Chris Kyle was a young man with a history of bravery and service to his country. The story of Chris Kyle's life and the life of his killer collided, bringing to light war and its effects on young men and women. When considered, Chris Kyle’s life brings up many of the hot button issues on the minds of Americans today. One only need turn on the television Sunday morning to hear the debate of gun violence, mental illness and the systems which fail to help those in need.Chris Kyle was a mythical figure to many who followed Chris Kyle's story. Chris Kyle was counted on as a protector to many including the wife and two children Chris Kyle left behind. Chris Kyle was a devoted family man, mentor and a lethal sniper in service to his country.Chris Kyle’s life and death peel back as an onion beginning with his birth and proceeding to Chris Kyle's harrowing war experiences culminating in his death.

    Teller asked about the people in the drawings: the streetcar operators, waitresses, soldiers, bums. And Mam and Pad (Irene and Joe) began to unfold the hidden history of their world before their Bundle of Joy came along. Out came the Hobo Shoebox, full of letters Joe wrote while riding the rails during the Great Depression; their daring photos as art students, eloping to escape their feuding families; and the War Trunk. Readers stand beside Teller as Pad teaches him why using a ruler in painting is evil; join Mam as she interprets the designs hidden in Joe's "art pancakes"; and enter the world of a most peculiar, philosophical, funny, and loving family.

    Rock stars from Elvis to Bruce Springsteen have been profoundly affected by his work. This insightful book examines the power of Orbison's music--from his pioneer days to his fantastic comeback--and the events that lead to his untimely death.

    Combing through her stories, poems, articles, reviews, correspondence, and even her rare journalism and song lyrics, editor Barry Day has selected and arranged passages that describe her life and its preoccupations-urban living, the theater and cinema, the battle of the sexes, and death by dissipation. Best known for her scathing pieces for the New Yorker and her membership in the Algonquin Round Table ("The greatest collection of unsaleable wit in America."), Parker filled her work with a unique mix of fearlessness, melancholy, savvy, and hope. In Dorothy Parker, the irrepressible writer addresses: her early career writing for magazines; her championing of social causes such as integration; and the obsession with suicide that became another drama ("Scratch an actor...and you'll find an actress."), literature ("This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.") and much more.

    The black mass crashed through the local school. 144 people were killed. 116 were schoolchildren. Gaynor Madgwick was there. She was eight and severely injured. In this book, Gaynor tells her own story and interviews people affected by the day's events. "Gaynor Madgwick was pulled injured from one of the classrooms where her friends died. She was left behind to live out her life. This is her story, sad, sweet, sentimental, and authentic. I commend it to you." - Vincent Kane, Broadcaster "Gaynor Madgwick's sense of injustice is palpable in her clear, riveting account of this scandal and its human cost. Despite everything, however, she is not bitter and retains the quiet dignity that is, perhaps, the true and lasting legacy of Aberfan." - Frank Olding, Planet Magazine "Madgwick does not dwell too much on the politics of Aberfan, and this is left largely to an incisive introduction by the veteran broadcaster, Vincent Kane, who leaves us in no doubt where the responsibility lay for the disaster. Thankfully Madgwick has now found happiness after a troubled life, having had to live with the guilt of the survivor for all her life. And writing so sensitively has helped her to come to terms with what happened in 1966. This is certainly not an easy book to read, but as noted by Lord Snowdon, it should and must be read by all of us in memory of those who died, whilst not forgetting those who also survived this tragic event." - Richard E. Huws, Gwales

    Even today, over a century after his death in 1891, his visionary poetry has continued to influence everyone from Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan to Patti Smith. His long poem A Season in Hell (1873) and his collection Illuminations (1886) are essential to the modern canon, marked by a hallucinatory and hypnotic style that defined the Symbolist movement in poetry. Having sworn off writing at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud drifted around the world from scheme to scheme, ultimately dying from an infection contracted while running guns in Africa. He was thirty-seven. Edmund White writes with a historian's eye for detail, driven by a genuine personal investment in his subject. White delves deep into the young poet's relationships with his family, his teachers, and his notorious affair with the more established poet Paul Verlaine. He follows the often elusive (sometimes blatant) threads of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud's poems (in those days, sodomy was a crime) and offers incisive interpretations of the poems, using his own artful translations to bring us closer to the mercurial poet.

