Cecil Beaton and Katharine Hepburn were her godparents. Tracy was named after Katherine Hepburn’s character, Tracy Lord, in the classic film, The Philadelphia Story. These stylish showbiz people were role models for Tracy, who became a clotheshorse at a young age. Tracy’s father, Kenneth Tynan, was a powerful theater critic and writer for the Evening Standard, The Observer, and The New Yorker. Her mother was Elaine Dundy, a successful novelist and biographer, whose works have recently been revived by The New York Review of Books. Both of Tracy’s parents, particularly her father, were known as much for what they wore as what they wrote. In the Tynans’ social circles, style was essential, and Tracy had firm ideas about her own clothing for as long as she can remember. Shopping was an art passed down through the family; though shopping trips with her mother were so traumatic that Tracy started shopping on her own when she was fourteen. When Tracy started writing about her life she found that clothing was the focus of many of her stories. She recalls her father’s dandy attire and her mother’s Pucci dresses, as well as her parents’ rancorous marriage and divorce, her father’s prodigious talents and celebrity lifestyle, and her mother’s lifelong struggle with addiction. She tackles issues big and small using clothes as an entrée—relationships, marriage, children, stepchildren, blended families, her parent’s decline and deaths, and her work as a costume designer are all recounted with humor, with insight, and with the special joy that can only come from finding the perfect outfit.

    What he found in the ruins of Tikrit, one of the last barriers between ISIS and Baghdad, was a covert alliance of women, embedded against ISIS and fronted by an Iraqi named Wahida, acting as unofficial spies for the US and coalition forces. With her entire family wiped out by ISIS, Wahida has been waging a war of her own—she recruits from the divorce courts of Iraq to find women willing to pose as wives under ISIS rule. The result: air strikes that have liquidated top ISIS figures—and civilians.The Widow’s Network reveals a world where battle lines don’t exist, where risks are incalculable, and where everyday women are playing a major role in defeating one of the most depraved and destructive forces of our time.

    Two years later, police found a boy abandoned outside a variety store in New Jersey. The FBI tracked down Dora Fronczak, the kidnapped infant’s mother, and she identified the abandoned boy as her son. The family spent the next fifty years believing they were whole again—but Paul was always unsure about his true identity. Then, four years ago—spurred on by the birth of his first child, Emma Faith—Paul took a DNA test. The test revealed that he was definitely not Paul Fronczak. From that moment on, Paul has been on a tireless mission to find the man whose life he’s been living—and to discover who abandoned him, and why. Poignant and inspiring, The Foundling is a story about a child lost and a faith found, about the permanence of families and the bloodlines that define you, and about the emotional toll of both losing your identity and rediscovering who you truly are.

    Previous books and films, including the brilliant 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, have emphasized the supposed glamour of America's most notorious criminal couple, thus contributing to ongoing mythology. The real story is completely different -- and far more fascinating.In Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, bestselling author Jeff Guinn combines exhaustive research with surprising, newly discovered material to tell the real tale of two kids from a filthy Dallas slum who fell in love and then willingly traded their lives for a brief interlude of excitement and, more important, fame. Their timing could not have been better -- the Barrow Gang pulled its first heist in 1932 when most Americans, reeling from the Great Depression, were desperate for escapist entertainment. Thanks to newsreels, true crime magazines, and new-fangled wire services that transmitted scandalous photos of Bonnie smoking a cigar to every newspaper in the nation, the Barrow Gang members almost instantly became household names on a par with Charles Lindbergh, Jack Dempsey, and Babe Ruth. In the minds of the public, they were cool, calculating bandits who robbed banks and killed cops with equal impunity.Nothing could have been further from the truth. Clyde and Bonnie were perhaps the most inept crooks ever, and their two-year crime spree was as much a reign of error as it was of terror. Lacking the sophistication to plot robberies of big-city banks, the Barrow Gang preyed mostly on small mom-and-pop groceries and service stations. Even at that, they often came up empty-handed and were reduced to breaking into gum machines for meal money. Both were crippled, Clyde from cutting off two of his toes while in prison and Bonnie from a terrible car crash caused by Clyde's reckless driving. Constantly on the run from the law, they lived like animals, camping out in their latest stolen car, bathing in creeks, and dining on cans of cold beans and Vienna sausages. Yet theirs was a genuine love story. Their devotion to each other was as real as their overblown reputation as criminal masterminds was not.Go Down Together has it all -- true romance, rebellion against authority, bullets flying, cars crashing, and, in the end, a dramatic death at the hands of a celebrity lawman hired to hunt them down. Thanks in great part to surviving Barrow and Parker family members and collectors of criminal memorabilia who provided Jeff Guinn with access to never-before-published material, we finally have the real story of Bonnie and Clyde and their troubled times, delivered with cinematic sweep and unprecedented insight by a masterful storyteller.

