In Contempt


Christopher Darden - 1996
    Simpson trial and shares the author's observations on legal strategy, racial issues, and the principal lawyers, officials, and witnesses involved in the case.

The Swamp: Washington's Murky Pool of Corruption and Cronyism and How Trump Can Drain It


Eric Bolling - 2017
    was first built, it was on top of a swamp that had to be drained. Donald Trump says it's time to drain it again. In The Swamp, bestselling author and Fox News Channel host Eric Bolling presents an infuriating, amusing, revealing, and outrageous history of American politics, past and present, Republican and Democrat. From national political scandals to tempests in a teapot that blew up; bribery, blackmail, bullying, and backroom deals that contradicted public policies; cronyism that cost taxpayers hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars; and personal conduct that can only be described as regrettable, The Swamp is a journey downriver through the bayous and marshes of Capitol Hill and Foggy Bottom. The presidential election of 2016 was ugly, but it exposed a political, media, industry, and elite establishment that desperately wanted to elect a politician who received millions of dollars from terror-funding states over a businessman willing to tell the corrupt or incompetent, “You’re fired.”The book concludes with a series of recommendations for President Trump: practical, hard-headed, and concise ways to drain the swamp and force Washington to be more transparent, more accountable, and more effective in how it serves those who have elected its politicians and pay the bills for their decisions.Last year President Trump declared Wake Up America to be a "huge" book; Eric Bolling's second book is sure to build on that success. Entertaining and timely, The Swamp is the perfect book for today's political climate.

Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy Versus Jimmy Hoffa


James Neff - 2015
    From 1957 to 1964, Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa channeled nearly all of their considerable powers into destroying each other. Kennedy's battle with Hoffa burst into the public consciousness with the 1957 Senate Rackets Committee hearings and intensified when his brother named him attorney general in 1961. RFK put together a "Get Hoffa" squad within the Justice Department, devoted to destroying one man. But Hoffa, with nearly unlimited Teamster funds, was not about to roll over. Drawing upon a treasure trove of previously secret and undisclosed documents, James Neff has crafted a brilliant, heart-pounding epic of crime and punishment, a saga of venom and relentlessness and two men willing to do anything to demolish each other.

The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance that Changed the World


Greg King - 2013
    Four years later all had vanished in the chaos of World War I. One event precipitated the conflict, and at its hear was a tragic love story. When Austrian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand married for love against the wishes of the emperor, he and his wife Sophie were humiliated and shunned, yet they remained devoted to each other and to their children. The two bullets fired in Sarajevo not only ended their love story, but also led to war and a century of conflict.Set against a backdrop of glittering privilege, The Assassination of the Archduke combines royal history, touching romance, and political murder in a moving portrait of the end of an era. One hundred years after the event, it offers the startling truth behind the Sarajevo assassinations, including Serbian complicity and examines rumors of conspiracy and official negligence. Events in Sarajevo also doomed the couple’s children to lives of loss, exile, and the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, their plight echoing the horrors unleashed by their parents’ deaths. Challenging a century of myth, The Assassination of the Archduke resonates as a very human story of love destroyed by murder, revolution, and war.

The Girl on the Velvet Swing: Sex, Murder, and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century


Simon Baatz - 2018
    Nesbit, just sixteen years old, had recently moved to the city. White was forty-seven and a principal in the prominent architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. As the foremost architect of his day, he was a celebrity, responsible for designing countless landmark buildings in Manhattan. That evening, after drinking champagne, Nesbit lost consciousness and awoke to find herself naked in bed with White. Telltale spots of blood on the bed sheets told her that White had raped her.She told no one about the rape until, several years later, she confided in Harry Thaw, the millionaire playboy who would later become her husband. Thaw, thirsting for revenge, shot and killed White in 1906 before hundreds of theatergoers during a performance in Madison Square Garden, a building that White had designed.The trial was a sensation that gripped the nation. Most Americans agreed with Thaw that he had been justified in killing White, but the district attorney expected to send him to the electric chair. Evelyn Nesbit's testimony was so explicit and shocking that Theodore Roosevelt himself called on the newspapers not to print it verbatim. The murder of White cast a long shadow: Harry Thaw later attempted suicide, and Evelyn Nesbit struggled for many years to escape an addiction to cocaine. The Girl on the Velvet Swing, a tale of glamour, excess, and danger, is an immersive, fascinating look at an America dominated by men of outsize fortunes and by the the women who were their victims.

Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit


Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - 2016
    What ensued was a media firestorm and a whodunit that transfixed the nation, providing daily debates—and cruel, dinner table entertainment. Now, forty years after Michael Skakel’s conviction, his cousin, acclaimed activist and writer Robert Kennedy, Jr., has taken matters into his own hands to get the charges dropped and clear his cousin’s name.This startling expose—a page-turning, true story of murder, romance, and fame—is the story of Skakel’s conviction that the public has never before been prevue to. It is the product of hundreds of interviews with Skakel and those who knew him, Martha Moxley, and what may have happened the night of the crime, Halloween eve. It also explores why Kennedy believes Skakel has yet to receive a fair trial, and why he demands the original verdict be overturned.This is a heart-wrenching story with a powerful cast of characters. It opens the doors for the public into what was once a “perfect” Greenwich community and how a crime shook an elite family. Kennedy presents the evidence through enlightening text, photographs, and new interviews, and allows readers to decide, given the facts, what they believe really happened to Martha and if, forty years after his crucifixion, Michael Skakel should finally walk free.

A Very English Scandal: Sex, Lies, and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment


John Preston - 2016
    It's the late 1960s and homosexuality has only just been legalised, and Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, has a secret he's desperate to hide. As long as Norman Scott, his beautiful, unstable lover is around, Thorpe's brilliant career is at risk. With the help of his fellow politicians, Thorpe schemes, deceives, embezzles - until he can see only one way to silence Scott for good.The trial of Jeremy Thorpe changed our society forever: it was the moment the British public discovered the truth about its political class. Illuminating the darkest secrets of the Establishment, the Thorpe affair revealed such breath-taking deceit and corruption in an entire section of British society that, at the time, hardly anyone dared believe it could be true.

Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South


David Beasley - 2014
    Dow, author of The Autobiography of an ExecutionOn December 9, 1938, the state of Georgia executed six black men in eighty-one minutes in Tattnall Prison's electric chair. The executions were a record for the state that still stands today. The new prison, built with funds from FDR's New Deal, as well as the fact that the men were tried and executed rather than lynched were thought to be a sign of progress. They were anything but. While those men were arrested, convicted, sentenced, and executed in as little as six weeks---E. D. Rivers, the governor of the state, oversaw a pardon racket for white killers and criminals, allowed the Ku Klux Klan to infiltrate his administration, and bankrupted the state. Race and wealth were all that determined whether or not a man lived or died. There was no progress. There was no justice.David Beasley's Without Mercy is the harrowing true story of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the violent death throes of the Klan, but most of all it is the story of the stunning injustice of these executions and how they have seared distrust of the legal system into the consciousness of the Deep South, and it is a story that will forever be a testament to the death penalty's appalling inequality that continues to plague our nation

The Unexpected Spy: From the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life Taking Down Some of the World's Most Notorious Terrorists


Tracy Walder - 2020
    In high-security, steel-walled rooms in Virginia, Walder watched al-Qaeda members with drones as President Bush looked over her shoulder and CIA Director George Tenet brought her donuts. She tracked chemical terrorists and searched the world for weapons of mass destruction. She created a chemical terror chart that someone in the White House altered to convey information she did not have or believe, leading to the Iraq invasion. Driven to stop terrorism, Walder debriefed terrorists - men who swore they’d never speak to a woman - until they gave her leads. She followed trails through North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, shutting down multiple chemical attacks. Then Walder moved to the FBI, where she worked in counterintelligence. In a single year, she helped take down one of the most notorious foreign spies ever caught on American soil. Catching the bad guys wasn’t a problem in the FBI, but rampant sexism was. Walder left the FBI to teach young women, encouraging them to find a place in the FBI, CIA, State Department or the Senate - and thus change the world. Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins

Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero


Chris Matthews - 2011
    With the verve of a novelist, Chris Matthews gives us just that. We see this most beloved president in the company of friends. We see and feel him close-up, having fun and giving off that restlessness of his. We watch him navigate his life from privileged, rebellious youth to gutsy American president. We witness his bravery in war and selfless rescue of his PT boat crew. We watch JFK as a young politician learning to play hardball and watch him grow into the leader who averts a nuclear war.What was he like, this person whose own wife called him “that elusive, unforgettable man”? The Jack Kennedy you discover here wanted never to be alone, never to be bored. He loved courage, hated war, lived each day as if it were his last.Chris Matthews’s extraordinary biography is based on personal interviews with those closest to JFK, oral histories by top political aide Kenneth O’Donnell and others, documents from his years as a student at Choate, and notes from Jacqueline Kennedy’s first interview after Dallas. You’ll learn the origins of his inaugural call to “Ask what you can do for your country.” You’ll discover his role in the genesis of the Peace Corps, his stand on civil rights, his push to put a man on the moon, his ban on nuclear arms testing. You’ll get, more than ever before, to the root of the man, including the unsettling aspects of his personal life. As Matthews writes, “I found a fighting prince never free of pain, never far from trouble, never accepting the world he found, never wanting to be his father’s son. He was a far greater hero than he ever wished us to know.”

