{"product_id":"lost-at-sea-isbn-9781594631955","title":"Lost at Sea","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e–bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Psychopath Test\u003c\/i\u003e Jon Ronson writes about the dark, uncanny sides of humanity with clarity and humor. \u003ci\u003eLost at Sea\u003c\/i\u003e—now with new material—reveals how deep our collective craziness lies, even in the most mundane circumstances.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRonson investigates the strange things we’re willing to believe in, from robots programmed with our loved ones’ personalities to indigo children to the Insane Clown Posse’s juggalo fans. He looks at ordinary lives that take on extraordinary perspectives. Among them: a pop singer whose greatest passion is the coming alien invasion, assisted-suicide practitioners, and an Alaskan town’s Christmas-induced high school mass-murder plot. He explores all these tales with a sense of higher purpose and universality, yet they are stories not about the fringe of society. They are about all of us. Incisive and hilarious, poignant and maddening, revealing and disturbing—Ronson writes about our modern world, and reveals how deep our collective craziness lies, and the chaos stirring at the edge of our daily lives.“Profoundly weird...wonderfully twisted...extremely satisfying.”—\u003ci\u003eBoston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Initially, it seems that oddities are what...Jon Ronson is after. He’s actually really just trying to understand the irrational hopes and desires that drive us all.”\u003ci\u003e—The Daily Beast\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Eclectic and fascinating...Ronson treats his subjects fairly but skeptically...his view always framed by an appropriately cocked eyebrow.”—\u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Absurdly entertaining.”—\u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A sterling collection of amazing stories from an offbeat journalist at the top of his game.”—\u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eJon Ronson’s books include the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestseller \u003ci\u003eThe Psychopath Test\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThem: Adventures with Extremists \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Men Who Stare at Goats\u003c\/i\u003e—both international bestsellers. \u003ci\u003eThe Men Who Stare at Goats \u003c\/i\u003ewas adapted as a major motion picture, released in 2009 and starring George Clooney. Ronson lives in London and New York City.Who Killed Richard Cullen? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e(This story was published in the Guardian on July 16, 2005, two years before the global financial crash that began with the subprime mortgage crisis of July 2007.) \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is a wet February day in a very smoky room in a terraced cottage in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. A portable TV in an alcove plays the news. Everything in here is quite old. No spending spree has taken place in this house. There are wedding and baby and school photographs scattered around. Six children, now all grown up, were raised here. There’s a framed child’s painting in the toilet, a picture of Wendy Cullen. It reads “Supergran.” When I phoned Wendy a week ago she said I was welcome to visit, “Just as long as you don’t mind cigarette smoke. I’m smoking myself to death here.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe “Congratulations! You have been pre-approved for a loan”– type junk mail is still pouring through their letterbox. Wendy has just thrown another batch in the bin. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You know what the post is like,” she says. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I don’t get all that much credit-card junk mail,” I say. “I get some, I suppose, but not nearly as much as you do.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Really?” says Wendy. “I assumed everyone was constantly bombarded.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Not me,” I say. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe both shrug as if to say, “That’s a mystery.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIT WAS A month ago today that Wendy’s husband, Richard, committed suicide. It was the end of what had been an ordinary twenty-five-year marriage. They met when Wendy owned a B and B on the other side of Trowbridge. He turned up one day and rented a room. Richard had trained to be an electrical engineer but he ended up as a mechanic. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“He loved repairing people’s cars,” Wendy says. Then she narrows her eyes at my line of questioning and makes me promise that I am not here to write “a slushy horrible mawky love story.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’m really not,” I say. So Wendy continues. Everything was normal until six years ago, when she needed an operation. “I couldn’t face the Royal United Hospital in Bath,” she says, “so I went private. I took out a four-thousand-pound loan.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe says she remembers a time when it was hard for people like them to get loans, but this was easy. Companies were practically throwing money at them. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Richard handled all the finances. He said, ‘I can get you one with nought percent interest and after six months we’ll switch you to another one.’ ” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut then, a few months after the first operation, Wendy was diagnosed with breast cancer and Richard had to take six weeks off to drive her to radiotherapy. The bills needed paying and so, once again, he did that peculiarly modern British thing. He began signing up for credit cards, behaving like a company, thinking he could beat the lenders at their own game by cleverly rolling the debts over from account to account. