Search results for ""Notorious""

One of the last great untold stories of the Holocaust, The Survivor is an astonishing account of one man's unbreakable spirit, unshakeable faith, and extraordinary courage in the face of evil.At only sixteen years old, Josef Lewkowicz became a number, prisoner 85314. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, he and his father were separated from their family and herded to the Kraków-Plaszów concentration camp. Forced to carry out hard labour in brutal conditions, and to live under the constant threat of extreme violence and sudden death, before the war was over Josef would witness the unique horrors of six of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee.From salt mines to forced marches, summary executions to Amstetten, where prisoners were used as human shields in Allied bombing, Josef lived under the spectre of death for many years. When he was liberated from Ebensee at the end of the war, conditions were amongst the worst witnessed by allied forces.With his freedom, Josef returned home to find that he was the only one left alive in an extended family of 150. Compelled by the need to do something to avenge that loss, he joined the Jewish police while still in a displaced persons' camp, and was recruited as an intelligence officer for the US Army who gave him a team to search for Nazis in hiding.Whilst rounding up SS leaders, he played a critical role in identifying and bringing to justice his greatest tormentor, the Butcher of Plaszow, Amon Göth, played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. He then committed his life to helping the orphaned children of the Holocaust rebuild their lives.The Survivor is Josef's extraordinary testimony.

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The definitive account of the disastrous siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, featuring never-before-seen documents, photographs, and interviews, from former investigative reporter and bestselling author Jeff Guinn.Waco breaks new ground that will change the perception of the dramatic events that happened in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Among other revelations, the book shows how David Koresh directly based his famous End Time prophecies on the writings of a previous “prophet” laying claim to the name Koresh—Cyrus Teed, in Fort Myers, Florida, in the late 1890s. More than a dozen former AFT agents who participated in the initial February 28, 1993 raid on Mount Carmel speak for the first time on the record about the poor decisions of their raid commanders that led to this deadly confrontation. They also provided Guinn with documents and photographs that have never been published. An FBI agent/analyst who was involved in the fifty-one-day siege offers fresh information about why the FBI agent in charge chose to end the siege with the use of CS gas and about a failed FBI cover-up afterward. There is also documentation of the direct links between the Branch Davidian tragedy and the modern militia movement in America—notorious conspiracist Alex Jones is a part of the Waco story. Jeff Guinn puts you right alongside the ATF agents as they embarked on the disastrous initial assault, unaware that the Davidians knew they were coming and were armed and prepared to resist—which the agents had been told would not happen. Drawing on new eyewitness accounts, Jeff Guinn again does what he did with his bestselling books about Charles Manson and Jim Jones, shedding new light on a story that everyone thinks they know.

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The extraordinary life and crimes of heiress-turned-revolutionary Rose Dugdale, who in 1974 became the only woman to pull off a major art heist.In the world of crime, there exists an unusual commonality between those who steal art and those who repeatedly kill: they are almost exclusively male. But, as with all things, there is always an outlier—someone who bucks the trend, defying the reliable profiles and leaving investigators and researchers scratching their heads. In the history of major art heists, that outlier is Rose Dugdale. Dugdale’s life is singularly notorious. Born into extreme wealth, she abandoned her life as an Oxford-trained PhD and heiress to join the cause of Irish Republicanism. While on the surface she appears to be the British version of Patricia Hearst, she is anything but. Dugdale ran head-first towards the action, spearheading the first aerial terrorist attack in British history and pulling off the biggest art theft of her time. In 1974, she led a gang into the opulent Russborough House in Ireland and made off with millions in prized paintings, including works by Goya, Gainsborough, and Rubens, as well as Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid by the mysterious master Johannes Vermeer. Dugdale thus became—to this day—the only woman to pull off a major art heist. And as Anthony Amore explores in The Woman Who Stole Vermeer, it’s likely that this was not her only such heist. The Woman Who Stole Vermeer is Rose Dugdale’s story, from her idyllic upbringing in Devonshire and her presentation to Elizabeth II as a debutante to her university years and her eventual radical lifestyle. Her life of crime and activism is at turns unbelievable and awe-inspiring, and sure to engross readers.

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This is the definitive autobiography of John Lydon, one of the most recognizable icons in the annals of music history. As Johnny Rotten, he was the lead singer of the Sex Pistols - the world's most notorious band, who shot to fame in the mid-1970s with singles such as 'Anarchy in the UK' and 'God Save the Queen'. Via his music and invective he spearheaded a generation of young people across the world who were clamouring for change - and found it in the style and attitude of this most unlikely figurehead.With his next band, Public Image Ltd (PiL) Lydon expressed an equally urgent impulse in his make-up - the constant need to reinvent himself. From their beginnings in 1978 he set the template for a band that continues to challenge and thrive in the 2010s. He also found time for making innovative new dance records with the likes of Afrika Baambaata and Leftfield. Following the release of a solo record in 1997, John took a sabbatical from his music career into other media, most memorably his own Rotten TV show for VH1 and as the most outrageous contestant ever on I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!He then fronted the Megabugsseries and one-off nature documentaries and even turned his hand to a series of much loved TV advertisements for Country Life butter.Lydon has remained a compelling and dynamic figure - both as a musician, and, thanks to his outspoken, controversial, yet always heartfelt and honest statements, as a cultural commentator.The book is a fresh and mature look back on a life full of incident from his beginnings as a sickly child of immigrant Irish parents who grew up in post-war London, to his present status as a vibrant, alternative national hero.

