Profiles in Courage
John F. Kennedy - 1955
Kennedy, with an introduction by Caroline Kennedy and a foreword by Robert F. Kennedy.Written in 1955 by the then junior senator from the state of Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage serves as a clarion call to every American.In this book Kennedy chose eight of his historical colleagues to profile for their acts of astounding integrity in the face of overwhelming opposition. These heroes, coming from different junctures in our nation’s history, include John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, and Robert A. Taft.Now, a half-century later, the book remains a moving, powerful, and relevant testament to the indomitable national spirit and an unparalleled celebration of that most noble of human virtues. It resounds with timeless lessons on the most cherished of virtues and is a powerful reminder of the strength of the human spirit. Profiles in Courage is as Robert Kennedy states in the foreword: “not just stories of the past but a book of hope and confidence for the future. What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us."Along with vintage photographs and an extensive author biography, this book features Kennedy's correspondence about the writing project, contemporary reviews, a letter from Ernest Hemingway, and two rousing speeches from recipients of the Profile in Courage Award. Introduction by John F. Kennedy’s daughter Caroline Kennedy, forward by John F. Kennedy’s brother Robert F. Kennedy.
My Life Among the Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers
Helen Morrison - 2004
Helen Morrison has profiled more than eighty serial killers around the world. What she learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious criminals known to man.Judging by appearances, Dr. Helen Morrison has an ordinary life in the suburbs of a major city. She has a physician husband, two children, and a thriving psychiatric clinic. But her life is much more than that. She is one of the country's leading experts on serial killers, and has spent as many as four hundred hours alone in a room with depraved murderers, digging deep into killers' psyches in ways no profiler before ever has.In My Life Among the Serial Killers, Dr. Morrison relates how she profiled the Mad Biter, Richard Otto Macek, who chewed on his victims' body parts, stalked Dr. Morrison, then believed she was his wife. She did the last interview with Ed Gein, who was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. John Wayne Gacy, the clown-obsessed killer of young men, sent her crazed Christmas cards and gave her his paintings as presents. Then there was Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams; rapist turned murderer Bobby Joe Long; England's Fred and Rosemary West, who killed girls and women in their "House of Horrors"; and Brazil's deadliest killer of children, Marcelo Costa de Andrade.Dr. Morrison has received hundreds of letters from killers, read their diaries and journals, evaluated crime scenes, testified at their trials, and studied photos of the gruesome carnage. She has interviewed the families of the victims -- and the spouses and parents of the killers -- to gain a deeper understanding of the killer's environment and the public persona he adopts. She has also studied serial killers throughout history and shows how this is not a recent phenomenon with psychological autopsies of the fifteenth-century French war hero Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Bathory, H. H. Holmes of the late ninteenth century, and Albert Fish of the Roaring Twenties.Through it all, Dr. Morrison has been on a mission to discover the reasons why serial killers are compelled to murder, how they choose their victims, and what we can do to prevent their crimes in the future. Her provocative conclusions will stun you.
A Warning
Anonymous - 2019
An unprecedented behind-the-scenes portrait of the Trump presidency from the anonymous senior official whose first words of warning about the president rocked the nation's capital.
No Stone Unturned: The True Story of the World's Premier Forensic Investigators
Steve Jackson - 2002
A hiker brutally murdered, then thrown off a cliff in a remote mountain range. A devious killer who hid his wife's body under a thick cement patio. For investigators, the story is often the same: they know a murder took place, they may even know who did it. But without key evidence, pursuing a conviction is nearly impossible. That's when they call NecroSearch International. Necrosearch boasts a brain trust of the nation's top scientists, specialists, and behaviourists who use the latest technology and techniques to help solve "unsolvable" crimes, no matter how decayed the corpse, no matter how cleverly the killer has hidden the victim's body. Now, for the first time ever, readers are taken on a fascinating, often-shocking journey into a realm of crime investigation of which few people are aware. Necrosearch's most challenging cases are described, step-by-step, as these modern-day Sherlock Holmes's detect bodies and evidence thought irretrievable, and testify in court to bring cold-blooded killers to justice.
