Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen


Brian Masters - 1985
    Within days he had confessed to fifteen gruesome murders over a period of four years. His victims, all young homosexual men, had never been reported missing. Brian Masters, with Nilsen's full cooperation, has produced a unique study of a serial killer's mind, revealing the disturbing psychology of a mass murderer.

Hell in the Heartland: Murder, Meth, and the Case of Two Missing Girls


Jax Miller - 2020
    The next morning, the Freeman family trailer was in flames and both girls were missing.While rumors of drug debts, revenge, and police collusion abounded in the years that followed, the case remained unsolved and the girls were never found.In 2015, crime writer Jax Miller--who had been haunted by the case--decided to travel to Oklahoma to find out what really happened on that winter night in 1999, and why the story was still simmering more than fifteen years later. What she found was more than she could have ever bargained for: jaw-dropping levels of police negligence and corruption, entire communities ravaged by methamphetamine addiction, and a series of interconnected murders with an ominously familiar pattern.These forgotten towns were wild, lawless, and home to some very dark secrets.

Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison


Patricia Kennealy-Morrison - 1992
    Photographs.

Killing for You: A Brave Soldier, a Beautiful Dancer, and a Shocking Double Murder


Keith Elliot Greenberg - 2017
    A KILLER PLOT Twenty-six-year-old actor Daniel Wozniak was unemployed, facing eviction, and deep in debt for his upcoming wedding. So he devised a diabolical plan: He asked his neighbor Sam Herr, a young war veteran, to help him move some things into the attic of an empty theater. There, Wozniak shot Herr twice in the head before taking his ATM card and cell phone. Hours later,Wozniak performed on stage with his fiancée in a local production of the musical Nine, convinced that he had gotten away with murder… A DRAMATIC LAST ACT Wozniak dismembered his victim’s body and hid the pieces. Then he lured Herr’s college friend Juri “Julie” Kibuishi to Herr’s apartment and shot her twice in the head. The police immediately declared Herr a prime suspect—just as Wozniak had planned. But when Herr was declared missing, and his ATM withdrawals led authorities to Wozniak at his bachelor party, the actor was forced to play the role of a lifetime in a shocking murder investigation that would be his greatest—and final—performance… Includes 8 pages of photos

From Holocaust to Harvard: A Story of Escape, Forgiveness, and Freedom


John Stoessinger - 2014
    His grandparents encouraged his mother and stepfather to take young John somewhere safe. “You must have a future,” his grandfather told him before he and his parents boarded the train and waved goodbye.As they trekked across the country, from Vienna to Prague and then finally settling in Shanghai, there was never a single moment Stoessinger was not afraid—he lived in constant fear that he and his family would be found and killed. However, even in Hitler-ruled Nazi Germany, there were plenty of people who refused to cower to absolute evil and who did everything they could to usher families like Stoessinger’s to freedom.In From Holocaust to Harvard, Stoessinger recalls heartbreaking moments from his childhood and of living a life of secrets in Shanghai. He then presents the second part of his story—the part where he attempts to untangle himself from his previous life and devastating memories and is able to relocate to America, earn a graduate-level degree from a prestigious university, and later become a member of the Council on Foreign Relations despite making a decision that nearly lands him in prison and threatens his hard-earned freedom.Throughout his story, Stoessinger expresses his gratitude to those who helped him through the toughest parts of this life and put him on a path that led him to a Harvard education, a successful career, and inner peace.

Destroying Their God: How I Fought My Evil Half-Brother to Save My Children


Wallace Jeffs - 2018
    After he built a successful business, the church required him to marry a second wife. Wallace fathered twenty children, but he never felt comfortable with polygamy or many other FLDS beliefs.As his prophet-brother increasingly manipulated him, Wallace started hearing about FLDS atrocities. On the day the FBI arrested Warren Jeffs for child rape, the prophet was en route to reclaim Wallace's second wife for himself. Wallace defied the prophet and soon ended up in a coma. Though Wallace feared FLDS sabotage caused his car crash, he kept fighting the sect.With today's movement against male abusers, Wallace's story reminds us that power and position don't corrupt all men. In 2018, Wallace found resolution by marrying an LDS woman in the Salt Lake Temple. At the same time, he renews our concern for the thousands who still live under FLDS control, including some of Wallace's own children.

