Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People


Tim Reiterman - 1982
     Tim Reiterman s Raven provides the seminal history of the Rev. Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and the murderous ordeal at Jonestown in 1978. This PEN Award winning work explores the ideals-gone-wrong, the intrigue, and the grim realities behind the Peoples Temple and its implosion in the jungle of South America. Reiterman s reportage clarifies enduring misperceptions of the character and motives of Jim Jones, the reasons why people followed him, and the important truth that many of those who perished at Jonestown were victims of mass murder rather than suicide.This widely sought work is restored to print after many years with a new preface by the author, as well as the more than sixty-five rare photographs from the original volume."

The King of Con: How a Smooth-Talking Jersey Boy Made and Lost Billions, Baffled the FBI, Eluded the Mob, and Lived to Tell the Crooked Tale


Thomas Giacomaro - 2018
    A charming, brash-talking salesman with a genius-level IQ, he climbed the ranks and let his lust for money and relationships with New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago crime families send him spiraling into a world of drugs and violence. Forced to go on the lam in South Africa and Europe, he returned a year later with millions of dollars' worth of diamonds stuffed in his underwear. And that's only the beginning.In The King of Con, Tom details how he hashes out a deal with the FBI, agreeing to become a special crime informant in an effort to avoid jail time--only he somehow manages not to rat anyone out and, incredibly, continues his high-finance, white-collar scheming, luring celebrities and other high-profile contacts to invest multimillions in his new business ventures. When it all inevitably comes crashing down, Tom is thrown in prison for over a decade, yet, even behind bars, he's able to get what he wants from anyone: the warden, the doctors, the guards, his fellow inmates . . . and he eventually finds a way to get released early.Cowritten by journalist Natasha Stoynoff, The King of Con is the true story about a streetwise Jersey boy who talked and scammed his way to the top and became richer and more successful than his wildest dreams. It offers an unforgettable look into the life of a man who became hooked on living life to thrilling and dangerous excess, rubbing elbows with celebrities and crime bosses, until he was humbled by the FBI, by the US Attorney, and by life itself.Now, Tom is back in his old New Jersey neighborhood. His old business cronies and mob contacts are calling, his palms are itching to make billions again, and the US Attorney's office is watching. Will he stay on the straight and narrow, or will he steal back his crown of crime as the King of Con?

A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France


Miranda Richmond Mouillot - 2015
    Five years later, Anna packed her bags and walked out on Armand, taking the typewriter and their children. Aside from one brief encounter, the two never saw or spoke to each other again, never remarried, and never revealed what had divided them forever.A Fifty-Year Silence is the deeply involving account of Miranda Richmond Mouillot's journey to find out what happened between her grandmother, a physician, and her grandfather, an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials, who refused to utter his wife's name aloud after she left him.  To discover the roots of their embittered and entrenched silence, Miranda abandons her plans for the future and moves to their stone house, now a crumbling ruin; immerses herself in letters, archival materials, and secondary sources; and teases stories out of her reticent, and declining, grandparents.  As she reconstructs how Anna and Armand braved overwhelming odds and how the knowledge her grandfather acquired at Nuremberg destroyed their relationship, Miranda wrestles with the legacy of trauma, the burden of history, and the complexities of memory.  She also finds herself learning how not only to survive but to thrive – making a home in the village and falling in love.With warmth, humor, and rich, evocative details that bring her grandparents' outsize characters and their daily struggles vividly to life, A Fifty-Year Silence is a heartbreaking, uplifting love story spanning two continents and three generations.

Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City


Nelson Johnson - 2002
    New Jersey Superior Court judge Nelson Johnson has been observing the underpinnings of the boardwalk scene for three decades, both as a professional and an amateur history buff. His scintillating new book traces the city's long, eventful path from birth to seaside resort to a scandal-ridden crime center and beyond. The Sopranos with salt-water taffy.

