Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force.In this compelling and evocative story of a world in flux, Brown shows that death was as generative as it was destructive. From the eighteenth-century zenith of British colonial slavery to its demise in the 1830s, the Grim Reaper cultivated essential aspects of social life in Jamaica—belonging and status, dreams for the future, and commemorations of the past. Surveying a haunted landscape, Brown unfolds the letters of anxious colonists; listens in on wakes, eulogies, and solemn incantations; peers into crypts and coffins, and finds the very spirit of human struggle in slavery. Masters and enslaved, fortune seekers and spiritual healers, rebels and rulers, all summoned the dead to further their desires and ambitions. In this turbulent transatlantic world, Brown argues, “mortuary politics” played a consequential role in determining the course of history.Insightful and powerfully affecting, The Reaper’s Garden promises to enrich our understanding of the ways that death shaped political life in the world of Atlantic slavery and beyond.

    In Written in Bones, significant discoveries are carefully brought together and analyzed. Readers learn how experts use modern scientific techniques to piece together the stories behind the bones. The data is used to create a picture of cultures and ritual beliefs. There are such astonishing discoveries as:Han Dynasty aristocrat preserved in an unknown red liquid Bog bodies in Europe The riddle of Tomb KV55 - where a male body was found inside a female coffin World's oldest dwarf The headless men and giant wolves of the Mesolithic cemetery in Siberia

    In the winter of 1926 Earle Leonard Nelson erupted into a 16 month long frenzy of savage rape, barbaric murder and blood lust.

    Suddenly, the eyes of the world turned to Baltimore. In nearly 100 stunning black and white photos, Allen documents the uprising, his city, and the people who live there, revealing a world of love, courage, struggle and hope. Each photo reveals the personality, beauty and spirit of Baltimore and those who live there, as his camera complicates the stereotype of a “ghetto”. We find smiles where one might least expect them, hope doing battle against a system that sows desperation and fear, and above all, resistance, to the unrelenting pressures of racism in twenty-first-century America.““Allen’s work demonstrates a connection between resistance as a daily activity, a way of life in the ghetto, and resistance as a political act, as played out in the streets last spring. He documents resistance without judgment, without asking the usual questions that outsiders might: Is it justified? Is it effective? Is it legal? Resistance is represented not as a tactic, but as a fundamental aspect of life.”—Washington PostDevin Allen is one of the first amateur photographers to have their his work featured on the cover of Time magazine. His photographs have also appeared in New York Magazine, the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, BBC, NBC News, Aperture Magazine, and Yahoo!.

    But her youngest daughter, 16-year-old Terry, told police another story: one almost too terrible to believe.But accused of imprisoning her children in a house of horrors...According to Terry, Theresa - no longer the petite brunette she once was - had turned insanely jealous of her pretty eldest daughters and enlisted the help of her two teenaged sons in a vicious campaign against their sisters.Of beating, torturing and killing her own flesh and blood...Terry's gruesome tale told how Theresa had drugged, handcuffed and shot 16-year-old Suesan, allowing her wounds to fester, until the day she ordered her sons to burn their sister alive. Next, Terry said Theresa severely beat 20-year-old Sheila and then locked her in a stifling broom closet, so that when the girl finally starved to death, her brothers dumped her body in the same desolate mountain range where they had cremated Suesan.She could be one of the most evil murderesses of our time...It took Terry five agonizing years to convince authorities to investigate her grisly accounts of burning flesh, starvation and torture...of a mother from hell, so sadistic and so deranged, she had become her children's own executioner.

    Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.

    A painting of a corn dog. A clock made out of an old “mostly clean” cheese grater. All this and more await you in the pages of Regretsy, a veritable sideshow of handcrafts gone wrong. Based on the eponymous hit blog and arranged in categories such as Décor, Pet Humiliation, and Christmas, Regretsy showcases the best of the worst, ranging from the hilariously absurd to the purely horrifying. Each page of this jaw-dropping volume features the actual seller’s online listing with a light coat of snarky commentary to give it a good shellacking. So join us as we descend into handmade hell and gawk, gasp, and marvel at the disturbingly odd artifacts that Regretsy has collected for your viewing pleasure, proving that you can never have too much of a bad thing.

    After enjoying initial success as a British blues band, Fleetwood Mac became wildly popular.

    Once all-American hometown boy, Charles "Tex" Watson answered "Yes" and thus became hopelessly caught in the dizzying downward spiral into the Manson family and into the brutal role of Helter-Skelter executioner. Finally, on the verge of insanity, Tex Watson found release from the drugs, the sex, the violence, and the mindlessness of his past. Here is his personal story-both of the Manson madness and of his new life in Christ.