Henry: A Polish Swimmer's True Story of Friendship from Auschwitz to America


Katrina Shawver - 2017
    Couched in the interview style of Tuesdays with Morrie, Henry relates in his own voice a life as a champion swimmer, interrupted by three years imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a Polish political prisoner. With a pragmatic gallows humor, and sense of hope, he showed the author how to truly live for today, preferably with a shot of good Polish vodka. Henry's path of resiliency and power of connection are as relevant today, as they were in World War II.Henry reminds us that no single class of people was safe from Hitler's reach or imprisonment, and no country suffered more under Hitler and Stalin than Poland. This bridge to history and view of the Holocaust through Polish eyes is supported by extensive research, and features more than 70 original photos and rare German documents. Ultimately, Henry is the story a strong young man, who survives by his wits, humor, friends, and a healthy dose of luck. This book is for the discerning adult looking for an intelligent read that examines World War II, the Holocaust, and the true meaning of friendship then and now.

The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever


David M. Friedman - 2007
    But for all the attention lavished on Charles Lindbergh, one story has remained untold until now: his macabre scientific collaboration with Dr. Alexis Carrel. Together this oddest of couples – one a brilliant surgeon turned social engineer, the other a failed dirt farmer turned hero of the skies – embarked on a secret quest to achieve immortality.Their endeavor began on November 28, 1930, in Carrel's laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, a haven created by the world's richest man, John D. Rockefeller, so that medical investigators could pursue their wildest dreams, freed from the demands of clinical practice. For Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize in 1912 for pioneering organ transplants, that dream was conquering death. But not for everyone – only a special few.In one of his more ghoulish experiments, Carrel removed the heart from a chick embryo and placed it in a glass jar, where, with special cleansing and feeding, he kept it alive, with no signs of aging, far beyond the species' natural life span. That result, Carrel believed, suggested that natural death wasn't inevitable.But to attempt such a test with humans, Carrel needed a mechanical genius to create a device in which severed human organs could live and function indefin–itely. Might that genius be the handsome pilot who astonished the world in May 1927 by flying alone across the Atlantic – a feat even most pilots had thought impos–sible – in a single–engine airplane he designed himself?Part Frankenstein, part The Professor and the Mad–man, and all true, The Immortalists is the remarkable story of how two men of prodigious achievement, and equally large character flaws, challenged nature's oldest rule, with consequences – personal, professional, and political – neither man anticipated.

After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring


Joseph Polak - 2014
    It is the tale of how one newly takes on the world, having lived in the midst of corpses strewn about in the scores of thousands, and how one can possibly resume life in the aftermath of such experiences. It is the story of the child who decides, upon growing up, that the only career that makes sense for him in light of these years of horror is to become someone sensitive to the deepest flaws of humanity, a teacher of God’s role in history amidst the traditions that attempt to understand it—and to become a rabbi. Readers will not emerge unscathed from this searing work, written by a distinguished, Boston-based rabbi and academic.

Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films


Molly Haskell - 2017
    Taking this as a key to understanding the hugely successful moviemaker, Molly Haskell explores the full range of Spielberg’s works for the light they shine upon the man himself. Through such powerhouse hits as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Jurassic Park, and Indiana Jones, to lesser-known masterworks like A.I. and Empire of the Sun, to the haunting Schindler’s List, Haskell shows how Spielberg’s uniquely evocative filmmaking and story-telling reveal the many ways in which his life, work, and times are entwined.   Organizing chapters around specific films, the distinguished critic discusses how Spielberg’s childhood in non-Jewish suburbs, his parents’ traumatic divorce, his return to Judaism upon his son’s birth, and other events echo in his work. She offers a brilliant portrait of the extraordinary director—a fearful boy living through his imagination who grew into a man whose openness, generosity of spirit, and creativity have enchanted audiences for more than 40 years.About Jewish Lives:  Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present. In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award.More praise for Jewish Lives: "Excellent." –New York Times "Exemplary." –Wall Street Journal "Distinguished." –New Yorker "Superb." –The Guardian

