Book picks similar to
Shards: A Young Vice Cop Investigates Her Darkest Case of Meth Addiction—Her Own by Allison Moore
non-fiction
memoir
memoirs
nonfiction
How to Murder Your Life
Cat Marnell - 2017
After a privileged yet emotionally-starved childhood in Washington, she became hooked on ADHD medication provided by her psychiatrist father. This led to a dependence on Xanax and other prescription drugs at boarding school, and she experimented with cocaine, ecstasy… whatever came her way. By 26 she was a talented ‘doctor shopper’ who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists into giving her never-ending prescriptions; her life had become a twisted merry-go-round of parties and pills at night, and trying to hold down a high profile job at Condé Naste during the day.With a complete lack of self-pity and an honesty that is almost painful, Cat describes the crazed euphoria, terrifying comedowns and the horrendous guilt she feels lying to those who try to help her. Writing in a voice that is utterly magnetic – prompting comparisons to Brett Easton Ellis and Charles Bukowski – she captures something essential both about her generation and our times. Profoundly divisive and controversial, How to Murder Your Life is a unforgettable, charged account of a young female addict, so close to throwing her entire life away.
The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI's Original Mindhunter
John E. Douglas - 2019
In this riveting work of true crime, he spotlights four of the most diabolical criminals he’s confronted, interviewed and learned from. Going deep into each man’s life and crimes, he outlines the factors that led them to murder and how he used his interrogation skills to expose their means, motives, and true evil. Like the hit Netflix show, The Killer Across the Table is centered around Douglas’ unique interrogation and profiling process. With his longtime collaborator Mark Olshaker, Douglas recounts the chilling encounters with these four killers as he experienced them—revealing for the first time his profile methods in detail. Going step by step through his interviews, Douglas explains how he connects each killer’s crimes to the specific conversation, and contrasts these encounters with those of other deadly criminals to show what he learns from each one. In the process, he returns to other famous cases, killers and interviews that have shaped his career, describing how the knowledge he gained from those exchanges helped prepare him for these.A glimpse into the mind of a man who has pierced the heart of human darkness, The Killer Across the Table unlocks the ultimate mystery of depravity and the techniques and approaches that have countered evil in the name of justice.
Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead
Frank Meeink - 2010
Frank’s violent childhood in South Philadelphia primed him to hate, while addiction made him easy prey for a small group of skinhead gang recruiters. By 16 he had become one of the most notorious skinhead gang leaders on the East Coast and by 18 he was doing hard time. Teamed up with African-American players in a prison football league, Frank learned to question his hatred, and after being paroled he defected from the white supremacy movement and began speaking on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League. A story of fighting the demons of hatred and addiction, Frank's downfall and ultimate redemption has the power to open hearts and change lives.
Funny, You Don't Look Autistic: A Comedian's Guide to Life on the Spectrum
Michael McCreary - 2019
Like many others on the autism spectrum, 20-something stand-up comic Michael McCreary has been told by more than a few well-meaning folks that he doesn't "look" autistic. But, as he's quick to point out in this memoir, autism "looks" different for just about everyone with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Diagnosed with ASD at age five, McCreary got hit with the performance bug not much later. During a difficult time in junior high, he started journaling, eventually turning his pain e into something empowering--and funny. He scored his first stand-up gig at age 14, and hasn't looked back. An #OwnVoices memoir breaks down what it's like to live with autism for readers on and off the spectrum.
If You Feel Too Much: Thoughts on Things Found and Lost and Hoped For
Jamie Tworkowski - 2015
The piece was so hauntingly beautiful that it quickly went viral, giving birth to a non-profit organization of the same name. Now, To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA) is an internationally recognized leader in suicide prevention and a source of hope, encouragement, and support for people worldwide.If You Feel Too Much is a celebration of hope, wonder, and what it means to be human. From personal stories of struggling on days most people celebrate to words of strength and encouragement in moments of loss, the essays in this book invite readers to believe that it’s okay to admit to pain and okay to ask for help. If You Feel Too Much is an important book from one of this generation’s most important voices.
Killing for You: A Brave Soldier, a Beautiful Dancer, and a Shocking Double Murder
Keith Elliot Greenberg - 2017
A KILLER PLOT Twenty-six-year-old actor Daniel Wozniak was unemployed, facing eviction, and deep in debt for his upcoming wedding. So he devised a diabolical plan: He asked his neighbor Sam Herr, a young war veteran, to help him move some things into the attic of an empty theater. There, Wozniak shot Herr twice in the head before taking his ATM card and cell phone. Hours later,Wozniak performed on stage with his fiancée in a local production of the musical Nine, convinced that he had gotten away with murder… A DRAMATIC LAST ACT Wozniak dismembered his victim’s body and hid the pieces. Then he lured Herr’s college friend Juri “Julie” Kibuishi to Herr’s apartment and shot her twice in the head. The police immediately declared Herr a prime suspect—just as Wozniak had planned. But when Herr was declared missing, and his ATM withdrawals led authorities to Wozniak at his bachelor party, the actor was forced to play the role of a lifetime in a shocking murder investigation that would be his greatest—and final—performance… Includes 8 pages of photos
Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered: The Definitive How-To Guide
Karen Kilgariff - 2019
Includes special bonus material!Sharing never-before-heard stories ranging from their struggles with depression, eating disorders, and addiction, Karen and Georgia irreverently recount their biggest mistakes and deepest fears, reflecting on the formative life events that shaped them into two of the most followed voices in the nation.In Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, Karen and Georgia focus on the importance of self-advocating and valuing personal safety over being ‘nice’ or ‘helpful.’ They delve into their own pasts, true crime stories, and beyond to discuss meaningful cultural and societal issues with fierce empathy and unapologetic frankness.