Mrs. Paine's Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy


Thomas Mallon - 2002
    Mrs. Paine's Garage is the tragic story of this well-intentioned woman who found Oswald the job that put him six floors above Dealey Plaza-into which, on November 22, 1963, he fired a rifle he'd kept hidden inside Mrs. Paine's house. But this is also a tale of survival and resilience: the story of a devout, open-hearted woman who weathered a whirlwind of suspicion and betrayal, and who refused to allow her connection to the calamity of that November destroy her life. From these stories Thomas Mallon has fashioned an account of generosity and secrets, tragic might-have-beens and eerie coincidences, that unfolds with a gripping inevitability.

The Infiltrator: My Secret Life Inside the Dirty Banks Behind Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel


Robert Mazur - 2009
    Robert Mazur spent years undercover infiltrating the Medellín Cartel's criminal hierarchy. The dirty bankers and businessmen he befriended -- some of whom still shape power across the globe -- knew him as Bob Musella, a wealthy, mob-connected big shot living the good life. Together they partied in $1,000-per-night hotel suites, drank bottles of the world's finest champagne, drove Rolls-Royce convertibles, and flew in private jets. But under Mazur's Armani suits and in his Renwick briefcase, recorders whirred silently, capturing the damning evidence of their crimes. The Infiltrator is the story of how Mazur helped bring down the unscrupulous bankers who manipulated complex international finance systems to serve drug lords, corrupt politicians, tax cheats, and terrorists. It is a shocking chronicle of the rise and fall of one of the biggest and most intricate money-laundering operation of all time-an enterprise that cleaned and moved hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Filled with dangerous lies, near misses, and harrowing escapes, The Infiltrator is as bracing and explosive as the greatest fiction thrillers -- only it's all true.

I Am Murdered: George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, and the Killing That Shocked a New Nation


Bruce Chadwick - 2009
    Doubled over in agony, he stumbled to the kitchen in search of help. There he found his maid, Lydia Broadnax, and his young protegé, Michael Brown, who were also writhing in distress. Hours later, when help arrived, Wythe was quick to tell anyone who would listen, "I am murdered." Over the next two weeks, as Wythe suffered a long and painful death, insults would be added to his mortal injury.I Am Murdered tells the bizarre true story of Wythe's death and the subsequent trial of his grandnephew and namesake, George Wythe Sweeney, for the crime—unquestionably the most sensational and talked-about court case of the era. Hinging on hit-and-miss forensics, the unreliability of medical autopsies, the prevalence of poisoning, race relations, slavery, and the law, Sweeney's trial serves as a window into early nineteenth- century America. Its particular focus is on Richmond, part elegant state capital and part chaotic boomtown riddled with vice, opportunism, and crime.As Wythe lay dying, his doctors insisted that he had not been poisoned, and Sweeney had the nerve to beg him for bail money. In I Am Murdered, this signer of the Declaration of Independence, mentor to Thomas Jefferson, and "Father of American Jurisprudence" finally gets the justice he deserved.

The Mexican Revolution: A History From Beginning to End


Hourly History - 2018
     Over a period of more than ten years, following the overthrow of the government in 1910, Mexico experienced a period of intense and bloody warfare as a bewildering array of factions in ever-changing alliances took power and then lost it. Presidents were elected (or elected themselves) and were then deposed or assassinated. New factions appeared with impressive sounding slogans, took to the field, and were either wiped out and never heard of again or became the next government. Inside you will read about... ✓ The Porfiriato ✓ The Unlikely Revolutionary ✓ Reign and Assassination of Madero ✓ The Iron Hand of Huerta ✓ Carranza Takes on Zapata and Villa ✓ Last Man Standing And much more! The Mexican Revolution is confusing and difficult to understand—there is, for example, still no agreement between scholars and historians on when it ended—but it is essential in understanding the national identity of modern Mexico. The civil war produced heroes whose names live on in legend and villains whose bloody exploits are still horrifying. It also caused anything up to two million casualties both as a direct result of the fighting and in the famine, economic hardship, and disease which followed in its wake. Modern Mexico was created out of the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution; this is the story of la revolución mexicana.

The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge


T.J. English - 2011
    English has the mastered the hybrid narrative art form of social history and underworld thriller. The Savage City is a truly gripping read filled with unexpected twists and turns.”—Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great DelugeIn The Savage City, T.J. English, author of the New York Times bestselling blockbuster Havana Nocturne, takes readers back to a frightening place in a dark time of violence and urban chaos: New York City in the 1960s and early ’70s. As he did in his acclaimed true crime masterwork, The Westies, English focuses on the rot on the Big Apple in this stunning tale of race, murder, and a generation on the edge—as he interweaves the real-life sagas of a corrupt cop, a militant Black Panther, and an innocent young African American man framed by the NYPD for a series of crimes, including a brutal and sensational double murder.