    When their car broke down in El Paso, Texas, they made the most of being stranded by staying at a posh hotel and crossing the border to Juarez for shopping, dining, and drinking. A week later, their near-nude bodies were found in the Chihuahuan Desert. Though they had been seen on occasion with two mystery men, there were no clues as to why they had apparently been abducted, tortured for days, and shot execution style. El Paso sheriff Chris Fox, a lawman right out of central casting, engaged in a turf war with the Texas Rangers and local officials that hampered the investigation. But the victims’ detours had placed them in the path of a Nazi spy ring operating from the West Coast to Latin America through a deep-cover portal at El Paso. The sleeper cell was run by spymasters at the German consulate in San Francisco. In 1938, only the inner circle of the Roosevelt White House and a few FBI agents were aware of the extent to which German agents had infiltrated American industry. Fetch the Devil is the first narrative account of this still officially unsolved case. Based on long forgotten archives and recently declassified FBI files, Richmond paints a convincing portrait of a sheriff’s dogged investigation into a baffling murder, the international spy ring that orchestrated it, and America on the brink of another world war.

    Running from the shipwreck of her glamorous and unstable childhood with a volatile mother, Wendy Lawless landed in the center of it all. With an open heart and a thrift store wardrobe, Wendy navigated this demi-monde of jaded punk rockers, desperate actors, pulsing parties, and unexpected run-ins with her own past as she made every mistake of youth, looked for love in all the wrong places, and eventually learned how to grow up on her own.With the same “biting humor” (People) that made her “powerful” (USA TODAY) and “illuminating and inspiring” (Reader’s Digest) New York Times bestseller Chanel Bonfire so captivating, Wendy turns her brutally honest and often hilarious spotlight on herself, recounting her tumultuous and giddy twenties trying to make it in the creative underbelly of New York City, all the while searching for love, a paying job, and occasionally, a free meal.

    The power to control law enforcement, politicians at the highest levels, the judicial system as a whole. To have what you want when you want it, whatever it is. All you have to do is kill someone . . . before someone kills you. MEMBERS of THE CIRCLE don’t have to imagine such a life. They live it. The liberation of being both hunter and hunted. The salvation that comes with such freedom. A chance to feel truly alive. A chance to savor each precious moment. Because in THE CIRCLE any moment could be your last. DOUGLAS GOODWIN isn’t rich. He isn’t powerful. What could the sacred society of THE CIRCLE possibly want with him—just a regular guy with a regular job leading a regular life? What would drive them to coerce a young man who has always valued integrity over hedonism into their midst? And why would Doug agree to submersion in a world of secrecy and murder? It’s unthinkable. THE HARSH REALITY? Doug has been inducted into an institution where friends become enemies overnight, loyalty is a nothing more than a punchline, and conscience is a burden. Where he will be hunted and expected to hunt other members to their death. With no escape from THE CIRCLE’s ubiquitous influence and domination. HOW FAR WILL DOUG GO? How much will he sacrifice to preserve his way of life? Will he be swayed by the money, the women, the power? Or will THE CIRCLE consume him, as it has hundreds of others before him, and leave nothing but another nameless corpse in its wake?