First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
Thomas E. Ricks - 2020
On every page I learned something new. Read it every night if you want to restore your faith in our country." —James Mattis, General, U.S. Marines (ret.) & 26th Secretary of Defense The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author offers a revelatory new book about the founding fathers, examining their educations and, in particular, their devotion to the ancient Greek and Roman classics—and how that influence would shape their ideals and the new American nation.On the morning after the 2016 presidential election, Thomas Ricks awoke with a few questions on his mind: What kind of nation did we now have? Is it what was designed or intended by the nation’s founders? Trying to get as close to the source as he could, Ricks decided to go back and read the philosophy and literature that shaped the founders’ thinking, and the letters they wrote to each other debating these crucial works—among them the Iliad, Plutarch’s Lives, and the works of Xenophon, Epicurus, Aristotle, Cato, and Cicero. For though much attention has been paid the influence of English political philosophers, like John Locke, closer to their own era, the founders were far more immersed in the literature of the ancient world.The first four American presidents came to their classical knowledge differently. Washington absorbed it mainly from the elite culture of his day; Adams from the laws and rhetoric of Rome; Jefferson immersed himself in classical philosophy, especially Epicureanism; and Madison, both a groundbreaking researcher and a deft politician, spent years studying the ancient world like a political scientist. Each of their experiences, and distinctive learning, played an essential role in the formation of the United States. In examining how and what they studied, looking at them in the unusual light of the classical world, Ricks is able to draw arresting and fresh portraits of men we thought we knew.First Principles follows these four members of the Revolutionary generation from their youths to their adult lives, as they grappled with questions of independence, and forming and keeping a new nation. In doing so, Ricks interprets not only the effect of the ancient world on each man, and how that shaped our constitution and government, but offers startling new insights into these legendary leaders.
Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit
John E. Douglas - 1995
He has confronted, interviewed and researched dozens of serial killers and assassins, including Charles Manson, Richard Speck, John Wayne Gacy, and James Earl Ray - for a landmark study to understand their motives. To get inside their minds. He is Special Agent John Douglas, the model for law enforcement legend Jack Crawford in Thomas Harris's thrillers Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, and the man who ushered in a new age in behavorial science and criminal profiling. Recently retired after twenty-five years of service, John Douglas can finally tell his unique and compelling story.
Kill Zone: A Sniper Looks at Dealey Plaza
Craig Roberts - 1994
Marine Corps sniper Craig Roberts, a seasoned veteran of the Vietnam war, stood for the first time at the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository. As he looked down into that the U.S. Government maintains was the kill zone used by Lee Harvey Oswald, he knew immediately the the Warren Commission's verdict that Oswald, acting alone from that position, fired three shots is 5.6 seconds with an ancient bolt-action rifle was a lie. If Oswald, by himself, could not have done it, then who could? And why? Follow Roberts's investigation of six years into a shadow world of black operations into a level above the CIA, the KGB, the Mafia, Texas oil and others into a powerful organization that to them, to murder a head of a country anywhere is "business as usual."
The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson
Jeffrey Toobin - 1996
Simpson, the evidence in the case, and the role of the prosecution and defense.
Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot
Bill O'Reilly - 2012
Kennedy struggles to contain the growth of Communism while he learns the hardships, solitude, and temptations of what it means to be president of the United States. Along the way he acquires a number of formidable enemies, among them Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In addition, powerful elements of organized crime have begun to talk about targeting the president and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.In the midst of a 1963 campaign trip to Texas, Kennedy is gunned down by an erratic young drifter named Lee Harvey Oswald. The former Marine Corps sharpshooter escapes the scene, only to be caught and shot dead while in police custody.The events leading up to the most notorious crime of the twentieth century are almost as shocking as the assassination itself.
Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign
Jonathan Allen - 2017
And of course she was supposed to win. How Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump is the tragic story of a sure thing gone off the rails. For every Comey revelation or hindsight acknowledgment about the electorate, no explanation of defeat can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary's campaign--the candidate herself. Through deep access to insiders from the top to the bottom of the campaign, political writers Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have reconstructed the key decisions and unseized opportunities, the well-intentioned misfires and the hidden thorns that turned a winnable contest into a devastating loss. Drawing on the authors' deep knowledge of Hillary from their previous book, the acclaimed biography HRC, Shattered will offer an object lesson in how Hillary herself made victory an uphill battle, how her difficulty articulating a vision irreparably hobbled her impact with voters, and how the campaign failed to internalize the lessons of populist fury from the hard-fought primary against Bernie Sanders. Moving blow-by-blow from the campaign's difficult birth through the bewildering terror of election night, Shattered tells an unforgettable story with urgent lessons both political and personal, filled with revelations that will change the way readers understand just what happened to America on November 8, 2016.