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How the notorious author of The 120 Days of Sodom inspired the surrealists and other avant-garde artists, writers, and filmmakersThe writings of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) present a libertine philosophy of sexual excess and human suffering that refuses to make any concession to law, religion, or public decency. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Alyce Mahon traces how artists of the twentieth century turned to Sade to explore political, sexual, and psychological terror, adapting his imagery of the excessively sexual and terrorized body as a means of liberation from systems of power.Mahon shows how avant-garde artists, writers, dramatists, and filmmakers drew on Sade's "philosophy in the bedroom" to challenge oppressive regimes and their restrictive codes and conventions of gender and sexuality. She provides close analyses of early illustrated editions of Sade's works and looks at drawings, paintings, and photographs by leading surrealists such as André Masson, Leonor Fini, and Man Ray. She explains how Sade's ideas were reflected in the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire and the fiction of Anne Desclos, who wrote her erotic novel, Story of O, as a love letter to critic Jean Paulhan, an admirer of Sade. Mahon explores how Sade influenced the happenings of Jean-Jacques Lebel, the theater of Peter Brook, the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the multimedia art of Paul Chan. She also discusses responses to Sade by feminist theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, and Angela Carter.Beautifully illustrated, The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde demonstrates that Sade inspired generations of artists to imagine new utopian visions of living, push the boundaries of the body and the body politic, and portray the unthinkable in their art.

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Among German crimes of the Second World War, the Nazi massacre of 642 men, women, and children at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944, is one of the most notorious. On that Saturday afternoon, four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town in the rolling farm country of the Limousin. Soldiers marched the men to nearby barns, lined them up, and shot them. They then locked the women and children in the church, shot them, and set the building and the rest of the town on fire. Residents who had been away for the day returned to a blackened scene of horror, carnage, and devastation. In 1946 the French State expropriated and preserved the entire ruins of Oradour. The forty acres of crumbling houses, farms and shops became France's village martyr, set up as a monument to French suffering under the German occupation. Today, the village is a tourist destination, complete with maps and guidebooks. In this first full-scale study of the destruction of Oradour and its remembrance over the half century since the war, Sarah Farmer investigates the prominence of the massacre in French understanding of the national experience under German domination. Through interviews with survivors and village officials, as well as extensive archival research, she pieces together a fascinating history of both a shattering event and its memorial afterlife. Complemented by haunting photographs of the site, Farmer's eloquent dissection of France's national memory addresses the personal and private ways in which, through remembrance, people try to come to terms with enormous loss. Martyred Village will have implications for the study of the history and sociology of memory, testimonies about remembrances of war and the Holocaust, and postmodern concerns with the presentation of the past.

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In September 2007, a packed courtroom in St. George, Utah, sat hushed as Elissa Wall, the star witness against polygamous sect leader Warren Jeffs, gave captivating testimony of how Jeffs forced her to marry her first cousin at age fourteen. This harrowing and vivid account proved to be the most compelling evidence against Jeffs, showing the harsh realities of this closed community and the lengths to which Jeffs went in order to control the sect's women. Now, in this courageous memoir, Elissa Wall tells the incredible and inspirational story of how she emerged from the confines of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) and helped bring one of America's most notorious criminals to justice. Offering a child's perspective on life in the FLDS, Wall discusses her tumultuous youth, and detailing how Warren Jeffs's influence over the church twisted its already rigid beliefs in dangerous new directions. But even in those bleak times, Wall retained a sliver of hope that one day she would find a way out, and one snowy night that came in the form of a rugged stranger named Lamont Barlow. Their chance encounter set in motion a friendship and eventual romance that gave her the strength she needed to break free from her past and sever the chains of the church. In "Stolen Innocence", Wall delves into the difficult months on the outside that led her to come forward against him, working with prosecutors on one of the biggest criminal cases in Utah's history, so that other girls still inside the church might be spared her cruel fate. More than a tale of survival and freedom, "Stolen Innocence" is the story of one heroic woman who stood up for what was right and reclaimed her life.