    It dispels the myths about Layne's childhood, his early days in music, and the final, very private years of his life. It contains dozens of never-before-seen drawings, writings and photographs...that all shaped the ALICE IN CHAINS' songwriter/singer who sold millions of CDs...helping revolutionize modern rock.

    Thirty years later, this six-time platinum album is considered to be the high-water mark of Metallica’s incredible career, with songs like “Battery,” “Welcome Home (Sanitarium),” and the title track, “Master of Puppets,” still a staple of their sell-out live shows. Sadly, this hugely successful period for Metallica was marred by a tragedy that shook the band to its foundation: the death of bassist Cliff Burton in a tour bus accident on September 27, 1986.  For the first time, Metallica: Back to the Front tells the fully authorized story of the creation of the Master of Puppets album and the subsequent tour. Featuring new and exclusive interviews with band members James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, and Kirk Hammett, this is the definitive account of the most venerated period of Metallica’s history, from the incredible highs of touring in support of Ozzy Osbourne to the lows of losing a key member of the band and crucial part of the Metallica sound. Metallica: Back to the Front will also feature interviews with other important figures in the band’s history, including managers Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch, Faith No More guitarist Jim Martin, Anthrax band members Scott Ian and Charlie Benante, and many, many more. Filled with hundreds of never-before-seen images from the band’s personal archives, this deluxe volume will combine an in-depth narrative with stunning visuals, taking fans further into this defining period of the band’s career than ever before. Released to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the Master of Puppets album and tour, Metallica: Back to the Front is created with the full cooperation and support of the band. The result is a treasure trove of stories, anecdotes, and never-before-seen photographs that legions of Metallica fans will cherish for generations to come.

    Matthew Bannister said he was going to reinvent the station, the most popular in Europe. But things didn't go exactly to plan. The station lost millions of listeners. Its most famous DJs left, and their replacements proved to be disasters. Radio 1's commercial rivals regarded the internal turmoil with glee. For a while a saviour arrived, in the shape of Chris Evans. But his behaviour caused further upheavals, and his eventual departure provoked another mass desertion by listeners. What was to be done? In the middle of this crisis, Radio 1 bravely (or foolishly) allowed the writer Simon Garfield to observe its workings from the inside. For a year he was allowed unprecedented access to management meetings and to DJs in their studios, to research briefings and playlist conferences. Everyone interviewed spoke in passionate detail about their struggle to make their station credible and successful once more. The result is a gripping and often hilarious portrait a much loved national institution as it battles back from the brink of calamity.

    How school and later university became her escape route from a family filled with secrets and violence. It is also a story of how, as a mature woman and a mother herself, she came to face what had happened to her as a child. How she had to bring long-buried memories into the light in order to move on.

    Omm Sety’s EGYPT contains never-before-seen episodes from her life, and important, previously unknown details of Egyptian history. “Omm Sety was a controversial character... an example of a soul so consumed with a purpose that it focused the arc of her life - not in one incarnation only, but in at least two. She knew things she could not have known without some extraordinary extension of consciousness."– Stephen A. Schwartz, Director of Research, Rhine Research Center, Durham, North Carolina and author of Opening to the Infinite "With access to Omm Sety's secrets, diaries and riveting private conversations, the authors navigate this explosive material with elegance, sincerity, and sympathy. Readers may have trouble putting this book down once they start it."– John Anthony West, author of The Serpent in the Sky