Slow Death
Jim Fielder - 2001
Transcripts of audio and videotapes are featured, as well as over 16 pages of shocking photos.
Dying for Daddy: The True Story of a Family's Worst Nightmare
Carlton Smith - 1998
On a picturesque street in Sacramento County, California, three healthy saplings stand side by side. But what they symbolize are the deaths of three innocent people—two of them children. The man who took their lives, then planted trees in their honor, was their own husband and father. Hearts went out to Jack Barron when his wife, Irene, died mysteriously in her sleep. Soon after, his two young children were also found dead in their beds. Barron claimed they suffered from the same rare genetic disorder as their mother. But when his fifty-two-year-old mother died, also of asphyxiation in her sleep, law enforcement officials finally took action: The fatal pattern was impossible to ignore. Was this “devoted” father really a heartless murderer? Did he suffer from a bizarre syndrome known as Munchausen by proxy, whereby a parent kills a child to gain sympathy? With firsthand interviews and exclusive inside information, author Carlton Smith paints a chilling portrait of a man driven to commit the most unspeakable of acts.
True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall
Mark Salzman - 2003
What he found so moved and astonished him that he began to teach there regularly. In voices of indelible emotional presence, the boys write about what led them to crime and about the lives that stretch ahead of them behind bars. We see them coming to terms with their crime-ridden pasts and searching for a reason to believe in their future selves. Insightful, comic, honest and tragic, True Notebooks is an object lesson in the redemptive power of writing.
Writing My Wrongs
Shaka Senghor - 2013
He was a young drug dealer with a quick temper who had been hardened by what he experienced selling drugs on the unforgiving streets of Detroit. For years, as he served out his sentence for second degree murder, he blamed everybody else but himself for the decision he made to shoot on that fateful night. It wasn't until Shaka started writing about the pain from his childhood and his life on the streets that he was able to get at the root of the anger that led him to prison. Through the power of journaling, he accepted responsibility for his violent behavior and now uses his experience to help others avoid the same path.
Shot in the Heart
Mikal Gilmore - 1994
Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a blacksheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder. Mikal, burdened with the guilt of being his father's favorite and the shame of being Gary's brother, gracefully and painfully relates a murder tale "from inside the house where murder is born... a house that, in some ways, [he has] never been able to leave." Shot in the Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence, and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long lineage of ruin. Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged.
Corruption Officer: From Jail Guard to Perpetrator Inside Rikers Island
Gary Heyward - 2012
For the Harlem-born ex-Marine, being an officer of the law was the ticket he'd been waiting for to move up from a low-wage security job and out of the Polo Ground Projects in New York City—and take his mother with him.Heyward was warned of the temptations he'd encounter as a new officer, but when faced with financial hardship, he suddenly found himself unable to resist the income generated from selling contraband to inmates. In his distinctive voice, Heyward takes you on a journey inside the walls of Rikers Island, showing how he teamed up with various inmates and other officers to develop a system that allowed him to profit from selling drugs inside the jail.Corruption Officer is a jarring exposé of a man having lived on both sides of the law, a rare insider's look at a corrupt city jail, and a testament to the lengths we'll go when our backs are against the wall.
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice
Bill BrowderBill Browder - 2014
It continued in Moscow, where Browder made his fortune heading the largest investment fund in Russia after the Soviet Union's collapse. But when he exposed the corrupt oligarchs who were robbing the companies in which he was investing, Vladimir Putin turned on him and, in 2005, had him expelled from Russia. In 2007, a group of law enforcement officers raided Browder's offices in Moscow and stole $230 million of taxes that his fund's companies had paid to the Russian government. Browder's attorney Sergei Magnitsky investigated the incident and uncovered a sprawling criminal enterprise. A month after Sergei testified against the officials involved, he was arrested and thrown into pre-trial detention, where he was tortured for a year. On November 16, 2009, he was led to an isolation chamber, handcuffed to a bedrail, and beaten to death by eight guards in full riot gear. Browder glimpsed the heart of darkness, and it transformed his life: he embarked on an unrelenting quest for justice in Sergei's name, exposing the towering cover-up that leads right up to Putin. A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world.
Being Lolita: A Memoir
Alisson Wood - 2020
NYU MFA candidate and Goldwater Fellow Alisson Wood's BEING LOLITA, a memoir of the author's two-year relationship with her high school English teacher who seduced her by teaching her Lolita, a story he had her believe was the greatest love story of our time, which she only later learned was anything but, and how revisiting Nabokov's masterpiece allowed her to grapple with what it means to have been an unreliable narrator of her own life, exploring our shifting views of consent, male dominance, and self-perception, to Sarah Murphy at Flatiron Books.