Face to Face with Evil: Conversations with Ian Brady


Chris Cowley - 2010
    With his co-conspirator, Myra Hindley, he perpetrated the Moors Murders in which five children were abducted, assaulted, and murdered. Dr. Chris Cowley is a forensic psychologist who is in the unique position of having exclusive access to Brady. For six years, he has been conducting groundbreaking research by corresponding with and visiting him in prison. By gaining his trust, Cowley has been able to take an unrivalled look inside the mind of a serial killer. In this in-depth and revealing book, Dr. Cowley reproduces letters and transcripts of conversations with Brady that have never been published before. Using this fresh perspective and original material, he is able to shed new light on what went wrong in Brady’s formative years to set him on a path of crime, how Hindley became the lethal factor that started Brady’s murder cycle, as well as revealing Brady’s unflinching account of being caught and convicted of serial murder and his thoughts and emotions concerning Hindley as he moves into his eighth year on hunger strike. This important study provides information that will prove essential in our understanding of the psychology of serial killers. By broadening our knowledge of these complex issues, we can increase the likelihood of catching murderers and perhaps even prevent their terrible crimes from taking place.

Heaven and Mel (Kindle Single)


Joe Eszterhas - 2012
    "Heaven and Mel" is Eszterhas's explosive, unabridged, no-holds-barred account. It is a Hollywood story but it's not. It is the story of love and hatred, of anti-Semitism and fathers and sons, and of a movie star's tragic sexual obsession. It is the story of God and the Devil, devastating but often hilarious. It is Joe Eszterhas at his best: two-fisted, movingly sensitive, always outrageous.

What is Culture For?


The School of Life - 2018
    Music, film, literature and the visual arts enjoy high prestige and are viewed by many as getting close to the meaning of life. But what is culture really for? This book proposes that works of culture were all made, in one way or another, with the idea of improving the way we live. The book connects a range of cultural masterpieces with our own dilemmas and pains around love, work and society, and invites us to see culture as a resource with which to address the complex agonies of being human. It provides us with enduring keys to unlocking culture as a way of transforming our lives.

Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere


Jan Morris - 2001
    This city on the Adriatic has always tantalized Jan Morris with its moodiness and changeability. After visiting Trieste for more than half a century, she has come to see it as a touchstone for her interests and preoccupations: cities, seas, empires. It has even come to reflect her own life in its loves, disillusionments, and memories. Her meditation on the place is characteristically layered with history and sprinkled with stories of famous visitors from James Joyce to Sigmund Freud. A lyrical travelogue, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is also superb cultural history and the culmination of a singular career-"an elegant and bittersweet farewell" (Boston Globe).

Notorious C.O.P.: The Inside Story of the Tupac, Biggie, and Jam Master Jay Investigations from NYPD's First "Hip-Hop Cop"


Derrick Parker - 2000
     Always straddling the fence between "po-po" and NYPD outsider, Derrick threatened police tradition to try to get the cases solved. He was the first detective to interview an informant offering a detailed account of Biggie Smalls's murder. He protected one of the only surviving eyewitnesses to the Jam Master Jay murder and knows the identity of the killers as well as the motivation behind the shooting. "Notorious C.O.P. "reveals hip-hop crimes that never made the paper--like the robbing of Foxy Brown and the first Hot 97 shooting--and answers some lingering questions about murders that have remained unsolved. The book that both the NYPD and the hip-hop community don't want you to read, "Notorious C.O.P. "is the first insider look at the real links between crime and hip-hop and the inefficiencies that have left some of the most widely publicized murders in entertainment history unsolved.

And It Don't Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years


Raquel Cepeda - 2004
    This shift was triggered by the release of the Sugarhill Gang's single, Rapper's Delight. Not only did it usher rap music into the mainstream's consciousness, it brought us the word "hip-hop." And It Don't Stop, edited by the award winning journalist Raquel Cepeda, with a foreword from Nelson George is a collection of the best articles the hip-hop generation has produced. It captures the indelible moments in hip-hop's history since 1979 and will be the centerpiece of the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration. This book epitomizes the media's response by taking the reader on an engaging and critical journey, including the very first pieces written about hip-hop for publications like The Village Voice--controversial articles that created rifts between church and state, the artist and journalist, and articles that recorded the rise and tragic fall of the art form's appointed heroes, such as Tupac Shakur, Eazy-E, and the Notorious B.I.G. The list of contributors includes Toure, Kevin Powell, dream hampton, Harry Allen, Cheo Hodari Coker, Greg Tate, Bill Adler, Hilton Als, Danyel Smith, and Joan Morgan.

