Temple of Doom: And Other Stories of Kids and Crime

Temple of Doom: And Other Stories of Kids and Crime, by the award-winning journalist Mike Sager, is a pocket collection of true stories-first published in Rolling Stone, G​​​​​​​Q, and Esquire-that shed light on the incredible intersection between underage kids and adult crimes and punishments. In the title story, police are baffled when eight Thai Buddhist monks and one nun are killed execution-style in a temple outside Phoenix-the worst mass murder in Arizona history. Nobody wants to believe the crime has been committed by a pair of gung-ho ROTC students from the local high school. In "The Death of a High School Narc," the fortunes of a small Texas town are changed inexorably when the city manager decides there is a drug problem at the local high school. In "Raised in Captivity" we meet Gary Fannon, who lost years of his life to a trumped-up arrest, a crooked cop, and draconian drug-sentencing laws. The decade he spent in prison taught him lessons no man should ever have to learn. "Revenge of the Donut Boys" visits Newark, New Jersey, which once had the highest rate of car theft in the nation, 56 percent of which were perpetrated by teens and pre-teens. "Death in Venice" takes us to the barrio in Venice, California, where the author embeds for six weeks with the once-proud Mexican American gang V-13 during the height of the crack epidemic. Life inside an L.A. gang. In "Fact: Five out of Five Kids Who Kill Love Slayer" the author embeds at home and on tour with the thrash metal band Slayer, rumored to be "violent and heavy drug users," who "worship Satan." Perception meets reality. "Sager has made a career of finding the unexpected story and telling it with empathy and narrative skill." -Publishers Weekly

About the Author :
Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter. He's been called "the Beat poet of American journalism." For more than forty years he has worked as a writer primarily for the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, GQ and Esquire. In 2010 he won the American Society of Magazine Editors National Magazine award for profile writing. A number of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired movies and documentaries, including Boogie Nights. The author of a dozen books and eBooks, Sager is also the editor and publisher of The Sager Group LLC, a content brand that publishes books and eBooks; ministers to artists and provides modest grants; designs products; and produces documentary, narrative and commercial films and music videos. For more info about TSG, please see www.TheSagerGroup.net

Review :
"Sager plays Virgil in the modern American Inferno . . . Compelling and stylish magazine journalism, rich in novelistic detail."-Kirkus Reviews "Like his journalistic precursors Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Sager writes frenetic, off-kilter pop-sociological profiles of Americans in all their vulgarity and vitality . . . He writes with flair, but only in the service of an omnivorous curiosity and defies expectations in pieces that lesser writers would play for satire or sensationalism . . . A Whitmanesque ode to teeming humanity's mystical unity." -The New York Times Book Review "I once described Mike Sager as 'the Beat poet of American journalism.' The title is still apt. For decades, he has explored the beautiful and horrifying underbelly of American society with poignantly explicit portrayals of porn stars, swingers, druggies, movie stars, rockers, and rappers, as well as stunning stories about obscure people whose lives were resonant with deep meaning-a 92-year-old man, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, a 650-pound man. He became a journalistic ethnographer of American life and his generation's heir to the work of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. His imposing body of work today is collected in more than a dozen books and eBooks." -Walt Harrington, author and past head of Journalism at the University of Illinois "The sentences flow with a definite rhythm, but Sager's style is unadorned with falsity, unburdened by over-interpretation. He's a natural storyteller. You never get the feeling he's there just to show off, only to entertain you." -Alex Belth, editor of EsquireClassic.com and The Stacks Reader Series "Like a silver-tongued Margaret Mead, Sager slips into foreign societies almost unnoticed and lives among the natives, chronicling his observations in riveting long-form narratives." -Performances Magazine "Sager has made a career of finding the unexpected story and telling it with empathy and narrative skill." -Publishers Weekly "His self-effacing style evokes George Orwell's famous dictum that good writing should be as transparent as a pane of glass... Exhibit A for why, in an age of video, writing still matters." -San Diego CityBeat