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'Drawing on the stories of the soldiers who were there, this dramatic history of the SAS is full of bravado. Forged to fight guerrillas in the sweltering jungles of Malaya... Ryan writes with the authority of a man familiar with every nuance of the regiment's tactics, training, weapons and equipment.' - Sunday Times CultureTasked with storming mountain strongholds in the desert. Trained to hunt down the world's most wanted terrorists. This is the extraordinary story of 22 SAS. The history of the modern SAS is one of the great successes of post-war Britain. Since it was revived in 1950 to combat Communist insurgents, the Regiment has gone from strength to strength, fighting covert wars in Oman, Borneo, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Persian Gulf and beyond. In the process, it has become one of the most indispensable, and at times controversial, units in the British armyToday, the SAS is regarded as the world's leading Special Forces unit, renowned for its demanding Selection course and its relentless ability to adapt to the changing nature of warfare. More than anything else, however, it is the determination and ingenuity of the SAS soldiers that has made the Regiment what it is today. Drawing on his extensive network of contacts and his own experiences, Chris Ryan tells the story of the men on the ground. From the earliest patrols in the Malayan jungle, through to the storming of the Iranian Embassy, the daring raids behind enemy lines in the Gulf War, and up-to-minute missions to capture or kill notorious terrorists - this is the gripping, no-holds-barred account of Regiment operations. Above all, it is a story of elite soldiers fighting, and triumphing, against seemingly impossible odds.

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'Darkly entertaining police procedural with a difference' CRIME REVIEW'Fizzes with life' - STUART TURTON, Costa First Novel Award winner'A thrilling ride with dark humour, action and a touching side that's hard to forget' SUN five stars (book of the week)WHO BETTER TO SOLVE A MURDER THAN A DEAD DETECTIVE?When Detective Inspector Joe Lazarus storms a Lincolnshire farmhouse, he expects to bring down a notorious drug gang; instead, he discovers his own dead body and a spirit guide called Daisy-May. She's there to enlist him to the Dying Squad, a spectral police force made up of the recently deceased. Joe soon realises there are fates far worse than death. To escape being stuck in purgatory, he must solve his own murder. Reluctantly partnering with Daisy-May, Joe faces dangers from both the living and the dead in the quest to find his killer - before they kill again.Recruits are loving THE DYING SQUAD:'At times evocative of Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim series, but without its hardboiled cynicism, this is an impressive and memorable debut' CRIME TIME'Whip-smart, fresh with a dash of dark humour, The Dying Squad is a wildly entertaining read. Highly recommended' - ADAM HAMDY, Sunday Times bestselling author'Adam has crafted something unique with The Dying Squad, mashing fantasy and crime together in a way I've not seen before . . . I'm sure it will be a huge success' - JAMES OSWALD, author of the Sunday Times bestselling Inspector McLean series'Superbly plotted and packs an emotional heft rarely seen in a debut' - MW CRAVEN, CWA Gold Dagger Award winner 'Funny, creepy and compelling' - ANNA STEPHENS, acclaimed author of Godblind 'Grim, wry and inventive, a twisting tale with both guts and heart. Never has Lincolnshire seemed more desolate, or more menacing' - DAVID WRAGG, The Black Hawks

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In 1445 a fifteen-year-old French girl left her homeland to marry the son of the great warrior Henry V. Sixteen years later, her husband had lost his throne and she had fled into exile. For a decade, she struggled to reclaim the throne of England before her final and shattering defeat at the Battle of Tewkesbury. It marked the final destruction of the House of Lancaster by Yorkist King Edward IV and his brothers. Margaret lost more than her family: she was also vilified. Shakespeare cast her as a sadistic killer who murdered the noble Richard, Duke of York. History cast her as a manipulative seductress whose destructive ambition was a major cause of the Wars of the Roses. Margaret of Anjou remains one of the most notorious consorts in medieval history, the queen we love to hate. But is her reputation deserved, or was she simply caught between the machinations and rivalries of powerful men? By examining Margaret’s life and actions in detail, this biography reveals a new side to the last foreign-born queen of medieval England. Margaret came from a family of strong women. Faced with hardship in the first years of her marriage, Margaret’s choices arose from a conviction that it was natural for a woman to take control in the absence of male leadership. A wealth of records have been left behind, allowing historians to investigate Margaret’s career as a beloved wife and, later, as the leader of a political faction struggling to secure the crown for her family. If the course of history had run differently, would she instead be considered a heroic warrior queen today – perhaps even England’s Joan of Arc?

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In DEAD SKY, Tami Hoag - the Sunday Times bestselling author of A THIN DARK LINE - returns with book three in the gripping Kovac & Liska detective series as they investigate a shocking family murder.It was a crime so brutal it changed the lives of even the most hardened homicide police officers. The Haas family murders left a scar on the community nothing can erase, but convicting the alleged killer, Karl Dahl, is a start. Only Judge Carey Moore seems to be standing in the way. Her ruling that Dahl's prior criminal record is inadmissible as evidence against him raises a public outcry - and puts the judge in grave danger.When an unknown assailant attacks Carey Moore in a parking garage, Detectives Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska are called in to investigate and keep the judge from further harm. Then Karl Dahl escapes custody, and the judge is kidnapped from her home even as the police sit outside watching her house. With no time to spare, the detectives are pulled down a strange dark trail of smoke and mirrors, where no one is who they seem, and everyone is guilty of something.Watch out for the next title in the Kovac and Liska crime thriller seriesAs Detectives Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska stand over the brutally disfigured remains of an adolescent girl in the early hours of New Year's Day, they suspect they've stumbled across the ninth victim of the notorious Doc Holiday. A horribly sadistic killer who strikes during the holidays. But with the girl's identity obscured by her injuries, they have little to go on. Until Liska discovers that one of her son's friends - Gray - is missing... THE 9TH GIRL is the next gripping thriller in the series.

