Until it was destroyed from within by drugs, greed, and the decline of its traditional crime Family values. And by guys like Sal Polisi. He was born in Brooklyn—the same place that spawned Murder, Inc., Al Capone, and John Gotti, the future Mob godfather who became his friend. Polisi was raised on a family legacy that led him into the life he loved as a member of the Colombos, one of the New York Mob’s feared Five Families, and came of age when the Mafia was at the height of its vast wealth and power. Known by his Mob name, Sally Ubatz (“Crazy Sally”), he ran an illegal after-hours gambling den, The Sinatra Club, that was a magic kingdom of crime and a hangout for up-and-coming mobsters like Gotti and the three wiseguys immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas—Henry Hill, Jimmy Burke, and Tommy DeSimone. For Polisi, the nonstop thrills of glory days spent robbing banks, hijacking trucks, pulling daring heists—and getting away with it all, thanks to cops and public servants corrupted by Mob money—were fleeting. When he was busted for drug trafficking, and already sickened by the bloodbath that engulfed the Mob as it teetered toward extinction, he flipped and became one of a breed he had loathed all his life—a rat. In this riveting, pulse-pounding, and, at times, darkly hilarious first-person chronicle of his brazen crimes, wild sexual escapades, and personal tragedies, Polisi tells his story of life inside the New York Mob in a voice straight from the streets. With shocking candor, he draws on a hard-won knowledge of Mob history to paint a neverbefore- seen picture of the inner workings of the Mob and the larger-than-life characters who populated a once extensive and secret underworld that, thanks to guys like him, no longer exists. *** I was always a street guy. I was into robbing and stealing and gambling and loan sharking. I wasn’t involved in the bigmoney sit-downs, the labor racketeering and construction company shakedowns, the Garment District and garbage and cement company kickbacks. . . . For guys like me and Fox, my blood brother and crime partner, the thing we loved about being in that life was the action, the excitement. . . .We were in it for the money, sure. But it was the danger, the thrills that made the life of crime something special. A guy like John Gotti was different. He was far more ambitious than me and Fox. He wasn’t just in it for the rush and the riches. He wanted the power and the glory. John Gotti’s tragedy, if you can call it that, was that he was born too late for the old-school gangster crown that he craved. He began his rise as the Mob was beginning to crumble; by the time he got to the top, the bottom had dropped out. From the beginning, John was charismatic and smart. He just wasn’t cut out to be godfather. Once he became boss, he drove the bus right off the bridge. Or maybe it was the bus that drove him. Either way, I watched him go. Here’s how it all happened.

     On March 4th, 1995, a New Orleans police officer shot a fellow off-duty cop and two innocent bystanders at a Vietnamese restaurant. She then responded to their call for help, as though she knew nothing of what had transpired. This is the story of her rise through the corrupted ranks, her crime, and her capture.

    Eventually uncovered and arrested, Boyce was convicted of espionage in Los Angeles, California, on June 20, 1977, and sentenced to forty years in a maximum-security federal penitentiary. Soon after his imprisonment, Boyce--the man prosecutors said had done more harm to the security of the United States than any Soviet agents since the Rosenbergs--escaped. Boyce was to become America's most wanted fugitive and the focus of an unprecedented, massive manhunt for eighteen months. Scores of FBI agents and U.S. Marshals sifted through hundreds of false leads. They traveled countless miles back and forth across America, to South Africa, through the isolated jungles of Central America. They were called on the carpet by Congressional committees for the often-publicized and embarassing lack of reults. Although THE FLIGHT OF THE FALCON is a thrilling chase and suspense story, it is also a fine study of character and psychological drama--the metamorphosis of an idealistic young man into a coarse and violent criminal fugitive.

