Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City


Tanya Talaga - 2017
    An inquest was called and four recommendations were made to prevent another tragedy. None of those recommendations were applied.More than a quarter of a century later, from 2000 to 2011, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The seven were hundreds of miles away from their families, forced to leave home and live in a foreign and unwelcoming city. Five were found dead in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior, below a sacred Indigenous site. Jordan Wabasse, a gentle boy and star hockey player, disappeared into the minus twenty degrees Celsius night. The body of celebrated artist Norval Morrisseau’s grandson, Kyle, was pulled from a river, as was Curran Strang’s. Robyn Harper died in her boarding-house hallway and Paul Panacheese inexplicably collapsed on his kitchen floor. Reggie Bushie’s death finally prompted an inquest, seven years after the discovery of Jethro Anderson, the first boy whose body was found in the water.Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, award-winning investigative journalist Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this small northern city that has come to manifest Canada’s long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities.

Circle of Six: The True Story of New York's Most Notorious Cop Killer and the Cop Who Risked Everything to Catch Him


Randy Jurgensen - 2006
    It details Randy Jurgensen's determined effort to bring to justice the murderer of Patrolman Phillip Cardillo, who was shot and killed inside Harlem's Mosque #7 in 1972, in the midst of an allout assault on the NYPD from the Black Liberation Army. The New York of this era was a place not unlike the Wild West, in which cops and criminals shot it out on a daily basis.Despite the mayhem on the streets and the Machiavellian corridors of Mayor Lindsay's City Hall, Detective Jurgensen singlehandedly took on the Black Liberation Army, the Nation of Islam, NYPD brass, and City Hall, capturing Cardillo's killer, Lewis 17X Dupree. He broke the case with an unlikely accomplice, Foster 2X Thomas, a member of the Nation of Islam who became Jurgensen's witness. The relationship they formed during the time before trial gave each of the two men a greater perspective of the two sides in the street war and changed them forever. In the end, Jurgensen had to settle for a conviction on other charges, and Dupree served a number of years. The murder case is still officially unsolved. In 2006 the NYPD reopened the case, and it is once again an active investigation with full media attention.The book has received acclaim from current New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, as well as former Commissioner William Bratton.

21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality


Bob Joseph - 2018
    Bob Joseph’s book comes at a key time in the reconciliation process, when awareness from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities is at a crescendo. Joseph explains how Indigenous Peoples can step out from under the Indian Act and return to self-government, self-determination, and self-reliance—and why doing so would result in a better country for every Canadian. He dissects the complex issues around truth and reconciliation, and clearly demonstrates why learning about the Indian Act’s cruel, enduring legacy is essential for the country to move toward true reconciliation.

Getting Life: An Innocent Man's 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace


Michael Morton - 2014
    He lost his wife, his son, and his freedom. This is the story of how Michael Morton finally got justice—and a second chance at life.On August 13, 1986, just one day after his thirty-second birthday, Michael Morton went to work at his usual time. By the end of the day, his wife Christine had been savagely bludgeoned to death in the couple’s bed—and the Williamson County Sherriff’s office in Texas wasted no time in pinning her murder on Michael, despite an absolute lack of physical evidence. Michael was swiftly sentenced to life in prison for a crime he had not committed.He mourned his wife from a prison cell. He lost all contact with their son. Life, as he knew it, was over.It would take twenty-five years—and thousands of hours of effort on the part of Michael’s lawyers, including the team at the New York-based Innocence Project—before DNA evidence was brought to light that would ultimately set Michael free. The evidence had been collected only days after the murder—but was never investigated.Drawing on his recollections, court transcripts, and more than one thousand pages of personal journals he wrote in prison, Michael recounts the hidden police reports about an unidentified van parked near his house that were never pursued; the treasure trove of evidence, including a bandana with the killer’s DNA on it, that was never introduced in court; the call from a neighboring county reporting the attempted use of his wife’s credit card (a message that was received, recorded, and never returned by local police); and ultimately, how he battled his way through the darkness to become a free man once again.Getting Life is an extraordinary story of unfathomable tragedy, grave injustice, and the strength and courage it takes to find forgiveness.

The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers


Michael Newton - 1990
    From Jack the Ripper to Ted Bundy, the encyclopedia gives readers an overview of what is undoubtedly the most macabre and fascinating branch of crime and modern criminology.