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I was told to come alone. I was not to carry any identification, and would have to leave my cell phone, audio recorder, watch, and purse at my hotel . . .For her whole life, Souad Mekhennet, a reporter for the Washington Post who was born and educated in Germany, has had to balance the two sides of her upbringing - Muslim and Western. She has also sought to provide a mediating voice between these cultures, which too often misunderstand each other.In this compelling and evocative memoir, we accompany Mekhennet as she journeys behind the lines of jihad, starting in the German neighbourhoods where the 9/11 plotters were radicalised and the Iraqi neighbourhoods where Sunnis and Shia turned against one another, and culminating on the Turkish/Syrian border region where ISIS is a daily presence. In her travels across the Middle East and North Africa, she documents her chilling run-ins with various intelligence services and shows why the Arab Spring never lived up to its promise. She then returns to Europe, first in London, where she uncovers the identity of the notorious ISIS executioner 'Jihadi John', and then in France, Belgium and her native Germany, where terror has come to the heart of Western civilisation.Mekhennet's background has given her unique access to some of the world's most wanted men, who generally refuse to speak to Western journalists. She is not afraid to face personal danger to reach out to individuals in the inner circles of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS and their affiliates; when she is told to come alone to an interview, she never knows what awaits at her destination.Souad Mekhennet is an ideal guide to introduce us to the human beings behind the ominous headlines, as she shares her transformative journey with us. Hers is a story you will not soon forget.

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Arden of Faversham * A Woman Killed with Kindness * The Witch of Edmonton * The English Traveller In about 1590, an unknown dramatist had the idea of writing a tragedy about the lives of ordinary people, instead of the genre's usual complement of kings and queens and politicians. His play, Arden of Faversham, inaugurated a new genre of 'domestic' drama, set in near-contemporary England and concerned with issues of marriage, crime, and property rather than war and power. Arden dramatizes a notorious murder case of forty years earlier, in which a wealthy husband was killed by his wife and her lover. In Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, a wife is caught by her husband in bed with his best friend, only to find that he takes unusual reprisals. The Witch of Edmonton combines a true-life story of witchcraft with a fictitious tale of bigamy and wife-murder, and The English Traveller deals with the unexpected and unwelcome changes people find when they return home after a lengthy absence. Part of the Oxford English Drama series, this edition has modern-spelling texts; a critical introduction that outlines the way all four plays raise powerful and complex questions about the English society in which their tragic events unfold; wide-ranging notes; a chronology of the plays from their sources to recent performance; and appendices relating to two of the plays: who wrote Arden of Faversham and when did Heywood write The English Traveller. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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A definitive new account of the professional and personal life of one of Hollywood's most unforgettable, influential stars. Archie Leach was a poorly educated, working-class boy from a troubled family living in the backstreets of Bristol. Cary Grant was Hollywood's most debonair film star--the embodiment of worldly sophistication. Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend tells the incredible story of how a sad, neglected boy became the suave, glamorous star many know and idolize. The first biography to be based on Grant's own personal papers, this book takes us on a fascinating journey from the actor's difficult childhood through years of struggle in music halls and vaudeville, a hit-and-miss career in Broadway musicals, and three decades of film stardom during Hollywood's golden age. Leaving no stone unturned, Cary Grant delves into all aspects of Grant's life, from the bitter realities of his impoverished childhood to his trailblazing role in Hollywood as a film star who defied the studio system and took control of his own career. Highlighting Grant's genius as an actor and a filmmaker, author Mark Glancy examines the crucial contributions Grant made to such classic films as Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Notorious (1946), An Affair to Remember (1957), North by Northwest (1959), Charade (1963) and Father Goose (1964). Glancy also explores Grant's private life with new candor and insight throughout the book's nine sections, illuminating how Grant's search for happiness and fulfillment lead him to having his first child at the age of 62 and embarking on his fifth marriage at the age of 77. With this biography--complete with a chronological filmography of the actor's work--Glancy provides a definitive account of the professional and personal life of one of Hollywood's most unforgettable, influential stars.

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The incredible true story behind the creation of a masterpiece of world literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment'A dazzling literary detective story' GuardianIn the summer of 1865, the former exile Dostoevsky found himself trapped in a cheap hotel in Wiesbaden, unable to leave until he'd paid the bill. Having lost the last of his money at the roulette table, his debts hung heavy over his head, his epileptic seizures were worsening, and his wife and beloved brother were dead. Desperate, a story came to him, a way to write himself out of his predicament: the murderer Raskolnikov, the hot, disorienting swirl of St Petersburg, the axe, the terrible crime, and the murderer's paranoia. The book was Crime and Punishment, and from the moment it was published it was a sensation. But how did this haunting tale of guilt come to be, and why does it still hold such a sway over us all these years later? The Sinner and the Saint gives us the story of the creation of a work of literature that has bewitched readers for over a century, and of the two men so central to it: Dostoevsky himself, and Pierre François Lacenaire, a notorious murderer and glamorous egoist who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s and whose sensational story provided the germ of the novel. As reports of his trial tore through Europe, readers asked themselves: could the instincts of nihilism, the philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries, also drive a man to murder? Showing how both men's lives were directed by the intoxicating new ideas swirling around Europe in the nineteenth century, The Sinner and the Saint also reveals why they still appal and entice us today. Thrilling and definitive, this is the story of a masterpiece.