    But, first and last, Mozart loved and respected women. His mother, his sister, his wife, her sisters, and his female patrons, friends, lovers and fellow artists all figure prominently in his life. And his experience, observation and understanding of women reappear, spectacularly, in the characters he created. As one of our finest interpreters of Mozart's work, Jane Glover is perfectly placed to bring these remarkable women -- both real and dramatized -- vividly to life. We meet Mozart's mother, Maria Anna, and his beloved and devoted sister, Nannerl, perhaps as talented as her brilliant brother but, owing to her sex, destined to languish at home while Wolfgang and their father entertained the drawing rooms of Europe. We meet, too, Mozart's "other family" -- his in-laws, the Webers: Constanze, his wife, much maligned by history, and her sisters, Aloysia, Sophie and Josefa. Aloysia and Josefa were highly talented singers for whom Mozart wrote some of his most remarkable music. Aloysia was the first woman whom Mozart truly and passionately loved, and her eventual rejection of him nearly broke his heart. Constanze, though a less gifted singer, proved a steadfast and loving wife and -- after Mozart's death -- his extremely efficient widow, consolidating his reputation and ensuring that his most enduring legacy, his music, never be forgotten.Mozart's Women is their story. But it is also the story of the women in his operas, all of whom were -- like his sister, his mother, his wife and his entire female acquaintance -- restrained by the conventions and strictures of eighteenth-century society. Yet through his glorious writing, he identified and released the emotions of his characters. Constanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail; Ilia and Elettra in Idomeneo; Susanna and the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro; Donnas Anna and Elvira in Don Giovanni; Fiordiligi, Dorabella and Despina in Così fan tutte; Pamina and the Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte: are all examined and celebrated. They hold up the mirror to their audiences and offer inestimable insight, together constituting yet further proof of Mozart's true genius and phenomenal understanding of human nature. Rich, evocative and compellingly readable, Mozart's Women illuminates the music and the man -- but, above all, the women who inspired him.

    It begins with a knock at the door. “The curtains pull away. They come to the door. And they know. They always know,” said Major Steve Beck. Since the start of the war in Iraq, Marines like Major Beck found themselves thrown into a different kind of mission: casualty notification. It is a job Major Beck never asked for and one for which he received no training. They are given no set rules, only impersonal guidelines. Marines are trained to kill, to break down doors, but casualty notification is a mission without weapons. For Beck, the mission meant learning each dead Marine’s name and nickname, touching the toys they grew up with and reading the letters they wrote home. He held grieving mothers in long embraces, absorbing their muffled cries into the dark blue shoulder of his uniform. He stitched himself into the fabric of their lives, in the simple hope that his compassion might help alleviate at least the smallest piece of their pain. Sometimes he returned home to his own family unable to keep from crying in the dark. In Final Salute, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jim Sheeler weaves together the stories of the fallen and of the broken homes they have left behind. It is also the story of Major Steve Beck and his unflagging efforts to help heal the wounds of those left grieving. Above all, it is a moving tribute to our troops, putting faces to the mostly anonymous names of our courageous heroes, and to the brave families who have made the ultimate sacrifice for this country. Final Salute is the achingly beautiful, devastatingly honest story of the true toll of war. After the knock on the door, the story has only begun.

    Separated upon arrival, he was left to fend for himself in the men’s camp of Auschwitz I.During 22 harsh months in three camps, Thomas experienced and witnessed the cruel and inhumane world of Nazi concentration and death camps. Nonetheless, he never gave up the will to live. Miraculously, he survived and was liberated from Buchenwald at the age of fifteen.While still in the camp and too weak to leave, Thomas felt a compelling need to document it all, and drew over eighty drawings, all portrayed in simple yet poignant detail with extraordinary accuracy. He not only shared the infamous scenes, but also the day-to-day events of life in the camps, alongside inmates' manifestations of humanity, support and friendship.To honor his lost friends and the millions of silenced victims of the Holocaust, in the years following the war, Thomas put his story into words. Despite the evil of the camps, his account provides a striking affirmation of life.The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz, accompanied with 56 of his color illustrations, is the unique testimony of young Thomas and his quest for a brighter tomorrow.

    president, and championed equality and justice for all. Why We March presents more than 300 of the most powerful, uplifting, clever, and creative signs from these marches. “Nasty Women Unite.” “Make America Think Again.” “Build Bridges, Not Walls.” “Girls Just Wanna Have Fundamental Rights.” “Love Trumps Hate.” “A Woman’s Place Is in the Resistance.” These images--featuring messages about reproductive rights and cabinet picks, immigration and police violence, climate change and feminism--together paint a striking portrait of resistance, despair, humor, and most of all, hope. This book will serve as a rallying cry for this burgeoning movement, and a valuable and timely encapsulation of an unprecedented moment in political history. All royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to Planned Parenthood.

    These are stories of loss, rebuilding, wonder, and wild speculation featuring everyone from philosophers to former death row wardens and hospice volunteers. In these moving, enlightening, and often funny conversations, the end is only the beginning.

    Their juxtaposing stories—and those of others close to them—unfold against a volatile backdrop of oil-boom opulence, fear, hatred, lynchings that climax in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, when whites burned the city's properous black community. Askew's award-winning first novel, The Mercy Seat, was praised for its astute diepiction of family bonds and the beauty of American landscape. Now she explores the American race story with the same perception.