    Within two years he's a multimillionaire. The press calls him "King of the Bootleggers," writing breathless stories about the Gatsby-esque events he and his glamorous second wife, Imogene, host at their Cincinnati mansion, with party favors ranging from diamond jewelry for the men to brand new Pontiacs for the women. By the summer of 1921, Remus owns 35 percent of all the liquor in the United States.Pioneering prosecutor Mabel Walker Willebrandt is determined to bring him down. Willebrandt's bosses at the U.S. Attorney's office hired her right out of law school, assuming she'd pose no real threat to the cozy relationship they maintain with Remus. Eager to prove them wrong, she dispatches her best investigator, Franklin Dodge, to look into his empire. It's a decision with deadly consequences: With Remus behind bars, Dodge and Imogene begin an affair and plot to ruin him, sparking a bitter feud that soon reaches the highest levels of government--and that can only end in murder.

    John’s mother, a well-known Times reporter and editor, tried to keep alive the dream of raising her two sons in ideal surroundings. When that proved impossible, she collapsed emotionally and physically. But along the way she created such a powerful myth of the father-hero who gave his life for his family, country, and the fourth estate that John followed his footsteps into the same newsroom. Decades after his father’s death, John and his brother, the historian Robert Darnton, began digging into the past to uncover the truth about their parents. To discover who the real-life Barney Darnton was—and in part who he himself is—John delves into turn-of-the-century farm life in Michigan, the anything-goes Jazz Age in Greenwich Village, the lives of hard-drinking war correspondents in the Pacific theater, and the fearful loneliness of the McCarthy years in Washington, D.C. He ends his quest on a beach in Papua New Guinea, where he learns about his father’s last moments from an aged villager who never forgot what he saw sixty-five years earlier.

    She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents--hiding the fact that many weren't orphans at all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died.The publication of Lisa Wingate's novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann's lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and find their birth families.Before and After includes moving and sometimes shocking accounts of the ways in which adoptees were separated from their first families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. In Before and After, Wingate and Christie tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art meeting life, long-silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with Wingate and Christie to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children's Home Society reunion . . . with extraordinary results.

    You’ll have heard of most of these notorious criminals, but possibly not so much about one or two of them. All of them were real, ruthless hoodlums, and all had their "15 minutes of fame", leaving trails of death and mayhem behind them. Most did not live to an old age, and those that did were probably in jail. Their escapades were daring and reckless and many paid the ultimate price in the end. Volume 1 contains • Lucky Luciano –From Streetwise Kid to the Father of Organized Crime Leaving poverty ravaged Sicily for New York with his family at the age of 10; Lucky was running his own protection racket and making a name for himself whilst still in his teens. Inevitably, he moved on to become the undisputed boss of organized crime in the USA, but it was his own ‘family’s’ involvement in prostitution which landed him a jail sentence of 30 to 50 years. It didn’t end there however as he continued to run the family affairs from prison where Lady Luck visited him with an offer he couldn’t refuse. • Bugsy Siegel and “The Flamingo Hotel”Through his gambling and bootlegging operations, plus numerous ruthless contract murders, Bugsy Siegel established himself as a key member of “The Syndicate” in New York. Relocating to Las Vegas with the blessing of Lucky Luciano in 1945 to expand the organizations activities, he built the famous Flamingo Club and Casino in the desert of Las Vegas using money provided by the East Coast mobsters. The hopelessly mismanaged project went way over budget, implicating Bugsy in the ‘misappropriation’ of funds and enraging his bosses – Bugsy’s day were numbered.• Dutch Schultz – Beer Baron and Vicious Killer From the slums of New York, Dutch Schultz rose through the ranks of crime to be named “the nation’s top gangster” by the FBI. Claiming to be a good guy simply supplying people with the beer they wanted, (illegally of course), he was also responsible for killing at least two of his own men he suspected of ‘skimming’ more of the proceeds than was due to them. • Hymies Weiss - The Man Al Capone FearedEarl Wojciechowski was born on Jan 25th 1898 in Chicago, but over time became known as Hymie Weiss, eventually teaming up with Dean O'Banion the leader of the North Side Gang who he succeeded after his murder in 1924. Hymie swore to avenge his friends death and waged wore on the Torrio-Capone criminal empire, even attempting to assassinate Capone himself. Violent gun battles on the streets of Chicago were regular occurrences during this period as the gangs fought for control of the lucrative bootlegging and other rackets - things had to come to a head sooner or later. • Wilbur Underhill – The Tri-State TerrorIt took a 24 man task force to bring down Mad Dog Wilbur Underhill in the end. During 12 years of rampaging through the Southwest he was sentenced to life for a murder in Oklahoma, and received another life sentence in Kansas after escaping jail in a ten man breakout and murdering a policeman. Suspected of involvement in the famous Kansas City Massacre, Wilbur began his life of crime as a burglar, and quickly moved on to armed robbery and murder. Order your copy today..! Scroll back up for instant download