Find Me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum


Kennedy Odede - 2015
    With a Foreword by Nicholas Kristof.This is the story of two young people from completely different worlds: Kennedy Odede from Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, and Jessica Posner from Denver, Colorado. Kennedy foraged for food, lived on the street, and taught himself to read with old newspapers. When an American volunteer gave him the work of Mandela, Garvey, and King, teenaged Kennedy decided he was going to change his life and his community. He bought a soccer ball and started a youth empowerment group he called Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO). Then in 2007, Wesleyan undergraduate Jessica Posner spent a semester abroad in Kenya working with SHOFCO. Breaking all convention, she decided to live in Kibera with Kennedy, and they fell in love.Their connection persisted, and Jessica helped Kennedy to escape political violence and fulfill his lifelong dream of an education, at Wesleyan University.The alchemy of their remarkable union has drawn the support of community members and celebrities alike—The Clintons, Mia Farrow, and Nicholas Kristof are among their fans—and their work has changed the lives of many of Kibera’s most vulnerable population: its girls. Jess and Kennedy founded Kibera’s first tuition-free school for girls, a large, bright blue building, which stands as a bastion of hope in what once felt like a hopeless place. But Jessica and Kennedy are just getting started—they have expanded their model to connect essential services like health care, clean water, and economic empowerment programs. They’ve opened an identical project in Mathare, Kenya’s second largest slum, and intend to expand their remarkably successful program for change.Ultimately this is a love story about a fight against poverty and hopelessness, the transformation made possible by a true love, and the power of young people to have a deep impact on the world.

A People's History of the United States


Howard Zinn - 1980
    Zinn portrays a side of American history that can largely be seen as the exploitation and manipulation of the majority by rigged systems that hugely favor a small aggregate of elite rulers from across the orthodox political parties.A People's History has been assigned as reading in many high schools and colleges across the United States. It has also resulted in a change in the focus of historical work, which now includes stories that previously were ignoredLibrary Journal calls Howard Zinn’s book “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those…whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.”

A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green


Thomas Cahill - 2009
    Arrested at the age of eighteen in the fatal shooting of a man during a robbery outside a Houston convenience store, Green may have taken part in the robbery but always insisted that he did not pull the trigger. The jury, which had no African Americans on it, sentenced him to death. Despite obvious errors in the legal procedures and the protests of the victim’s family, he spent the last twelve years of his life on Death Row. When Cahill found himself in Texas in December 2003, he visited Dominique at the request of Judge Sheila Murphy, who was working on the appeal of the case. In Dominique, he encountered a level of goodness, peace, and enlightenment that few human beings ever attain. Cahill joined the fierce fight for Dominique’s life, even enlisting Dominique’s hero, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to make an historic visit to Dominique and to plead publicly for mercy. Cahill was so profoundly moved by Dominique’s extraordinary life that he was compelled to tell the tragic story of his unjust death at the hands of the state. A Saint on Death Row will introduce you to a young man whose history, innate goodness, and final days you will never forget. It also shines a necessary light on America’s racist and deeply flawed legal system. A Saint on Death Row is an absorbing, sobering, and deeply spiritual story that illuminates the moral imperatives too often ignored in the headlong quest for justice.

Those Who Wander: America’s Lost Street Kids


Vivian Ho - 2019
    But they also shed light on a more complex issue. The killers were three drifters scrounging for a living among a burgeoning counterculture population. Soon this community of runaways and transients became vulnerable scapegoats of a modern witch hunt. The supposedly progressive residents of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, only two generations removed from the Summer of Love, now feared all of society’s outcasts as threats.In Those Who Wander, Vivian Ho delves deep into a rising subculture that’s changing the very fabric of her city and all of urban America. Moving beyond the disheartening statistics, she gives voices to these young people—victims of abuse, failed foster care, mental illness, and drug addiction. She also doesn’t ignore the threat they pose to themselves and to others as a dangerous dark side emerges. With alarming urgency, she asks what can be done to save the next generation of America’s vagabond youth.