My Life with Bonnie and Clyde


Blanche Caldwell Barrow - 2004
    But they did not act alone. In 1933, during their infamous run from the law, Bonnie and Clyde were joined by Clyde’s brother Buck Barrow and his wife Blanche. Of these four accomplices, only one—Blanche Caldwell Barrow—lived beyond early adulthood and only Blanche left behind a written account of their escapades. Edited by outlaw expert John Neal Phillips, Blanche’s previously unknown memoir is here available for the first time.Blanche wrote her memoir between 1933 and 1939, while serving time at the Missouri State Penitentiary. Following her death, Blanche’s good friend and the executor of her will, Esther L. Weiser, found the memoir wrapped in a large unused Christmas card. Later she entrusted it to Phillips, who had interviewed Blanche several times before her death. Drawing from these interviews, and from extensive research into Depression-era outlaw history, Phillips supplements the memoir with helpful notes and with biographical information about Blanche and her accomplices.

Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema


Anne Helen Petersen - 2014
    And the stars of yesteryear? They weren’t always the saints that we make them out to be. BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen, author of Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, is here to set the record straight. Pulling little-known gems from the archives of film history, Petersen reveals eyebrow-raising information, including:*The smear campaign against the original It Girl, Clara Bow, started by her best friend *The heartbreaking story of Montgomery Clift’s rapid rise to fame, the car accident that destroyed his face, and the “long suicide” that followed *Fatty Arbuckle’s descent from Hollywood royalty, fueled by allegations of a boozy orgy turned violent assault *Why Mae West was arrested and jailed for “indecency charges” *And much more Part biography, part cultural history, these stories cover the stuff that films are made of: love, sex, drugs, illegitimate children, illicit affairs, and botched cover-ups. But it’s not all just tawdry gossip in the pages of this book. The stories are all contextualized within the boundaries of film, cultural, political, and gender history, making for a read that will inform as it entertains. Based on Petersen’s beloved column on the Hairpin, but featuring 100% new content, Scandals of Classic Hollywood is sensationalism made smart.

Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison


John Kiriakou - 2017
    His crime: blowing the whistle on the CIA's use of torture on Al Qaeda prisoners. Doing Time Like A Spy is Kiriakou's memoir of his twenty-three months in prison. Using twenty life skills he learned in CIA operational training, he was able to keep himself safe and at the top of the prison social heap. Including his award-winning blog series "Letters from Loretto," Doing Time Like a Spy is at once a searing journal of daily prison life and an alternately funny and heartbreaking commentary on the federal prison system.

We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence


Becky Cooper - 2020
    government. You have to remember because Harvard doesn't let you forget.1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment.   Forty years later, Becky Cooper a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims. We Keep the Dead Close is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny, and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.

Della's Web: The Many Husbands of a Suburban Black Widow


Aphrodite Jones - 2002
    With bewitching hazel eyes and exquisite clothes, Dante Britteon seemed to have stepped straight out of Vogue and into his arms. But their honeymoon didn't last long. Beneath Dante's china-doll facade lured a sceretive, dangerous woman, a man-hater born as Della Faye Hall, whose four previous marriages had been spiced with butcher knives, pistols, vandalized house and lover set on fire, according to the men she ensnared. And by the time Darryl—haunted by his own impotence—summoned the strength to demand out of the marriage, Della Faye was only too happy to oblige: with a bullet to the brain. In this stunning book, New York Times bestselling author Aphrodite Jones traces the intricate web of this fiendishly calculating sexual con artist. From Della Faye Hall's strange childhood to her violent marriages, from the police investigation to the murder trial, this is the shocking story of a suburban femme fatale, a gold-digger driven by jealousy and greed to torture her husband to death.

Daughter of the King


Sandra Lansky - 2014
    

Ask an Astronaut: My Guide to Life in Space


Tim Peake - 2017
    From training to launch, from his historic spacewalk to re-entry, he reveals for readers of all ages the cutting-edge science behind his ground-breaking experiments, and the wonders of day-to-day life on board the International Space Station.The public were invited to submit questions using the hashtag #askanastronaut, and a selection are answered by Tim in the book, which will be accompanied with illustrations, diagrams and never-before-seen photos.Tim is pleased to announce that, as with his previous book, royalties received from the book will be donated to The Prince’s Trust.

Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars


Juan Martínez - 2016
    What emerged was a story wrought with sex, manipulation, and deceit that stunned the public at every turn. Arias, always playing the wronged and innocent woman, changed her story continually as her bizarre behavior surrounding the crime and its aftermath came to light. Unwavering, Arias and her defense team continued to play off the salacious details of the case, until she was finally found guilty and—controversially—sentenced to life behind bars.Now, speaking openly for the first time, prosecutor Juan Martinez will unearth new details from the investigation that were never revealed at trial, exploring key facts from the case and the pieces of evidence he chose to keep close to the vest. Throughout the trials, his bullish and unfaltering prosecution strategy was both commended and criticized, and in his book, Martinez will illuminate the unique tactics he utilized in this case and how they lead to a successful conviction, and-for the first time-discuss how he felt losing the death penalty sentence he’d pursued for years.Going beyond the news reports, Martinez will explore the truth behind the multiple facades of Jodi Arias. Sparring with her from across the stand, Martinez came to know Arias like no one else could, dissecting what it took for a seemingly normal girl to become a deluded, cunning, and unrepentant murderer.With new stories from behind the scenes of the trial and Martinez’s own take on his defendant, the book takes you inside the mind of Jodi Arias like never before. Complete with 16 pages of photos from the case and trial, this book is the definitive account of the case that shocked America.

Lawbreaking Ladies: 50 Tales of Daring, Defiant, and Dangerous Women from History


Erika Owen - 2021
    Many of us are familiar with the popular slogan “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” But that adage is taken to the next level in this book, which looks at women from the past who weren’t afraid to break the law or challenge gender norms. From pirates to madams, gamblers to bootleggers, and serial killers to outlaws, women throughout the ages haven’t always decided to be sugar, spice, and everything nice.In Lawbreaking Ladies, author Erika Owen tells the stories of 50 remarkable women whose rebellious and often criminal acts ought to solidify their place in history, including:- The swashbuckling pirate Ching Shih- “Queen of the Bootleggers” Gloria de Casares- The Prohibition-era gangster Stephanie Saint-Clair- And a band of prisoners who came to be known as the Goree GirlsThe perfect gift for true crime fans and lovers of little-known women’s history, Lawbreaking Ladies serves as an engaging and informative guide to gals who were daring, defiant, and sometimes downright dangerous.

The Jigsaw Man


Paul Britton - 1997
    What he searches for at the scene of a crime are not fingerprints, fibres or blood stains - he looks for the 'mind trace' left behind by those responsible; the psychological characteristics that can help police to identify and understand the nature of the perpetrator.Over the past dozen years he has been at the centre of more than 100 headline-making investigations, from the murder of Jamie Bulger to the abduction of baby Abbie Humphries, the slaying of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common, the pursuit of the Green Chain rapist and the Heinz baby food extortionist, the notorious Gloucester House of Horror and most recently, the murder of Naomi Smith.Told with humanity and insight, The Jigsaw Man is Paul Britton's absorbing first-hand account of those cases, and of his groundbreaking analysis and treatment of the criminal mind. It combines the heart-stopping tension of the best detective thriller with his unique and profound understanding of the dark side of the human condition.

George Lucas: A Life


Brian Jay Jones - 2016
    Conceived, written, and directed by a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas, the movie originally called The Star Wars quickly drew blocks-long lines, bursting box-office records and ushering in a new way for movies to be made, marketed, and merchandised. It is now one of the most adored-and successful-movie franchises of all time.Now, the author of the bestselling biography Jim Henson delivers a long-awaited, revelatory look into the life and times of the man who created Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Indiana Jones.If Star Wars wasn't game-changing enough, Lucas went on to create another blockbuster series with Indiana Jones, and he completely transformed the world of special effects and the way movies sound. His innovation and ambition forged Pixar and Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and THX sound.Lucas's colleagues and competitors offer tantalizing glimpses into his life. His entire career has been stimulated by innovators including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, actors such as Harrison Ford, and the very technologies that enabled the creation of his films-and allowed him to keep tinkering with them long after their original releases. Like his unforgettable characters and stories, his influence is unmatched.