Def Leppard: The Definitive Visual History


Ross Halfin - 2011
    This fully authorized visual history of the band follows them from the new wave of British heavy metal to their massive Pyromania and Hysteria albums to the sustained power of their records and tours today. Legendary rock photographer Ross Halfin has been shooting Def Leppard since 1978, and his candid and definitive pictures have helped capture and shape the image of the band. Def Leppard includes more than 450 classic and unseen photographs, along with text from Halfin and stories and commentary by the band members and others. The book's publication coincides with the release of an all-new Def Leppard album in the spring and a worldwide tour in the summer.

Alligator Candy: A Memoir


David Kushner - 2016
    David Kushner grew up in the suburbs of Florida in the early 1970s, running wild with his friends, exploring, riding bikes, and disappearing into the nearby woods for hours at a time. One morning in 1973, however, everything changed. David's older brother Jon, making a trip to the local convenience store, vanished. This is the story of Jon's murder at the hands of two sadistic drifters and everything that happened after. "Alligator Candy "isn't only the chronicle of Jon's death, it is also the story of how parenting in America changed, casting light on the transition between two generations of children one raised on freedom, the other on fear. Jon's death was one of the first in what turned out to be a rash of child abductions and murders that dominated headlines for much of the 1970s and 80s. It was around this time that milk cartons began to feature the images of missing children, and newscasters began asking, It's 10:00, do you know where you children are? When one of Jon's killers received a parole hearing, David revisited the case that had so haunted him. Marshalling his skills as a journalist, he compiled all the details that he was sheltered from as a child, interviewing neighbors, reporters, cops, and his own family, and combing through yellowed news clippings. Haunting and intimate, "Alligator Candy" is a moving, disturbing, insightful, and inspiring meditation on grief, growth, family, and survival."

Captive: The Story of the Cleveland Abductions


Allan Hall - 2013
    Using interviews with witnesses, psychologists, family, friends, and the police, he shows how these girls remained undetected for ten years in a home just three miles from the block where they all went missing, and the extraordinary moment when they triumphed over their tormentor.

Marita: The Spy Who Loved Castro


Marita Lorenz - 2017
    Marita Lorenz is one of them.Born in Germany at the outbreak of WWII, Marita was incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp as a child. In 1959, she travelled to Cuba where she met and fell in love with Fidel Castro. Yet upon fleeing to America, she was recruited by the CIA to assassinate the Fidel. Torn by love and loyalty, she couldn’t bring herself to slip him the lethal pills.Her life would take many more twists and turns—including having a child with ex-dictator of Venezuela, Marcos Pérez Jiménez; testifying about the John F. Kennedy assassination; and becoming a party girl with close ties the New York mafia (and then a police informant).Caught up in Cold War intrigue, espionage, and conspiracy—this is Marita’s incredible autobiography of a young woman who became a spy for the CIA.

I Love You My Child, I'm Abandoning You: Holocaust book memoirs


Ariela Palacz - 2017
    But one day she is suddenly forced to confront the cruel reality of the Holocaust, together with the rest of French Jewry. Paulette is forced to separate from her family, and as a result, abandoned by her father. But despite her difficult and shocking life experiences, she remains naïve and optimistic, holding on to her thirst for life even in the darkest hours. An authentic and moving life story I Love You My Child, I'm Abandoning You is an exciting human documentary, taking place in France during the Holocaust. It honors the memory of the French Jews who perished in the Second World War, while simultaneously giving voice the persistent will to live, and the strength and bravery that characterize those who survived and gave rise to the future generations of the Jewish people. An existential odyssey that puts a spotlight on the human need and right to belong Ariela Palacz shares her life story through the character of little Paulette Szenker, sensitively weaving past and present into an authentic and moving journey that shifts between WWII France and contemporary Jerusalem. A story about the human spirit and the thirst for a family, a tradition, and a nation, that will touch your heart. Get your copy of I Love You My Child, I'm Abandoning You now!