A Good Month for Murder: The Inside Story of a Homicide Squad


Del Quentin Wilber - 2015
    After a quiet couple of months, all hell breaks loose: suddenly every detective in the squad is scrambling to solve one shooting and stabbing after another. Meanwhile, the entire unit is obsessed with a stone-cold "red ball," a high-profile case involving a seventeen-year-old honor student attacked by a gunman who kicked down the door to her house and shot her in her bed.Murder is the police investigator's ultimate crucible: to solve a killing, a detective must speak for the dead. More than any recent book, A Good Month for Murder shows what it takes to succeed when the stakes couldn't possibly be higher.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet


Jeffrey D. Sachs - 2008
    Sachs-one of the world's most respected economists and the author of The New York Times bestseller The End of Poverty- offers an urgent assessment of the environmental degradation, rapid population growth, and extreme poverty that threaten global peace and prosperity. Through crystalline examination of hard facts, Sachs predicts the cascade of crises that awaits this crowded planet-and presents a program of sustainable development and international cooperation that will correct this dangerous course. Few luminaries anywhere on the planet are as schooled in this daunting subject as Sachs, and this is the vital product of his experience and wisdom.

The Most Evil Women in History


Shelley Klein - 2003
    Parricide, fratricide and, most terrible of all, infanticide; murder under trust; serial murder, including the stalking and killing of men; torture, persecution, massacre and judicial murder; sexually motivated killings; murders for gain or to conceal other crimes- all these and others are detailed in this fascinating study of the manifestation of true evil in women over some 2,000 years. From Roman empresses to jealous daughters and bored housewives, they have all been responsible for terrible crimes.

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.

Saved by Her Enemy: An Iraqi woman's journey from the heart of war to the heartland of America


Don Teague - 2010
    Her understanding of the world, of her place in it, and of the United States had been steeped in the culture of Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein. Yet, in the midst of insurgents attempting to kidnap and kill her, she found herself on the receiving end of lifesaving help from those she considered her enemies.Rafraf suddenly finds herself living with a Christian family in the Bible Belt of America. Nothing had prepared her for this new reality—the life of a college student in a vastly foreign culture, in a community as far from her expectations as she could have imagined, and in a family that opens their hearts to enfold her.Saved by Her Enemy is a riveting journey of two very different people from opposite sides of the world, of faith, of experience, and of expectations. The dramatic intersection of their lives and their journey together is an inspiration to those who have ever felt there was more to life than the world they knew. A young Iraqi woman, an American war correspondent, and a true tale of friendship, faith, and family against the backdrop of war and the collision of culturesThis is a story of a very unlikely friendship—between American war correspondent Don Teague and Rafraf Barrak, an Iraqi college girl who won a job as a translator for NBC during the early months of violence in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq.While covering a story together, the two were nearly killed by a bomb, an experience that created a bond between them that led them down a path neither could have imagined.What follows is a story of transformation, as Rafraf—from a devout Muslim family—becomes the target of terrorist threats to kidnap and murder her. Don and his fellow correspondents mobilize to help save her life and suddenly Rafraf finds herself on the receiving end of an offer for safety and a new life in the United States. Dramatically transplanted from the streets of Iraq to the Bible Belt of middle America, Rafraf finds everything that she knew—or thought she knew—about herself, her values, her world, even faith and family, turned upside down. Meanwhile, Don; his wife, Kiki; and their children discover they’ve embarked on an adventure with Rafraf that reshapes their lives. This captivating story inspires us all to join Don and Rafraf in discovering that there is far more to life than the world we know.

War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony


Nelson A. Denis - 2015
    Violence swept through the island: assassins were sent to kill President Harry Truman, gunfights roared in eight towns, police stations and post offices were burned down. In order to suppress this uprising, the US Army deployed thousands of troops and bombarded two towns, marking the first time in history that the US government bombed its own citizens.Nelson A. Denis tells this powerful story through the controversial life of Pedro Albizu Campos, who served as the president of the Nationalist Party. A lawyer, chemical engineer, and the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard Law School, Albizu Campos was imprisoned for twenty-five years and died under mysterious circumstances. By tracing his life and death, Denis shows how the journey of Albizu Campos is part of a larger story of Puerto Rico and US colonialism.Through oral histories, personal interviews, eyewitness accounts, congressional testimony, and recently declassified FBI files, War Against All Puerto Ricans tells the story of a forgotten revolution and its context in Puerto Rico's history, from the US invasion in 1898 to the modern-day struggle for self-determination. Denis provides an unflinching account of the gunfights, prison riots, political intrigue, FBI and CIA covert activity, and mass hysteria that accompanied this tumultuous period in Puerto Rican history.