the Philly Wing Bowl legend who is shooting for a fifth chicken-eating championship despite the fact that it may be killing him; and Tim Eater X Janus, a lean young Wall Street trader who takes a seriously scientific and athletic approach to the pursuit of ingesting mountains of food in record-breaking times. Each in his own way feels as if he has lost or not yet found something essential in life, and each is driven by the desperate hope that through consumption he may yet find redemption, that even in the junkiest of Americas junk culture, true nourishment might be found. After all, as it says on the official IFOCE seal: In Voro Veritas (In Gorging, Truth).With forays into the gastrointestinal mechanics of the alimentary canal (its what unbuilds the world to build you, but, hey, you can skip that part if you like), the techniques and tricks of the experienced gurgitators (pouring a little club soda on top of high-carb foods makes them easier to swallow), and the historical roots of the competitive eating phenomenon, Horsemen of the Esophagus gives the French something else to dislike about America. And it gives the rest of us food for thought about the bizarre and unlikely places the American Dream can sometimes lead.Also available as an eBook

An epic tale of invention, in which ordinary peoples lives are changed forever by their quest to engineer a radically new kind of car In 2007, the X Prize Foundation announced that it would give $10 million to anyone who could build a safe, mass-producible car that could travel 100 miles on the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas. The challenge attracted more than one hundred teams from all over the world, including dozens of amateurs. Many designed their cars entirely from scratch, rejecting decades of thinking about what a car should look like. Jason Fagone follows four of those teams from the build stage to the final race and beyondinto a world in which destiny hangs on a low drag coefficient and a lug nut can be a beautiful talisman. The result is a gripping story of crazy collaboration, absurd risks, colossal hopes, and poignant losses. In an old pole barn in central Illinois, childhood sweethearts hack together an electric-powered dreamboat, using scavenged parts, forging their own steel, and burning through their life savings. In Virginia, an impassioned entrepreneur and his hand-picked squad of speed freaks pool their imaginations and build a car so light that you can push it across the floor with your thumb. In West Philly, a group of disaffected high school students come into their own as they create a hybrid car with the engine of a Harley motorcycle. And in Southern California, the early favoritea start-up backed by millions in venture capitaldesigns a car that looks like an alien egg. Ingenious is a joyride. Fagone takes us into the garages and the minds of the inventors, capturing the fractious yet beautiful process of engineering a bespoke machine. Suspenseful and bighearted, this is the story of ordinary people risking failure, economic ruin, and ridicule to create something vital that Detroit had never pulled off. As the Illinois team wrote in chalk on the wall of their barn, "SOMEBODY HAS TO DO SOMETHING. THAT SOMEBODY IS US."

Bill EL Wingador Simmons, Sonya The Black Widow Thomas, David Coondog OKarma, Bill EL Wingador Simmons, Sonya The Black Widow Thomas, David Coondog OKarma, Eric Badlands Booker, Timothy Eater X Janus - just a few of the stars of one of Americas fastest growing sports: competitive eating. In a country in which a third of the population is clinically obese, competitive eating has made the leap from trestle tables and paper napkins to stadium arenas - in the past two years, more than 1.4 million households have tuned in to Nathans hot dog contest on ESPN.Beginning with a trip to Japan in search of the elusive (and surprising slim-line) champion Takeru Kobayashi and ending up at the sports annual grand finale in Coney Island, Jason Fagone spends a year with the stars of the scene, watching as they eat their way into (or out of) oblivion, and finding out just what compels a gurgitator to force down forty-six dozen oysters in ten minutes. Wickedly funny and devastatingly insightful, Jason Fagone uses this weirdest of sports as a lens through which to examine the dark side of the American Dream - the never-ending quest for wealth, celebrity, possessions and food. And along the way, he uncovers the wonderfully human stories at the heart of this seemingly unnourished corner of American culture. Bigger, better, richer, fatter, Insatiable unlocks a world we all need to face up to. Dig In.

En 1916, un excéntrico magnate contrató a Elizebeth Smith, una joven maestra cuáquera y poetisa, para que encontrara los mensajes secretos que creía contenían las obras de Shakespeare. Elizebeth se traslado a su lujosa finca on la esperanza de pasar el dia estudiando libros antiguos. Pero los estrechos lazos del rico con el Gobierno y las urgencias de la guerra transformaron rapidamente su mision. Pronto aprendio a aplicar sus conocimientos a una nueva y apasionante empresa: descifrar mensajes secretos sin conocer la clave. Junto a ella trabajaba William Friedman, un cientifico judio que se convertiria en su marido y compañero de codificacion durante toda su vida. En La mujer que rompio los codigos, Fagone relata la vida de esta extraordinaria heroina que desempeño un papel fundamental en la historia, desde la Primera Guerra Mundial, la Ley Seca hasta su lucha contra el fascismo. Ayudo a atrapar a gangsters y contrabandistas, desenmascaro una red de espionaje nazi en Sudamerica y libro una batalla clandestina contra el Reich de Hitler, descifrando varias versiones de la maquina Enigma utilizada por los agentes alemanes para ocultar sus comunicaciones.

National Bestseller NPR Best Book of the YearNot all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie. The New York TimesJoining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II.In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the "Adam and Eve" of the NSA, Elizebeths story, incredibly, has never been told.In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nations history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizebeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitlers Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigmaand eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life.Fagone unveils Americas code-breaking history through the prism of Smiths life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence. Blending the lively pace and compelling detail that are the hallmarks of Erik Larsons bestsellers with the atmosphere and intensity of The Imitation Game, The Woman Who Smashed Codes is page-turning popular history at its finest.

«Este libro debería ser el próximo Figuras ocultas... Una historia que cualquier persona interesada en la época tiene que leer, una pieza clave del rompecabezas sobre el esfuerzo bélico de los aliado