Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men


Harold Schechter - 2018
    She was the rarest of female psychopaths, a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it. Between 1902 and 1908, she lured a succession of unsuspecting victims to her Indiana “murder farm.” Some were hired hands. Others were well-to-do bachelors. All of them vanished without a trace. When their bodies were dug up, they hadn’t merely been poisoned, like victims of other female killers. They’d been butchered.Hell’s Princess is a riveting account of one of the most sensational killing sprees in the annals of American crime: the shocking series of murders committed by the woman who came to be known as Lady Bluebeard. The only definitive book on this notorious case and the first to reveal previously unknown information about its subject, Harold Schechter’s gripping, suspenseful narrative has all the elements of a classic mystery—and all the gruesome twists of a nightmare.

Eleven Bats: A Story of Cricket and the SAS


Anthony 'Harry' Moffitt - 2020
    An improvised game of cricket was often the circuit-breaker Harry and his team needed after the tension of operations. He began a tradition of organising matches wherever he was sent, whether it was in the mountains of East Timor with a fugitive rebel leader, or on the dusty streets of Baghdad, or in exposed Forward Operating Bases in the hills of Afghanistan. Soldiers, locals and even visiting politicians played in these spontaneous yet often bridge-building games.As part of the tradition, Harry also started to take a cricket bat with him on operational tours, eleven of them in total. They'd often go outside the wire with him and end up signed by those he met or fought alongside. These eleven bats form the basis for Harry's extraordinary memoir. It's a book about combat, and what it takes to serve in one of the world's most elite formations. It's a book about the toll that war takes on soldiers and their loved ones. And it's a book about the healing power of cricket, and how a game can break down borders in even the most desperate of circumstances.

Eleanor Roosevelt's Life of Soul Searching and Self Discovery: From Depression and Betrayal to First Lady of the World


Ann Atkins - 2011
    Refusing to cave in to society's rules, Eleanor's exuberant style, wavering voice and lack of Hollywood beauty are fodder for the media.First Lady for thirteen years, Eleanor redefines and exploits this role to a position ofpower. Using her influence she champions for Jews, African Americans and women. Living through two world wars Eleanor witnesses thousands of graves, broken bodies and grieving families. After visiting troops in the Pacific she says:"If we don't make this a more decent world to live in I don't see how we can look these boys in the eyes."She defies a post-war return to status quo and establishes the Universal Declarationof Human Rights within the U.N. She earns her way to being named "First Lady of the World." The audacity of this woman to live out her own destiny challenges us to do the same. After all, it's not about Eleanor. Her story is history.  It's about us.

How To Stop Enabling Your Adult Children: Practical steps to use boundaries and get your power back as you stop enabling (Empowering Change Book 1)


Melody Devonish - 2014
     This book will start you on your journey to stop enabling. If you just can’t maintain boundaries with your adult child/children, and you find yourself constantly taken advantage of, then this book is for you. Discover the wealth of shared experience that can exist in a parent/adult child relationship that is not dominated by unrealistic expectations, manipulations and resentment. The goal is to empower you, as you understand the enabling cycle and then learn some very practical tools to help you stop. The enabling cycle can be challenged, and change will happen. Getting your power back in your life, and feeling the freedom of being in control of your decisions is an amazingly freeing process. It does however take work, and that is where this very practical book can get you started. You may find that your needs are constantly disregarded, while your adult child expects you to continually be there to pick up the pieces and rescue them again and again. It is time to learn HOW TO put firm boundaries in place in a calm and dignified manner. This book will help you see what lies are keeping you in your current stressful and unfulfilled situation. You will learn how to start the journey towards sharing a mutually fulfilling mature relationship with your adult child. Here Is A Preview Of What You'll Learn Understanding the Enabler or Rescuer How the Enabling Cycle Continues and Grows Boundaries Are Your Friend! Dignified Assertiveness The Importance of Individuation It’s Not Cruel To Say ‘No’! Changing Your Thinking (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) Practical Steps For Putting Your New Thinking and Boundaries Into Action Take action right away to start your empowering journey today by downloading this book, "How To Stop Enabling Your Adult Children", for a limited time discount of only $0.99! Tags: enabling adult children, rescuing, relationships, parenting, boundaries, enabling, individuation, cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT, self-talk, healthy boundaries

Conversations With a Killer (Singles Classic)


Alec Wilkinson - 2016
    The murders took place between 1972 and 1978, when he was caught and arrested. No one else in America has ever been convicted of killing so many people. Twenty-seven of the bodies were buried in a crawl space beneath the house where Gacy lived, in a neighborhood out by O’Hare Airport. About many of the murders there was a suggestion of sexual torture. Twenty-one of the murders were committed before Illinois had enacted a death penalty, and for those Gacy was sentenced to twenty-one terms of life in prison. For the others, he was sentenced to death. He is to be killed on the tenth of May.Published just a month before Gacy’s execution, Alec Wilkinson’s Conversations With a Killer presents a chilling portrait of one of America’s most heinous killers as he sits on death row and maintains his innocence. At once too close for comfort and impossible to put down, Conversations With a Killer is a must-read for true crime fans. Conversations with a Killer was originally published in The New Yorker, April 18, 1994.Cover design by Adil Dara.