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***Winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel***Just Like Home is a darkly gothic thriller from nationally bestselling author Sarah Gailey, perfect for fans of Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House.Going home is always hard.For Vera, going home means returning to the notorious Crowder House where her serial killer father murdered his victims and buried their bodies beneath. Then notes start to appear in Vera's father's handwriting - but they can't be from him. He has been dead for years. Vera thought that the house had given up all its secrets but now she must uncover how deep the rot goes. READERS LOVE JUST LIKE HOME:'If you are a fan of Stephen King, then this book will be the one for you''Along with an engaging plot, the writing is compelling and beautiful. This is a book that I feel will stick with me for a long time to come''A creepy and dark read and definitely not what I was expecting. I could not put this book down and finally turned the last page in the wee hours' 'I was actually terrified while reading it, and the emotion lingered long after I finished it. It kept me up all night' 'A slow burn thriller with an unnerving protagonist and an atmospheric setting? Yes, please!' 'It was dark, creepy and haunting and made me sleep with a light on'**************************************************PRAISE FOR THE ECHO WIFE:'An edge-of-your-seat tale . . . a unique, thrilling adventure, with truly unexpected twists and turns the whole way through' Independent'It's an unpredictable story . . . chilling . . . for an escape from our current stuck-at-home situation, The Echo Wife could be for you' Daily Record'Looking for one of the best science fiction books wrapped up in a mystery? Look no further . . . Gloriously inventive and full of surprises' Woman & Home Online

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'Fennell has created one of the most compelling characters in UK crime fiction' - M.W. CRAVEN'Fennell's agenda here is the ratcheting up of suspense and that's done with aplomb' - FINANCIAL TIMES'Totally compelling' - ARAMINTA HALLWHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T MAKE A SOUND . . .The stunning new crime thriller from one of British crime writing's brightest talents, and one of the twistiest, most gripping and emotional reads of the year.______________________A father is murdered in the dead of night in his London home, his head wrapped tightly in tape, a crude sad face penned over his facial features. But the victim's only child is left alive and unharmed at the scene.Met Police detectives Grace Archer and Harry Quinn have more immediate concerns. Notorious gangster Frankie White has placed a target on Archer's back, and there's no one he won't harm to get to her.Then a second family is murdered, leaving young Uma Whitmore as the only survivor.With a serial killer at large, DI Archer and DS Quinn must stay alive long enough to find the connection between these seemingly random victims. Can they do it before another child is orphaned?______________________What your favourite crime authors are saying about David Fennell:'A truly extraordinary crime novel' - LYNDA LA PLANTE'A stunning start to a fantastic new series' - M.W. CRAVEN'Involved me in a way that few thrillers do, kept me alert and on-edge right up through the deeply satisfying finale' - AJ FINN'I flew through it . . . Tense, gripping and brilliantly inventive' - SIMON LELIC'Unsettling, fast-paced, suspenseful and gripping . . . Excellent' - WILL DEAN'A serial killer thriller with the darkest of hearts' - FIONA CUMMINS'A tense-as-hell high-body count page turner, but a rarer thing too - one that's also full of genuine warmth and humanity' - WILLIAM SHAW'Chilling, unsettling and wonderfully atmospheric' - BRIAN McGILLOWAY

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A SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, SPECTATOR, FINANCIAL TIMES, GUARDIAN, BBC HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR'This is the biography we have been awaiting for 400 years' Hilary Mantel'A masterpiece' Dan Jones, Sunday TimesThomas Cromwell is one of the most famous - or notorious - figures in English history. Born in obscurity in Putney, he became a fixer for Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s. After Wolsey's fall, Henry VIII promoted him to a series of ever greater offices, and by the end of the 1530s he was effectively running the country for the King. That decade was one of the most momentous in English history: it saw a religious break with the Pope, unprecedented use of parliament, the dissolution of all monasteries. Cromwell was central to all this, but establishing his role with precision, at a distance of nearly five centuries and after the destruction of many of his papers at his own fall, has been notoriously difficult.Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography is much the most complete and persuasive life ever written of this elusive figure, a masterclass in historical detective work, making connections not previously seen. It overturns many received interpretations, for example that Cromwell was a cynical, 'secular' politician without deep-felt religious commitment, or that he and Anne Boleyn were allies because of their common religious sympathies - in fact he destroyed her. It introduces the many different personalities of these foundational years, all conscious of the 'terrifyingly unpredictable' Henry VIII. MacCulloch allows readers to feel that they are immersed in all this, that it is going on around them.For a time, the self-made 'ruffian' (as he described himself) - ruthless, adept in the exercise of power, quietly determined in religious revolution - was master of events. MacCulloch's biography for the first time reveals his true place in the making of modern England and Ireland, for good and ill.

