The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League


Jeff Hobbs - 2014
    His charismatic father was later convicted of a double murder. Peace's intellectual brilliance and hard-won determination earned him a full scholarship to Yale University. At college, while majoring in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, he straddled the world of academia and the world of the street, never revealing his full self in either place. Upon graduation from Yale, he went home to teach at the Catholic high school he'd attended, slid into the drug trade, and was brutally murdered at age thirty.That's the short version of Robert Peace's life. The long version, the complete version, is this remarkable tour de force by Jeff Hobbs, a talented young novelist who was Peace's college roommate. Hobbs attended Peace's funeral, reached out to his friends from both Yale and Newark, and ultimately decided to write this harrowing and beautiful account of his life.What does the haunting, untimely death of one man mean? Robert Peace's life doesn't reduce to easy sociological constructions. Through Hobbs's relentless research and remarkable writing, we learn the cost of living between the world Peace was born into and the one his potential allowed him to enter. We see him work, love, fail, succeed, give to others, care for his mother, travel, and dream. We witness the decisions he made for himself and the ones that life forced upon him. But most importantly, we come to understand the sheer complexity of his existence and are irrevocably changed by the fascinating, devastating, and unforgettable life of Robert Peace.

Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean


Richard Logan - 2010
    She jumped overboard just in time to escape. Surviving four days on a cork float in the middle of the ocean, Terry Jo’s rescue pictures graced LIFE Magazine soon after she was found.This is the first time Terry Jo, now known as Tere Duperrault Fassbender, has been able to fully tell her story. In September 1988 Oprah Winfrey reunited her with the freighter captain who saved her but, even then, she was not healed enough to reveal what it took to survive for four days adrift and alone at sea.Co-authored by psychologist and survival expert Richard Logan, readers delve into the details of how a little girl survived the murder of her family; the gradual collapse of the small cork float she used to keep afloat while guarded by a small pod of whales; and the aftermath and the reclamation of life.ALONE is the ultimate inspirational tale of good.

Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood


Jennifer Traig - 2004
    The result is a book so relentlessly funny and frank, it's totally refreshing.

Jesse James: A Life from Beginning to End (Biographies of Criminals)


Hourly History - 2021
    

Stolen: A Memoir


Elizabeth Gilpin - 2021
    Growing angrier by the day, she began skipping practices and drinking to excess. At a loss, her parents turned to an educational consultant who suggested Elizabeth be enrolled in a behavioral modification program. That recommendation would change her life forever.The nightmare began when she was abducted from her bed in the middle of the night by hired professionals and dropped off deep into a camp in the woods of AppalachiaAfter three brutal months, Elizabeth was transferred to a boarding school in Southern Virginia that in reality functioned more like a prison. Its curriculum revolved around a perverse form of group therapy where students were psychologically abused and humiliated. Finally, at seventeen, Elizabeth convinced them she was rehabilitated enough to “graduate” and was released. In this eye-opening and unflinching book, Elizabeth recalls the horrors she endured, the friends she lost to suicide and addiction, and—years later—how she was finally able to pick up the pieces of her life and reclaim her identity.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Summary


BookRags - 2011
    

Cannibal Killers: Monsters with an Appetite for Murder and a Taste for Human Flesh


Chloe Castleden - 2010
    It has long been a taboo subject, with even the tabloid press shying away from publishing precise details of cannibal crimes. When Albert Fish kidnapped, killed, and consumed ten-year-old Grace Budd in New York in 1928, he went to great pains to assure her parents, in a letter he wrote six years later that brought about his arrest, that he had not sexually assaulted her. But at the time, the court portrayed Fish as a sexually motivated criminal rather than as a cannibal. Yet, sexual depravity and cannibalism are far from being mutually exclusive. Andrei Chikatilo, the Butcher of Rostov, is proof of that, having eaten parts of the sexual organs of some of his fifty-six victims. Tsutomu Miyazaki, the Japanese Dracula, murdered little girls, molested their corpses, and drank their blood. These and many other cases, including those of Jeffrey Dahmer, Edmund Kemper, Joachim Kroll (the Duisburg Man Eater), and Daniel Rakowitz—who murdered his roommate and made soup from her brains—are studied in chilling detail.