In My Skin: A Memoir


Kate Holden - 2005
    . . the work of a stunningly talented writer who both graces and surpasses her material" (Guardian), this is the frank, harrowing, and true story of one young woman's descent into heroin addiction and prostitution and the long, arduous struggle to redeem her life that made her stronger. A shy, bookish college graduate from a solid middle-class home, Kate Holden was uncertain of her way in life. When she decided to try her first hit of heroin as a one-time adventure with friends, she did not anticipate that the drug would take over. She lost her job and apartment and stole from her family. Desperation drove her first to offer her body on the streets and then in high-class brothels, where she discovered hidden strengths as well as parts of herself that frightened her. With the acceptance and unyielding love of a family that never abandoned her, Kate Holden ultimately defeated the drug and left her netherworld behind.

ROAR


Samantha Lane - 2018
    They had a sound unlike anything anyone had ever heard: an almighty, heartfelt roar.’The inaugural season of the AFL Women’s league was a game changer for Australian sport and for Australia culturally. When women joined the nation’s biggest and most popular sporting code as players, it gave them licence to become legitimate football heroes. It was personal, political, proud and powerful.With unique insights from award-winning journalist Samantha Lane, including previously untold details behind AFLW’s birth, ROAR tells the remarkable tales of a group of trailblazers. These are intimate stories from a band of pioneers who now have a league of their own.From Daisy Pearce, AFLW’s original poster-player, to Craig Starcevich, the Collingwood premiership footballer who found football happiness where he least expected it, and superstars including Tayla Harris and history-making coach Bec Goddard, ROAR is a groundbreaking book to inspire, illuminate and celebrate the leading lights of AFLW.

Stories from a Theme Park Insider


Robert Niles - 2011
    What time is the 3:00 parade? Why does a child need to be 40 inches tall to ride a roller coaster? What happens when the president of France gets lost inside Pirates of the Caribbean? A former employee, or "cast member", at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom answers these and other questions while sharing humorous stories about working inside the world's most popular theme park."Stories from a Theme Park Insider" takes you inside the park's famous tunnels and backstage for a look at how theme parks really work, and the funny moments and embarrassments that can happen when your work is someone else's vacation.

Don't Eat the Puffin: Tales From a Travel Writer's Life


Jules Brown - 2018
    Get paid to travel and write about it.Only no one told Jules that it would mean eating oily seabirds, repeatedly falling off a husky sled, getting stranded on a Mediterranean island, and crash-landing in Iran.The exotic destinations come thick and fast – Hong Kong, Hawaii, Huddersfield – as Jules navigates what it means to be a travel writer in a world with endless surprises up its sleeve.Add in a cast of larger-than-life characters – Elvis, Captain Cook, his own travel-mad Dad – and an eye for the ridiculous, and this journey with Jules is one you won’t want to miss.

Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine


Allan MacDonell - 2006
    Here’s the inside story of running America’s most influential porn domain.A professional career of evaluating countless skin photos, taking XXX field trips, mastering “fully erect” film criticism and enduring creepy interoffice schemers suddenly launches MacDonell into national politics when Larry Flynt opens his wallet to impact the impeachment proceedings against President William Jefferson Clinton. MacDonell reveals the backside of his prominent role in tricking right-wing Speaker-elect Bob Livingston into resigning from Congress.Prisoner of X is a wildly entertaining memoir about life climbing the bent and fearsome masthead of an infamous magazine, and the bittersweet reward of publicly crossing its hillbilly Caesar.Aside from being the most prolific writer in the history of Larry Flynt Publications, Allan MacDonell contributed to the archetypal punk magazine Slash and the underground anthology Apocalypse Culture. Freelance pieces have appeared in venues as diverse as Gambling Times magazine, MrSkin.com and the L.A. Weekly. Mr. MacDonell lives in California's Hollywood Hills with two dogs, his wife Theresa, and a clear conscience.