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*Don’t miss The Stranger in Our Bed… Now a major motion picture starring Samantha Bond, Emily Berrington and Ben Lloyd-Hughes* ‘One of the deadliest female assassins I’ve ever encountered in fiction’ Brendan DuBois, New York Times-bestselling author of The End with James Patterson Killing Eve meets Jason Bourne… The house of killers always had one objective: to train a class of warriors that would elevate the Network from the national to the international – the amateur to the elite. It was the perfect poison… Radicalisation by virtue of not knowing any different. They never expected their most notorious child to claw his way back to the beating heart of MI5. Consumed by hurt and rage, Michael Kensington has his own objective: Neva. But as the body count rises like a tide that will sweep them all into oblivion, Neva will stop at nothing to make him understand that everything is at stake. Because there’s only one way to push back against the tide… Together. Kill a Spy is the third jaw-dropping instalment in The House of Killers series, a captivating spy thriller perfect for fans of Caroline Kepnes and Alex Gerlis. Praise for The House of Killers: ‘Fast-paced and impeccable, this is writing at its very best … It was almost dawn by the time I finished … It demands to be read in a single sitting. An absolute triumph!’ Awais Khan, author of In the Company of Strangers ‘Wow, what a read! Buckle up for a thrilling ride through a labyrinth of secrets, lies and betrayals, in a shadowy world where no one and nothing can be trusted. And where death is just the slash of a knife away’ Abbie Frost, author of The Guesthouse

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In rabbinic parlance, A"Japheth in the tents of ShemA" (Genesis 9:27) has become a proverbial expression for the interaction between Greek and Jewish cultures. The present volume contains 15 studies exploring a wide variety of aspects of the meeting of these cultures in antiquity. In the past 30 years the manifold manifestations of 'Jewish Hellenism' have become the focus of intensive research. The author of this book has played an active part in this field and the essays presented here are the fruits of his most recent research. He investigates, among other things, the extent to which Greek had become the daily language of the Jews (and the Samaritans) in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine; the knowledge of Greek medical lore and science among the rabbis; the development of Greek forms of the synagogal Eighteen Benedictions; the Jewish participation in the Hellenistic-Roman debate about antediluvian knowledge ('wisdom from before the flood'); the background of the surprising phenomenon of voluntary celibacy among ancient Jews; the role of the veneration of the tombs of biblical prophets in Jewish popular religion; the work of the Judaeo-Greek alchemist Maria, who happens to be the first female Jewish author we know of; the life and works of the most notorious anti-Semite from pagan antiquity, Apion, and Josephus' response to him; the Samaritan diaspora in Rome; the attractiveness of Judaism for Christians; et multa cetera. Pieter W. van der Horst (1946) is professor of New Testament and of the Jewish and Hellenistic world of early Christianity at the Faculty of Theology of Utrecht University. He published some 250 articles and books in the fields of early Judaism, ancient Christianity, and Graeco-Roman culture, with a special emphasis on their interactions. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Contemporarily Theology and Political Sciences are on the way of reinventing Erik Peterson (1890-1960) as a central figure in the discourses of 1920s to 1950s. The volumes of his "Ausgewählte Schriften" give us insight into a thinking of high inner tensions, which was developed in an intellectual exchange with many important dialogue partners. First of all, Peterson's concept of the Political is of a high interest. Peterson formed this concept in a constant discussion with the famous and notorious jurist Carl Schmitt. In the early 30s their friendship an intellectual partnership broke because of their different statements to the totalized Political and the national socialist ideology. Peterson confronted the political Totalitarianism with an apocalyptical concept and image of the church as an independent public sphere, which has its main publicity through the worship in front of God's throne in the community of the earthly church and the heavenly assembly of angels. From this specific concept of publicity Peterson got an eminently critical power of judgement against political totalitarianism, which he viewed as the consequent self fulfilment of modernity. On his way Peterson converted from Lutheran Protestantism to Roman Catholicism in 1930. Until today his strongly liturgical and dogmatical shaped theology is a challenge for the search for a forthcoming ecumenical church.This volume is the first monograph about Peterson from a protestant perspective. Roger Mielke focuses on the concepts of the public and the political in Peterson's work - especially in relationship to Schmitt's project of a "Political Theology" and the intellectual exchange between Peterson and Schmitt. The author views the different contemporary discourses where the motives of Peterson's work are influential and has a special interest in the "Radical Orthodoxy"-discourse which is not yet received broadly in German speaking theology.

