Reporter Julie Salamon got more than she bargained for when she was granted back-lot access to the making of Brian De Palma's THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. As the anticipated blockbuster metamorphosed into one of contemporary Hollywood's most problematic creations, she was there to dish the details.

J. D. Salinger's daughter invades the famous privacy of her famous father and writes a candid memoir which, she says, has been therapeutic for her, a way to help her make sense of what she sees as a destructive childhood. She also writes extensively about the parallels between her father's fiction and his life, and about the effects of his mixed Jewish-Catholic background on his world view.

As a founder member of the 1960s New York counterculture music and poetry collective the Fugs, Ed Sanders was perhaps uniquely placed to write an intimate history of the circumstances enabling mass-murderer Charles Manson and his acolytes to commit one of the most bizarre and horrific crimes in California criminal history. In THE FAMILY, his remarkable account of the events leading up to the 1969 Sharon Tate murders in Los Angeles, Sanders combines his knowledge of the '60s underground with a hard-nosed and unerring instinct for detecting and exposing the charlatanry and fraud at the root of Manson's cult of personality. With painstaking attention to detail and impressive research skills, Sanders dissects the origins of Manson's criminal psyche and its nurture in the US penal system, recounting the ways the charismatic killer used his jailhouse education to con his followers, and in some cases their relatives, into believing the myth of his omnipotence. With the air of a seasoned magician laying bare a huckster's carnival tricks, Sanders's matter-of-fact, deadpan prose exposes the lethal combination of Manson's criminal cunning and the naïveté of his disciples in the Family, which found macabre fruition in the horrific scenes of carnage at the Tate house on Cielo Drive.

An experimental memoir, in which the author relates the facts of his childhood and ancestry in various voices and styles, changing the course of events as it suits him, and contradicting the evidence that he supplies himself. A "New York Times" Notable Book for 1998.