    

    Churchill, 1948: World War II was the defining event of our age—the climactic clash between liberty and tyranny. It led to revolutions, the demise of empires, a protracted Cold War, and religious strife still not ended. Yet Churchill maintained that it was all avoidable. Here is a transformative view of Churchill’s theories, prescriptions, actions, and the degree to which he pursued them in the decade before the war. It shows that he was both right and wrong: right that Hitler could have been stopped; wrong that he did all he could to stop him. It is based on what really happened—evidence that has been “hiding in public” for many years, thoroughly referenced in Churchill’s words and those of his contemporaries. Richard M. Langworth began his Churchill work in 1968 when he organized the Churchill Study Unit, which later became the Churchill Centre. He served as its president and board chairman and was editor of its journal Finest Hour from 1982 to 2014. In November 2014, he was appointed senior fellow for Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project. Mr. Langworth published the first American edition of Churchill’s India, is the author of A Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill, and is the editor of Churchill by Himself, The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill, The Patriot’s Churchill, All Will Be Well: Good Advice from Winston Churchill, and Churchill in His Own Words. His next book is Winston Churchill, Urban Myths and Reality. In 1998, Richard Langworth was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by HM The Queen “for services to Anglo-American understanding and the memory of Sir Winston Churchill.”

      The spring of 1903 proved disastrous for the Murphy family. On April 22, the infant Ruth Murphy died in her crib. Within an hour, her mother, Gertrude, experienced a violent spasm before she, too, died. Ten days later, John Murphy followed his wife and child to the grave after suffering from a crippling convulsion. While neighbors whispered about a curse and physicians feared a contagious disease, Kalkaska County sheriff John W. Creighton and prosecuting attorney Ernest C. Smith searched for answers. As they probed deeper into the suspicious deaths, they uncovered a wicked web of intrigue. And at the center stood a widow in a black taffeta dress.   Includes photos

    For thirty years they fought a bloody battle for control of New York's underworld to emerge as the nation's richest and most powerful crime family. Now Mafia expert John H. Davis tells their compelling inside story. Here are the chilling details and deceptions that created a vast criminal empire. Here are six decades of the uncontrolled greed and lust for power of such men as Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia, Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano, and John Gotti--men for whom murder and betrayal were business as usual. From the Gambinos' powerful stranglehold on New York's construction, garment, and waterfront industries to the government's onslaught against them in the `80s and `90s, Mafia Dynasty takes you into the mysterious world of blood oaths, shifting alliances, and deadly feuds that will hold you riveted from the first page to the last.

    The disaster not only changed the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of radiation as an invisible killer.Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with it, the United States’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow, it was a political and financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one. With a total cost of 18 billion rubles—at the time equivalent to $18 billion—Chernobyl bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its population a state built upon a pillar of lies. The full story of the events that started that night in the control room of Reactor No.4 of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant has never been told—until now. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the Motherland. Midnight in Chernobyl, award-worthy nonfiction that reads like sci-fi, shows not only the final epic struggle of a dying empire but also the story of individual heroism and desperate, ingenious technical improvisation joining forces against a new kind of enemy.

    This is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this "divinely inspired" crime, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. Along the way, he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest-growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.Krakauer takes readers inside isolated communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, where some forty-thousand Mormon Fundamentalists believe the mainstream Mormon Church went unforgivably astray when it renounced polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the leaders of these outlaw sects are zealots who answer only to God. Marrying prodigiously and with virtual impunity (the leader of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five "plural wives," several of whom were wed to him when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties), fundamentalist prophets exercise absolute control over the lives of their followers, and preach that any day now the world will be swept clean in a hurricane of fire, sparing only their most obedient adherents.Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism’s violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the most successful homegrown faith in the United States, and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism. The result is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.

    The investigation that follows uncovers an extraordinarily complex and puzzling true-crime story. Only Vincent Bugliosi, who recounted his successful prosecution of mass murderer Charles Manson in the bestseller Helter Skelter, was able to draw together the hundreds of conflicting details of the mystery and reconstruct what really happened when four people found hell in a tropical paradise. And the Sea Will Tell reconstructs the events and subsequent trial of a riveting true murder mystery, and probes into the dark heart of a serpentine scenario of death.

    Over a thousand of these soldiers were Australian. By the end of the war, just one-third of them had survived and Ambon became a place of nightmares, one of the most notorious of all POW camps the war had seen.Many of the men captured were massacred, and of those who initially survived, many later succumbed to the sadistic brutality of the Japanese guards. Starvation also took a fearful toll, and then there were the medical 'experiments'. It was a place almost without hope for those who held on, made worse by the fact that the savagery inflicted on them wasn't limited to their captors but also came from their own. One soldier described their hopelessness towards the end with the bleak words: 'The men knew they were dying.'Yet astoundingly there were survivors and in Ambon they speak of not just the horrors, but the bravery, endurance and mateship that got them through an ordeal almost impossible to imagine.The story of Ambon is one of both the depravity and the triumph of the human spirit; it is also one that's not been widely told. Until now.