    She shot a lot of smack, grass and speed; made a lot of love - to men or women - and drank a lot of Southern Comfort and tequila. She had a real funky time ...and of course, she sang. She roared, whined and growled and ripped her way to the top. GOING DOWN WITH JANIS is a different kind of book about a different kind of person. It tells a story as raw and honest as her voice, as gut-shaking as her songs, and as vivid as her memory.

    For the first time, award-winning investigative journalist M. William Phelps reveals the identity of “Raven,” the serial killer who co-starred with him on Dark Minds—and tells the story of his intriguing bond with one of America’s most disturbing killers. In September 2011, M. William Phelps made a bold decision that would change the landscape of reality-based television – and his own life. He asked a convicted serial killer to act as a consultant for his TV series. Under the code name “Raven,” the murderer shared his insights into the minds of other killers and helped analyze their crimes. As the series became an international sensation, Raven became Phelps’s unlikely confidante, ally—and friend. I’m not making excuses for the eight murders I committed. In this deeply personal account, Phelps traces his own family’s dark history, and takes us into the heart and soul of a serial murderer. He also chronicles the complex relationship he developed with Raven. From questions about morality to Raven’s thoughts on the still-unsolved, brutal murder of Phelps’s sister-in-law, the author found himself grappling with an unwanted, unexpected, unsettling connection with a cold-blooded killer. It made me feel warm inside to know that I was responsible for that pain . . . Drawing on over 7,000 pages of letters, dozens of hours of recorded conversations, personal and Skype visits, and a friendship five years in the making, Phelps sheds new light on Raven’s bloody history, including details of an unknown victim, the location of a still-buried body—and a jaw-dropping admission. Eye-opening and provocative, Dangerous Ground is an unforgettable journey into the mind of a charming, manipulative psychopath that few would dare to know—and the determined journalist who did just that.

    Welcome to Silvertown. Population: 602 (for now). Officer Mary Whittaker has yet to be fully welcomed by the residents of this tiny, quirky mountain town which seems to be home to more conspiracy theories than any other place in America. But with the chief of police on leave, she is left alone to confront a series of abnormal incidents—strange even by Silvertown standards. A teenager dies tragically after eating obviously poisonous mushrooms from his lawn. A hiker found dead on a trail, smiling serenely after being mauled by a bear. A normally doting mother leaving her toddler twins behind without noticing. Other residents seem to have lost all sense of self-preservation as they walk out in front of Mary’s moving cruiser or sit placidly in the middle of a sharp bend in a mountain road. It’s almost as if the townsfolk are losing their survival instincts, one by one. As she digs deeper into her investigation and uncovers a larger conspiracy lurking below the surface of Silvertown, Officer Whittaker finds herself on the brink of falling prey to whatever has possessed the town and she must distinguish the truth from paranoia-fueled lies before she ends up losing her own instincts…and her life.

    Lovingly compiled by long-time close confidante and aide, Sheila Tate, the book provides a rare and much-anticipated look into the personal life of the president's wife, from her daily routines and travels as First Lady to her friendships and deep influence in the Reagan White House.Lady in Red depicts a nuanced portrait of this graceful yet strong woman who felt it was her mission to restore a sense of grandeur, mystique, and excitement to the presidency, showcasing the various roles that Mrs. Reagan played during her years in the White House, that of Wife, Mother, Protector, Host, Diplomat, and Advisor, among others.The book also features twenty-four pages of gorgeous color photographs, including "Nancy's Album," a collection of Mrs. Reagan's favorite photographs, which she entrusted to Sheila to share with the world after she and her beloved Ronnie had passed.To complete the portrait, Lady in Red includes interviews with the friends and politicians who knew Mrs. Reagan best: President George H. W. Bush, Chris Wallace, James Baker, Ed Meese, Maureen Dowd, and Marlin Fitzwater share their most cherished memories of the First Lady.