Leaning Into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West


Linda M. Hasselstrom - 1997
    Here are reflections on cowboys real and fake, tractor-driving lessons, outhouses, and the uses of baling wire; here are ranch marriages, enduring and not; family legacies; loss and renewal. Westerners will find their friends and neighbors in these pages; others will find a vivid portrait of the women of a region all too often mythologized.

Ladybird, Collected


Meg Heriford - 2020
    Essays from a tiny diner in the middle of the country.These are stories of love and adaptation at the broad intersection of commerce and community, and of how a pandemic changed everything and nothing about us.

The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays


Chinua Achebe - 2009
    The celebrated author of Things Fall Apart delivers his first book in more than 20 years--a new collection of autobiographical essays that offers a vivid portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria and inhabiting its middle ground.

Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives


Holly Gleason - 2017
    From Maybelle Carter to Dolly Parton, k.d. lang to Taylor Swift—these artists provided pivot points, truths, and doses of courage for women writers at every stage of their lives. Whether it’s Rosanne Cash eulogizing June Carter Cash or a seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift considering the golden glimmer of another precocious superstar, Brenda Lee, it’s the humanity beneath the music that resonates.Here are deeply personal essays from award-winning writers on femme fatales, feminists, groundbreakers, and truth tellers. Acclaimed historian Holly George Warren captures the spark of the rockabilly sensation Wanda Jackson; Entertainment Weekly’s Madison Vain considers Loretta Lynn’s girl-power anthem “The Pill”; and rocker Grace Potter embraces Linda Ronstadt’s unabashed visual and musical influence. Patty Griffin acts like a balm on a post-9/11 survivor on the run; Emmylou Harris offers a gateway through paralyzing grief; and Lucinda Williams proves that greatness is where you find it.Part history, part confessional, and part celebration of country, Americana, and bluegrass and the women who make them, Woman Walk the Line is a very personal collection of essays from some of America’s most intriguing women writers. It speaks to the ways in which artists mark our lives at different ages and in various states of grace and imperfection—and ultimately how music transforms not just the person making it, but also the listener.

Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan


Bruce Feiler - 1991
    With warmth and candor, Bruce Feiler recounts the year he spent as a teacher in a small rural town. Beginning with a ritual outdoor bath and culminating in an all-night trek to the top of Mt. Fuji, Feiler teaches his students about American culture, while they teach him everything from how to properly address an envelope to how to date a Japanese girl.

Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture


Claude Lévi-Strauss - 1978
    Only now are we coming to a fuller appreciation of the nature and role of myth in human history. In these five lectures originally prepared for Canadian radio, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers, in brief summations, the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding. The lectures begin with a discussion of the historical split between mythology and science and the evidence that mythic levels of understanding are being reintegrated in our approach to knowledge. In an extension of this theme, Professor Lévi-Strauss analyzes what we have called “primitive thinking” and discusses some universal features of human mythology. The final two lectures outline the functional relationship between mythology and history and the structural relationship between mythology and music.

The Soul Would Have No Rainbow if the Eyes Had No Tears and Other Native American Proverbs


Guy A. Zona - 1994
    He who serves his fellows is the greatest of all. If a man is as wise as a serpent, he can be as gentle as a dove. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. A sin against a neighbor is an offense against the Great Spirit.

Border-Line Personalities: A New Generation of Latinas Dish on Sex, Sass, and Cultural Shifting


Michelle Herrera Mulligan - 2004
    Also, never has there been a new generation of Latinas so ready to say what they mean and even criticize the Latina generation that preceded them. Until now.In Border-Line Personalities, twenty writers share their poignant and wickedly funny stories about fighting with their mothers, struggling with speaking Spanish, and dealing with the men who've done them wrong, among a myriad of other topics. In the end, each essay encompasses a different point of view, lending credence to the theory that no one can label any one item, idea, or person more Latina than the other.Questions posed to Latinas of all ages in Border-Line Personalities:Why do many of us often feel more American than Latina?How important is Spanish, really?Do we all really fit under one cultural umbrella?When thinking about having children, do we really have to consider being stay-at-home moms as most of us were raised to believe was law, or can Latinas even consider the possibility of raising children while working?What do we do when we fall in love with someone (male or female) outside our culture?

Sincerely, X


June Cohen - 2017
    TED and Audible present, Sincerely, X, featuring speakers whose ideas deserve to be heard but whose identities must remain hidden. From lifesaving rituals to the unexpected gift of a prison sentence to the consequence of physician burnout; you won’t know the storyteller’s name, but their story may change you forever.As an Audio Show - free for members - when you add Sincerely, X to your library, you'll get all 10 episodes, each with a runtime of about 25 minutes.