Mafia Kingfish
John H. Davis - 1988
Kennedy actually masterminded by a desperate mob boss? The House Select Committee on Assassinations seemed to agree; it named New Orleans Mafioso Carlos Marcello its prime suspect in 1979. Now, in Mafia Kingfish, John H. Davis reveals stunning new evidence of Marcello's complicity in the murders of both John and Robert Kennedy.
Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA and More Tell Us About Crime
Val McDermid - 2014
To the right listener, they tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died - and who killed them. Forensic scientists can unlock the mysteries of the past and help justice to be done using the messages left by a corpse, a crime scene or the faintest of human traces. Forensics uncovers the secrets of forensic medicine, drawing on interviews with top-level professionals, ground-breaking research and Val McDermid's own experience to lay bare the secrets of this fascinating science. And, along the way, she wonders at how maggots collected from a corpse can help determine time of death, how a DNA trace a millionth the size of a grain of salt can be used to convict a killer and how a team of young Argentine scientists led by a maverick American anthropologist uncovered the victims of a genocide.In her crime novels, Val McDermid has been solving complex crimes and confronting unimaginable evil for years. Now, she's looking at the people who do it for real, and real crime scenes. It's a journey that will take her to war zones, fire scenes and autopsy suites, and bring her into contact with extraordinary bravery and wickedness, as she traces the history of forensics from its earliest beginnings to the cutting-edge science of the modern day.
Killing JFK: 50 Years, 50 Lies -From the Warren Commission to Bill O’Reilly, A History of Deceit in the Kennedy Assassination
Lance Moore - 2013
Kennedy... and at last we have the unbiased facts, concisely-presented by a skilled, acclaimed author who is also a credible voice: an ordained Methodist minister. Dr. Moore presents over 200 source-notes supporting a compelling case that the death of President Kennedy involved more than a “lone nut” assassin. He marshals old and new evidence to prove that there was indeed a second sniper, positioned in front of the Presidential limousine, who fired the fatal head shot. Moore points up scores of glaring contradictions in the government’s own Warren Commission Report as he explains the greatest crime mystery of the last fifty years with riveting, engaging prose.
On the Trail of the Assassins
Jim Garrison - 1988
Ridiculed by the press, denounced by the FBI, and harassed by the CIA, he was tormented by those who clung fast to the idea of Oswald as villain. With his career on the line, Garrison persisted in the allegations no one wanted to believe—that factions of our government were behind it all.This is Jim Garrison’s story, the only man to ever successfully bring a conspirator to trial. This is also the story of pervasive subterfuge, the Dallas Police Department’s outright lies and deceptions, the Warren Commission’s blind omissions of facts, and the mysterious deaths of key witnesses just before testimony. Now, Garrison unveils the vicious plot that duped a nation and takes us clue by clue through the greatest conspiracy and cover-up of our time—the assassination of JFK.
The Letters of John F. Kennedy
Martin W. Sandler - 2013
Kennedy steered the nation away from the brink of nuclear war, initiated the first nuclear test ban treaty, created the Peace Corps, and launched America on its mission to the moon and beyond. JFK inspired a nation, particularly the massive generation of baby boomers, injecting hope and revitalizing faith in the American project.2013 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy's untimely death, a milestone to be marked by an avalanche of new books on his life and importance. Martin Sandler'sThe Letters of John F. Kennedywill stand out among them, as the only book that draws on letters from and to Kennedy, as collected at the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Drawn from more than two million letters on file at the library--many never before published--this project presents readers with a portrait of both Kennedy the politician and Kennedy the man, as well as the times he lived in.Letters to and from the likes of Martin Luther King Jr, Clare Booth Luce, Pearl Buck, John Wayne, Albert Schweitzer, Linus Pauling, Willy Brandt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Nikita Khruschev, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, a young John Kerry, and Ngo Dinh Diem are complemented by letters from ordinary citizens, schoolchildren, and concerned Americans. Each letter will be accompanied by lively and informative contextualization. Facsimiles of many letters will appear, along with photographs and other visual ephemera from the Kennedy Library and Museum.