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A stunning investigation of the life and legend of Mexican kingpin Joaquín Archivaldo “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, building on Noah Hurowitz’s revelatory coverage for Rolling Stone of El Chapo’s federal drug-trafficking trial.This is the true story of how El Chapo built the world’s wealthiest and most powerful drug-trafficking operation, based on months’ worth of trial testimony and dozens of interviews with cartel gunmen, Mexican journalists and political figures, Chapo’s family members, and the DEA agents who brought him down. Over the course of three decades, El Chapo was responsible for smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine, marijuana, heroin, meth, and fentanyl around the world, becoming in the process the most celebrated and reviled drug lord since Pablo Escobar. El Chapo waged ruthless wars against his rivals and former allies, plunging vast areas of Mexico into unprecedented levels of violence, even as many in his home state of Sinaloa continued to view him as a hero. This unputdownable book, written by a great new talent, brings El Chapo’s exploits into a focus that previous profiles have failed to capture. Hurowitz digs in deep beyond the legends and delves into El Chapo’s life and legacy—not just the hunt for him, revealing some of the most dramatic and often horrifying moments of his notorious career, including the infamous prison escapes, brutal murders, multi-million-dollar government payoffs, and the paranoia and narcissism that led to his downfall. From the evolution of organized crime in Mexico to the militarization of the drug war to the devastation wrought on both sides of the border by the introduction of synthetic opioids like fentanyl, this book is a gripping and comprehensive work of investigative, on-the-ground reporting.

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Madness and Power. Can the insane rule? Can insanity be a leadership quality? Scott Rank says yes (well, sometimes) in this fascinating look at nine of history’s most notorious rulers, from the Roman emperor Caligula to the North Korean Communist dictator Kim Jong-il. Rank paints intimate portraits of these deeply flawed but powerful men, examining the role that madness played in their lives, the repercussions of their madness on history, and what their madness can tell us about the times in which they lived. In History’s 9 Most Insane Rulers, you will meet: • King Charles VI of France, who thought he was made of glass • Sultan Ibrahim I, who was driven mad by the sadistic succession battles of the Ottoman Empire • Caligula, who built temples to himself and whose reign highlighted the lethal tensions between the power of the new Imperial Rome and the prerogatives of the old Roman Republic • The Russian tsar who became known as Ivan “the Terrible” • King George III of Britain, who not only lost his American colonies, but lost his mind as well • Bavaria’s “Mad” King Ludwig II, who left the world richer for his fabulous fairy tale castles and his patronage of the composer Richard Wagner Insane rulers did not die off with the last of the mad monarchs who inherited their power. Rank also examines the rise to power of crazed modern rulers, such as Idi Amin, who began as a lowly army cook and rose to the presidency of Uganda, and Saparmurat Niyazov, who ruled Turkmenistan and promoted a bizarre cult of personality around himself. Both entertaining and illuminating, History’s 9 Most Insane Rulers is a must-read for anyone interested in the role insanity has played in history.

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Most of us spend our lives talking ourselves out of things. But what could you accomplish if you never held yourself back? What if, despite your fears, you went for broke every time? You might live a life as extraordinary as the one Stanley Weiss has lived for nearly a century. A skinny Jewish kid from Philadelphia training to fight and likely die in the U.S. invasion of Japan in 1945, Stanley Weiss came home to the death of his loving but weak father, who left his mother penniless. Vowing on the spot not to let his insecurities limit him as they had his father, Weiss pledged that his mother would never have to worry. Later, a humiliation suffered at the hands of his wealthy girlfriend's famous father ignited in him a determination to better himself in every way and live life to the fullest. Inspired by a Humphrey Bogart movie, Weiss moved to a foreign country to hunt for treasure -- where Rule Number One was "Don't Die". Along the way, his zest for living has taken him from the company of legendary artists and poets in Mexico, to writers and beatniks in 1960s San Francisco and Hollywood; from drunken nights with a notorious spy to friendships with three of the men who played James Bond; from glamorous parties in Gstaad and Phuket to power politics in London and Washington, DC. A story of growth, tenacious focus, and good humour, it stretches from the days of "Don't Die" to Weiss's response when asked why business executives were interested in preventing nuclear war: "Being dead is bad for business". For those who believe the world is shaped by ordinary people who push themselves to do extraordinary things, Stanley Weiss's story will inspire and surprise while reminding us all that being dead is bad for business -- and being boring is bad for life.