    Unafraid of rejection or failure, Michael has taken on the most difficult and challenging cases of our times and despite the odds, won plenty. In Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer Michael dissects many of them, revealing his motivations, meticulous approach to forensic science, cross examination techniques, the political dimensions and emotional reactions with clarity, subtlety and charm. Interspersed with personal anecdotes and recollections, this insightful book is liberally laced with Michael's quirky brand of anarchic humour. Cases range from the Angry Brigade, the Bradford 12, the Birmingham Six, the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, Angela Cannings, Jill Dando, Ruth Ellis, Dodi Fayed, the 'Fertilizer' conspiracy, Iraqi hi-jackers, Stephen Lawrence, Fatmir Limaj (Leader of the Kosovan Liberation Army), the Marchioness Disaster, the Price sisters, the 'Ricin' trial, Risley prison riots, Tahira Tabassum, Judith Ward, Arthur Scargill and the miners to the Jean Charles de Menezes inquiry, and many more. Issues of public concern, human rights and innovative attempts to construct a democratic legal system are discussed in full, but Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer also unveils with honesty and wit a man who has put as much passion and energy into his life as his work, one of the great personalities of our time.

    In 1905 an unknown 26-year-old clerk at the Swiss Patent Office, who had supposedly failed math in school, burst on to the scientific scene and swept away the hidebound theories of the day. The clerk, Albert Einstein, introduced a new and unexpected understanding of the universe and launched the two great revolutions of twentieth-century physics, relativity and quantum mechanics. The obscure origin and wide-ranging brilliance of the work recalled Isaac Newton’s “annus mirabilis” (miracle year) of 1666, when as a 23-year-old seeking safety at his family manor from an outbreak of the plague, he invented calculus and laid the foundations for his theory of gravity. Like Newton, Einstein quickly became a scientific icon--the image of genius and, according to Time magazine, the Person of the Century.The actual story is much more interesting. Einstein himself once remarked that “science as something coming into being ... is just as subjectively, psychologically conditioned as are all other human endeavors.” In this profile, the historian of science L. Randles Lagerstrom takes you behind the myth and into the very human life of the young Einstein. From family rifts and girlfriend troubles to financial hardships and jobless anxieties, Einstein’s early years were typical of many young persons. And yet in the midst of it all, he also saw his way through to profound scientific insights. Drawing upon correspondence from Einstein, his family, and his friends, Lagerstrom brings to life the young Einstein and enables the reader to come away with a fuller and more appreciative understanding of Einstein the person and the origins of his revolutionary ideas.About the cover image: While walking to work six days a week as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, Einstein would pass by the famous "Zytglogge" tower and its astronomical clocks. The daily juxtaposition was fitting, as the relative nature of time and clock synchronization would be one of his revolutionary discoveries in the miracle year of 1905.

    This is because, as Brown explains, no one has ever focused on this great man's faith. This book explores the life and personality of Ronald Reagan by focusing on his deep-felt Christian beliefs and showing how faith guided him along his distinguished career and led him to his unprecedented success. With the support of Ronald Reagan's own words and writings and first-hand interviews of Ronald Reagan's family, friends, and co-workers, Brown weaves a magnificent story of Reagan's strong devotion to God that will not only inspire Christians to enter public service and allow their faith to motivate all their actions but also help point others to the Cross of Jesus Christ-a cause that was near and dear to President Reagan's heart."

    This book is the story of Volpe's years leading up to those at the Met, from his first job as a stagehand at the Morosco Theater to the odd jobs he picked up moonlighting: setting up a searchlight or laying down a red carpet for a movie premiere, changing titles on the marquees at the Astor, Victor, and Paramount theaters. It is his Met years--from apprentice carpenter to general manager--that give us a story about New York and the business of culture. Volpe looks at the Met today, an institution full of vast egos and complicated politics, as well as its glittering past--the old Met at Thirty-ninth and Broadway, and the political and artistic intrigues that exploded around its move to Lincoln Center. With stunning candor, he writes about the general managers he worked under, including Rudolf Bing and Anthony Bliss; his own embattled rise to the top; the maneuverings of the blue-chip board; his bad-cop, good-cop collaboration with the conductor James Levine; and his masterful approach to making a family of such highly charged artist-stars as Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Teresa Stratas, and Renee Fleming, and such visionary directors as Franco Zeffirelli, Robert Wilson, and Julie Taymor.