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere are currently eight million more credit cards in circulation in Britain than there are people: sixty-seven million credit cards, fifty-nine million people. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe signed up with Mint: “Apply for your Mint Card. You’d need a seriously good reason not to. What’s stopping you?” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd Frizzell: “A name you can trust.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd Barclaycard: “Wake up to a fresh start.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd Morgan Stanley: “Choose from our Flags of Great Britain range of card designs.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd American Express: “Go on, treat yourself.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd so on. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRight now nobody knows how Richard Cullen’s shrewd acumen fell apart. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“He wasn’t a man that talked a great deal,” says Wendy, “and he never, ever discussed finances with me.” But somehow it all spiraled out of control. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWendy first got the inkling that something was wrong just before Christmas 2004, when the debt-collection departments of various credit-card companies began phoning. He called them back out of his wife’s hearing. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You know how men will walk around with their mobiles,” says Wendy. “He used to go out into the garden.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe looks over to the garden behind the conservatory extension and says, “He was a very proud man. He must have been going through hell. They were very, very persistent. I don’t think he was even phoning them back in the end.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFinally, he admitted it to his wife. He said he didn’t seek out all of the twenty-two credit cards he had somehow ended up acquiring between 1998 and 2004. On many occasions they just arrived through the letterbox in the form of “Congratulations! You have been pre-approved . . .” junk. He said he thought he owed about £30,000. There had been no spending spree, he said, no secret vices. He had just tied himself up in knots, using each card to pay off the interest and the charges on the others. The fog of late-payment fees and so on had somehow crept up and engulfed him. He got a pair of scissors from the kitchen and cut up ten credit cards in front of her. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn January 10, 2005, Richard visited his ex-wife, Jennifer, who later told the police that he seemed “very quiet, like he’d retreated into himself, like his mind was gone.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe asked him how his weekend was. He replied, “Not very good.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen he went missing for two days. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Nobody knows where he went,” says Wendy. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn the morning of January 12, Wendy’s son Christopher looked in the garage. It was padlocked, so he broke in with a screwdriver. There was an old Vauxhall Nova covered with a sheet. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I don’t know why,” Christopher later told the police, “but I decided to look under the sheet.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRichard Cullen had gassed himself in his car. He left his wife a note: “I just can’t take this any more and you’ll be better off without me.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWHO KILLED RICHARD CULLEN? \u003cbr\u003eFor instance: Why did so many credit-card companies choose to swamp the Cullens with junk when they don’t swamp me? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow did they even get their address? How can I even begin to find something complicated like that out? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd then I have a brainwave. I’ll devise an experiment. I’ll create a number of personas. Their surnames will all be Ronson, and they’ll all live at my address, but they’ll have different first names. Each Ronson will be poles apart, personality wise. Each will have a unique set of hopes, desires, predilections, vices, and spending habits, reflected in the various mailing lists they’ll sign up to—from Porsche down to hard-core pornography. The one thing that’ll unite them is that they won’t be at all interested in credit cards. They will not seek loans nor any financial services as they wander around, filling out lifestyle surveys and entering competitions and purchasing things by mail order. Whenever they’re invited to tick a box forbidding whichever company from passing their details to other companies, they’ll neglect to tick the box. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhich, if any, of my personas will end up getting sent credit-card junk mail? Which personality type will be most attractive to the credit-card companies? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI name my personas John, Paul, George, Ringo, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, Titch, Willy, Biff, Happy and Bernard. And I begin.","brand":"Riverhead Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300647686373,"sku":"NP9781594631955","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781594631955.jpg?v=1767731817","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/lost-at-sea-isbn-9781594631955","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}