The Lost Generation: Chronicling India's Dying Professions


Nidhi Dugar Kundalia - 2015
    In The Lost Generation, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia narrates the unforgettable stories of eleven professionals—from the hauntingly beautiful rudaalis to the bizarre tasks of a street dentist—uncovering the romance, tragedy and old-world charm of India’s ageing bylanes and its incredible living history.

Killing Season: The Unsolved Case of New England's Deadliest Serial Killer


Carlton Smith - 1994
    Over the course of seven months in 1988, eleven women disappeared off the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a gloomy, drug-addled coastal town that was once the whaling capital of the world. Nine turned up dead. Two were never found. And the perpetrator remains unknown to this day.   How could such a thing happen? How, in what was once one of America’s richest cities, could the authorities let their most vulnerable citizens down this badly? As Carlton Smith, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his coverage of the Green River Killer case, demonstrates in this riveting account, it was the inability of police officers and politicians alike to set aside their personal agendas that let a psychopath off the hook.   In Killing Season, Smith takes readers into a close-knit community of working-class men and women, an underworld of prostitution and drug abuse, and the halls of New England law enforcement to tell the story of an epic failure of justice.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House


Michael Wolff - 2018
    Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.

The Grifter's Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency


Sarah Blaskey - 2020
    Long known for its famous and wealthy clientele, the resort's guest list soon started filling with political operatives and power-seekers. Meanwhile, as Trump re-branded Mar-a-Lago "the Winter White House" and began spending weekends there, state business spilled out into full view of the club's members, and vast sums of taxpayer money and political donations began flowing into its coffers, and into the pockets of the president. The Grifters' Club is a breakthrough account of the corruption, intrigue, and absurdity that has been on display in the place where the president is at his most relaxed. In these pages, a team of prizewinning Miami Herald journalists reveal the activities and motivations of the strange array of charlatans and tycoons who populate its halls. Some peddle influence, some look to steal government secrets, and some just want to soak up the feeling of unfettered access to the world's most powerful leaders. With the drama of an expose and the edgy humor of a Carl Hiaasen novel, The Grifters' Club takes you behind the velvet ropes of this exclusive club and into its bizarre world of extravagance and scandal.

The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design


Roman Mars - 2020
    The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.Now, in The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to Hidden World of Everyday Design, host Roman Mars and coauthor Kurt Kohlstedt zoom in on the various elements that make our cities work, exploring the origins and other fascinating stories behind everything from power grids and fire escapes to drinking fountains and street signs. With deeply researched entries and beautiful line drawings throughout, The 99% Invisible City will captivate devoted fans of the show and anyone curious about design, urban environments, and the unsung marvels of the world around them.

Listening to Killers: Lessons Learned from My Twenty Years as a Psychological Expert Witness in Murder Cases


James Garbarino - 2015
    James Garbarino, a leading expert psychological witness who listens to killers so that he can testify in court. The author offers detailed accounts of how killers travel a path that leads from childhood innocence to lethal violence in adolescence or adulthood. He places the emotional and moral damage of each individual killer within a larger scientific framework of social, psychological, anthropological, and biological research on human development. By linking individual cases to broad social and cultural issues and illustrating the social toxicity and unresolved trauma that drive some people to kill, Dr. Garbarino highlights the humanity we share with killers and the role of understanding and empathy in breaking the cycle of violence.

The Element in the Room: Science-y Stuff Staring You in the Face (Festival of the Spoken Nerd)


Helen Arney - 2017
    This hilarious and informative book is designed for anyone who is sci-curious and wants to know more about the world around them, especially the elements of everyday science that other books ignore.

Principal Suspect: The True Story of Dr. Jay Smith and the Main Line Murders


William C. Costopoulos - 1996
    Jay Smith, a high school principal and her accused killer. The naked body of Susan Reinert, a suburban, Philadelphia school teacher was found jammed into the hatchback of a car. Her two young children were missing and never found.Thus began one of the most prominent murder cases Pennsylvania history, and one that would grip the nation. Now the defense attorney for the main suspect of the murders-- Jay Smith, the principal of the school where Reinert taught-- takes you inside the cover-ups and corruption that dramatically affected the outcome of the case. Did Jay Smith do it? Did he deserved the death penalty? it is you who must decide.

Gone, Just Gone: Thirteen Baffling Disappearances


Harry M. Bobonich - 2015
    We bring you some cases you may have heard of, but others that will be new to you. A Pennsylvania DA goes for a drive and doesn’t return, years later he’s found to have passed on the early prosecution of some involved in the Penn State molestation scandal. Two young lovers in the 1970’s head off for an iconic rock festival and are never seen again—their classmates still wonder. The man behind the most important civil rights case before the landmark Brown decision steps into a cold rainy Chicago night and vanishes. A beautiful, but troubled, young Indian doctor goes missing in New York City on 9/11—or was it the night before? One of the richest and most unscrupulous men in the world falls out a small plane filled with his associates--or at least that was their story. Only one cadet in the history of West Point has gone missing and never been found—where in the world did Richard Cox go? As a bonus, you’ll read of people who went missing only to eventually turn up in the most unusual places.

Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre


Deep Halder - 2019
    Deep Halder is one of them.' - Amitava Kumar In 1978, around 1.5 lakh Hindu refugees, mostly belonging to the lower castes, settled in Marichjhapi an island in the Sundarbans, in West Bengal. By May 1979, the island was cleared of all refugees by Jyoti Basu's Left Front government. Most of the refugees were sent back to the central India camps they came from, but there were many deaths: of diseases, malnutrition resulting from an economic blockade, as well as from violence unleashed by the police on the orders of the government. Some of the refugees who survived Marichjhapi say the number of those who lost their lives could be as high as 10,000, while the-then government officials maintain that there were less than ten victims. How does an entire island population disappear? How does one unearth the truth and the details of one of the worst atrocities of post-Independent India? Journalist Deep Halder reconstructs the buried history of the 1979 massacres through his interviews with survivors, erstwhile reporters, government officials and activists with a rare combination of courage, conscientiousness and empathy.

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America


Christopher Leonard - 2019
    Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch brothers have wanted it that way. For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He’s a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates. But there’s another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book.

The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle


Kent Alexander - 2019
    Inside was a bomb, the largest of its kind in FBI and ATF history. Minutes later, the bomb detonated amid a crowd of fifty thousand people. But thanks to Jewell, it only wounded 111 and killed two, not the untold scores who would have otherwise died. With the eyes of the world on Atlanta, the Games continued. But the pressure to find the bomber was intense. Within seventy-two hours, Jewell went from the hero to the FBI’s main suspect. The news leaked and the intense focus on the guard forever changed his life. The worst part: It let the true bomber roam free to strike again.  What really happened that evening during the Olympic Games? The attack left a mark on American history, but most of what we remember is wrong. In a triumph of reporting and access in the tradition of the best investigative journalism, former U.S. Attorney Kent Alexander and former Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Salwen reconstruct all the events leading up to, during, and after the Olympic bombing from mountains of law enforcement evidence and the extensive personal records of key players, including Richard himself.The Suspect, the culmination of more than five years of reporting, is a gripping story of the rise of domestic terrorism in America, the advent of the 24/7 news cycle, and an innocent man’s fight to clear his name.

Murder in the Yoga Store


Peter Ross Range - 2013
    The grisly murder was committed on a pleasant Friday night in upscale Bethesda, Maryland, a leafy suburb of Washington, D.C. In this riveting narrative by veteran journalist Peter Ross Range, the author for the first time brings together the tale of what really happened in the yoga store murder. He portrays the personalities of both victim and murderer, along with the strange and convoluted circumstances of the crime and its cover-up. Range meticulously exposes layer upon layer of deceit and confusion. His account builds the tension of the police investigation until the real story, so odd and creepy, takes your breath away. The drama of the murder trial is a moving emotional roller coaster built around the prosecutors, the detectives and the family of the victim.

Hastened to the Grave: The Gypsy Murder Investigation


Jack Olsen - 1998
    And they couldn't be stopped-- until one courageous woman took on the cases no one else would touch...THE VICTIMS:Elderly, well-to-do men and women who, due to their failing health, strength, and faculties, could be conned out of their fortunes by heinous neglect, abuse, and possibly even murder.THE ACCUSED:Several members of a ruthless family of Gypsies known for their cunning con-games and remarkable ability to extract large sums of money from their unwitting pawns.THE INVESTIGATOR:Fay Faron, a beautiful, never-say-die P.I., determined to bring these culprits to justice-- even when the authorities turned a blind eye to the Gypsies' crimes time and time again.In this shattering expose, bestselling author Jack Olsen follows Fay Faron as she retraces every step of the Gypsy family and the crimes they stand accused of: moving in on their helpless prey, extorting money, signing the fortunes of elderly millionaires into their own names-- and speeding up the death process with sadistic neglect, slow poison, and unspeakable cruelty. Not since Peter Maas' King of the Gypsies has the world of Gypsy crime been exposed in such shocking detail and with more fascinating insight.

Three Minutes to Doomsday: An Agent, a Traitor, and the Worst Espionage Breach in U.S. History


Joe Navarro - 2017
    But his real expertise was “reading” body language. He possessed an uncanny ability to glean the thoughts of those he interrogated. So it was that, on a routine assignment to interview a “person of interest”—a former American soldier named Rod Ramsay—Navarro noticed his interviewee’s hand trembling slightly when he was asked about another soldier who had recently been arrested in Germany on suspicion of espionage. That thin lead was enough for the FBI agent to insist to his bosses that an investigation be opened. What followed is unique in the annals of espionage detection—a two-year-long battle of wits. The dueling antagonists: an FBI agent who couldn’t overtly tip to his target that he suspected him of wrongdoing lest he clam up, and a traitor whose weakness was the enjoyment he derived from sparring with his inquisitor. Navarro’s job was made even more difficult by his adversary’s brilliance: not only did Ramsay possess an authentic photographic memory as well as the second highest IQ ever recorded by the US Army, he was bored by people who couldn’t match his erudition. To ensure that the information flow would continue, Navarro had to pre-choreograph every interview, becoming a chess master plotting twenty moves in advance. And the backdrop to this mental tug of war was the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the very real possibility that its leaders, in a last bid to alter the course of history, might launch a devastating attack. If they did, they would have Ramsay to thank, because as Navarro would learn over the course of forty-two mind-bending interviews, Ramsay had, by his stunning intelligence giveaways, handed the Soviets the ability to utterly destroy the US. The story of a determined hero who pushed himself to jaw-dropping levels of exhaustion and who rallied his team to expose undreamed of vulnerabilities in America’s defense, Three Minutes to Doomsday will leave the reader with disturbing thoughts of the risks the country takes even today with its most protected national secrets.