Caged Lion: Joseph Pilates and His Legacy


John Howard Steel - 2020
    He not only invented an exercise regimen—which today is practiced by more than ten million people—but in the process, reinvented himself.John Howard Steel brings Joseph Pilates and his eponymous exercise regime to life from his unique perspective as a student, friend, and confidant. Joe’s influence profoundly changed Steel’s life; in turn, Steel was crucial for the survival of the Pilates Method and Joe’s legacy. Steel’s vivid account traces the expansion of Pilates from a small cadre of dedicated adherents, through two periods of near extinction, to the global sensation it is today. Steel describes Joseph Pilates’s years as a prisoner during World War I, Joe’s motivation to discover his system of exercises, his inspirational teaching technique, and the unique attraction of the Pilates Method. It’s quite a story.

Man vs Ocean - A toaster salesman who sets out to swim the world's deadliest oceans and change his life forever


Adam Walker - 2016
    He took on arguably the toughest extreme sport on the planet - to swim non-stop across seven of the world’s deadliest oceans wearing only swim trunks, cap and goggles. It is not a test for the faint-hearted: swimmers face freezing temperatures, huge swells and treacherous currents, potentially deadly marine life (from sharks to Portuguese men o’ war), vomiting and burning off a week’s calories in a single swim.In 2007, Adam, then a toaster salesman, saw a fi lm about a man attempting to swim the English Channel and change his life in doing so. Inspired by this, he decided to try to emulate the feat. After a year of rigorous training without a coach - his first open-water swim was in 9 degrees and he nearly died from hypothermia - Adam achieved his goal in 11 hours 35 minutes, despite a ruptured bicep tendon leading to medical advice to give up long-distance swimming. In 2011, after two operations and a change to his swimming style to take pressure off his injured shoulder, he became the first Briton to achieve a two-way crossing from Spain to Morocco and back. In the process, he broke the British record one way.Shortly afterwards, the Ocean’s Seven challenge was born, a gruelling equivalent to the Seven Summits mountaineering challenge. At fi rst it seemed that injury would prevent Adam from participating but, ignoring medical advice, he developed an innovative technique - the Ocean Walker stroke - that would enable him to continue with the ultimate aim of completing this seemingly impossible feat. Whether man would triumph over ocean, or fail in the attempt, forms the core of this extraordinary autobiography.Always intriguing, sometimes terrifying, and occasionally very funny, Adam’s story is about sport in its truest form: rather than competitions between teams and individuals, it is about man against nature - and against his own failings.

Edward the Elder and the Making of England


Harriet Harvey Wood - 2018
    It is an undoubted fact that, were it not for the work of Alfred, there might never have been the possibility of an English kingdom in the sense that we now understand it. It is also true that Athelstan was the first explicitly to rule over an English kingdom in roughly its present shape and extent. What, then, was the contribution of Edward to the evolution of what his son was to inherit? As a child, he saw his father at the lowest point of his fortunes; as a boy, he grew up under the constant threat of further Danish invasion. Edward came to adulthood in the knowledge that it was his responsibility to safeguard his country. By his death, he was undoubtedly the most powerful and respected ruler, not only in England but in western Europe, and he achieved this through both martial and legislative prowess. Edward built on his father’s work but he immeasurably expanded it, and the chroniclers who wrote in the centuries which immediately followed his death remembered him as ‘greatly excelling his father in extent of power’. Edward the Elder succeeded Alfred as king of the Anglo-Saxons; he died as king of the English. And yet virtually nothing has been written about him. Until now. While biographies of Alfred and studies of the achievements of Athelstan pour from the press, Edward is forgotten. Yet he was the first ruler to leave behind him the possibility of a united England, a country in which men thought of themselves as English, speaking a language which all would have described as English, which had never existed in quite this form before. Anyone looking to fully understand and appreciate the making of medieval England must look to understand and appreciate Edward the Elder and his reign.

Small Sacrifices


Ann Rule - 1987
    Ann Rule's shocking and powerful account of the destructive forces that drove Diane Downs, a beautiful young mother, to shoot her three young children in cold blood.

Finding Freedom in the Lost Kitchen


Erin French - 2021
    And of her son who became her guiding light as she slowly rebuilt her personal and culinary life around the solace she found in food--as a source of comfort, a sense of place, as a way of creating community and making something of herself, despite seemingly impossible odds.Set against the backdrop of rural Maine and its lushly intense, bountiful seasons, Erin French's rollercoaster memoir reveals struggles that have taken every ounce of her strength to overcome, and the passion and courage behind the fairytale success of The Lost Kitchen.