    Fresh out of commercial art school, Hamilton moves from Los Angeles to Las Vegas with her boyfriend to join the newly-formed Las Vegas International Circus. When that job doesn’t “fly” she experiences a series of short-term jobs in order to save enough money to move back to LA. But the MGM Grand Hotel, the world’s largest hotel/casino is scheduled to open, and Hamilton, who was also a former Playboy Bunny, is hired as a cocktail waitress. She subsequently marries her boyfriend, a former undercover ATF officer now District Court bailiff, who is later revealed to be a bigamist. Hamilton quickly learns the ways of the casino world. Along with several of her fellow workers, she battles sexual pressure from bartenders and the machinations of unscrupulous casino bosses who resent the tips players give to cocktail waitresses. A city-wide Las Vegas Culinary Union strike in 1974 proves to be an eye-opening political event that none of the cocktail waitresses view seriously. This is a highly personal and quite entertaining account of 3 years in a young woman’s life. Several of the author’s personal photos are included. The seventies were an era of change and Hamilton faced them all: drugs, alcohol, sex and women’s liberation. Carolyn V. Hamilton names real names, real places, and real events. These true stories show keen insight into casino life in the Las Vegas of the 1970s. Here’s what advance reviews say about COMING TO LAS VEGAS: “Honestly told and forthcoming.” “Hamilton reveals the seamy and steamy side of America’s Sin City. It’s a wild ride of time, place, and opportunity and she tells the story in a most compelling and engaging fashion.” "A brilliant look at behind the glitter of Las Vegas.” “Funny, poignant and disarmingly honest, her stories kept me turning pages well into the night.” “Really enjoyed the MGM Grand cast of characters, the colorful clothing styles and all the ‘juicy’ details.” “Hamilton takes readers on a fun, fast-paced, and sexy romp through 1970’s Las Vegas. Hang on to your chips! This is quite a ride.” “An astonishingly good read.” “Lots of humor and laughs, too.”

    He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” In this book, Justice Neil Gorsuch shares personal reflections, speeches, and essays that focus on the remarkable gift the framers left us in the Constitution. Justice Gorsuch draws on his thirty-year career as a lawyer, teacher, judge, and justice to explore essential aspects our Constitution, its separation of powers, and the liberties it is designed to protect. He discusses the role of the judge in our constitutional order, and why he believes that originalism and textualism are the surest guides to interpreting our nation’s founding documents and protecting our freedoms. He explains, too, the importance of affordable access to the courts in realizing the promise of equal justice under law—while highlighting some of the challenges we face on this front today. Along the way, Justice Gorsuch reveals some of the events that have shaped his life and outlook, from his upbringing in Colorado to his Supreme Court confirmation process. And he emphasizes the pivotal roles of civic education, civil discourse, and mutual respect in maintaining a healthy republic. A Republic, If You Can Keep It offers compelling insights into Justice Gorsuch’s faith in America and its founding documents, his thoughts on our Constitution’s design and the judge’s place within it, and his beliefs about the responsibility each of us shares to sustain our distinctive republic of, by, and for “We the People.”

    Sir Ernest Shackleton had carefully picked crew and a stout, well-outfitted ship, the Endurance. But he had no radio, the world was at war, and at the edge of the Antarctic continent, the ship froze in the sea ice. After months of immobility, it was crushed. Then began an impossible journey. With three tiny boats, the crew worked their way across frozen the Antarctic Sea. This vivid book recounts the story of Shackleton's heroic voyage from South Georgia Island to Antarctica then back to South Georgia. It is a tribute to Shackleton and his crew's ability to fight for survival and one of the most harrowing adventures in history.

    A culture of corruption pervaded the New York Police Department, where payoffs, protection, and shakedowns of gambling rackets and drug dealers were common practice. The so-called blue code of silence protected the minority of crooked cops from the sanction of the majority.Into this maelstrom came a working class, Brooklyn-born, Italian cop with long hair, a beard, and a taste for opera and ballet. Frank Serpico was a man who couldn't be silenced—or bought—and he refused to go along with the system. He had sworn an oath to uphold the law, even if the perpetrators happened to be other cops. For this unwavering commitment to justice, Serpico nearly paid with his life.