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Business lately has been deadly for Ike Kelly. Recent unexpected gunplay has whittled his detective agency down to a single operative: a man named John Henry Cole. Cole is the only man left when a new assignment comes in from a former lover of Kelly’s, a woman operating an escort service in the new mining camp of Deadwood in Dakota Territory. Three of the young women working for her have been murdered, and someone is trying to cover up their deaths.It’s a dangerous job, and Cole is advised that he must take every precaution—as if he needed such advice. The legendary Wild Bill Hickok was recently murdered at Deadwood, and Calamity Jane Canary and Doc Holliday are among Cole’s potential suspects. Add that to a corrupt constable and a bounty hunter who just happens to be an old enemy of Cole’s, and it’s clear there are many who will not welcome his arrival in Deadwood. Cole is a lonely man in a lonely profession, and finding a murderer in the wild mining camp could be less of a challenge than simply staying alive.Using real-life characters and settings from one of the most notorious times in the history of the Wild West, veteran author Bill Brooks spins another edge-of-your-seat thriller.Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction that takes place in the old West. Westerns—books about outlaws, sheriffs, chiefs and warriors, cowboys and Indians—are a genre in which we publish regularly. Our list includes international bestselling authors like Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour, and many more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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Lust and adventure meet history in this ride through roughshod America that rings truer than any history book.Uncovered from the ashes of the British Consulate in Trieste, an archaeological excavation has found the once-thought destroyed and very private journal of Richard Burton, a man regarded as perhaps one of the greatest intellects, rogues, and colorful adventurers of the nineteenth century. In the journal’s pages a different man comes to light: here is Richard Burton unplugged and uncensored—the Renaissance man of his age fully revealed.Presented as a transcription of the once-lost journal, Ruffian Dick follows the famous British adventurer into the true wilderness of American politics and the Wild West, all while the country is on the brink of the Civil War. Based on the historical fact that Burton actually did visit the United States in 1860, and traveled cross-country to study and write about the then-notorious polygamous Mormons in their stronghold at Salt Lake City, Joseph Kennedy’s Doctorow-esque mixture of fact and fiction takes the reader deep into that place and time.With Kennedy’s research and eye for historic detail, Ruffian Dick (as Burton was known to his contemporaries) is an adventure tale that brings to light a side of the famed explorer never seen before.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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A New York Times Best Seller! Implicating Robert F. Kennedy in Marilyn Monroe’s murder, this is the first book to name the LAPD officers who accompanied him to her home, provide details about how the Kennedys used bribes to silence one of the ambulance drivers, and specify how the cover-up was aided by a noted pathologist’s lies.Since Marilyn Monroe died among suspicious circumstances on the night of August 4, 1962, there have been queries and theories, allegations and investigations, but no definitive evidence about precisely what happened and who was involved . . . until now.Here renowned MM expert Jay Margolis and New York Times bestselling author Richard Buskin finally lay to rest more than fifty years of wild speculation and misguided assertions by actually naming, for the first time, the screen goddess’s killer while utilizing the testimony of eye-witnesses to exactly what took place inside her house on Fifth Helena Drive in Los Angeles’ Brentwood neighborhood.This blockbuster volume blows the lid off the world’s most notorious and talked-about celebrity death, and in the process exposes not only the truth about an iconic star’s tragic final hours, but also how a legendary American politician used powerful resources to protect what many still perceive as his untarnished reputation.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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With the war between the Mexican state and the drug traffickers operating within its borders having claimed over 70,000 lives since 2006, noted journalist and author Michael Deibert zeroes in on the story of the notorious Gulf Cartel, their deadly war with their former allies Los Zetas, the cartel's connections in Mexican politics and what its trajectory means for Mexico’s--and America’s--future. Punctuated by the disappearance of busloads of full of people from Mexican highways, heavy-weapon firefights in once-picturesque colonial towns and the discovery of mass graves, nowhere has the violence of Mexico’s drug war been more intense than directly across the border from East Texas, the scene of a scorched-earth war between two of Mexico’s largest drug trafficking organizations: The Gulf Cartel, a criminal body with roots stretching back to Prohibition, and Los Zetas, a group famous for their savagery and largely made up of deserters form Mexico's armed forces. From the valleys and sierras of rural Tamaulipas and Nuevo León to the economic hub of Monterrey, the violence rivals anything seen in the more well-known narco war in Ciudad Juárez, 830 miles to the west. Combining dozens of interviews that the author has conducted over the last six years in Mexico and other countries in the region along with a vast reserve of secondary source material, In the Shadow of Saint Death gives U.S. readers the story of the war being waged along our border in the voices of the cartel hitmen, law enforcement officials, politicians, shopkeepers, migrants and children living inside of it year-round. Through their stories, the book will pose provocative questions about the direction and consequence of U.S. drug policy and the militarized approach to combating the narcotics trade on both sides of the border.

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The camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau were an important part of the Nazis' final solution to the Jewish question. Over one million people were murdered in its gas chambers and tens of thousands of prisoners were worked to death in the nearby sub-camps. Others were held in the quarantine area before they were deported to work in the Third Reich. This is the story of the development of Auschwitz from a Polish prison camp into a concentration camp, and a thorough account of the building of Birkenau and the gas chambers, which grew into industrial killing machines. Rawson relates what life was like for prisoners, revealing where the unsuspecting new arrivals came from and how they were greeted at the camp with the humiliating selection process; how many were tricked into entering the gas chambers, while others were stripped of their identity and put to work; how prisoners struggled to survive on a poor diet and no health care; how they faced a grinding daily routine with frequent punishments; and how the camps were organized from the commandants, their assistants and the guards, to the kapos and stuben who supervised work parties and the barracks.He details how a few brave souls tried to resist, how even fewer made a break for freedom and the heartbreaking story of liberation and life afterwards. There are instructions on how to get to nearby Krakow - an ideal base - and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Information on how best to spend your time there is also included, making this an invaluable book that is both a vivid account of life in the concentration camps and an essential guide for visitors who want to explore the past of this notorious site.

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Artist John Decker was born in Germany in 1895, but found his fame in Hollywood during the 1930s and '40s. At the age of 13, he was abandoned by his parents in London, where he found work painting scenery for the theatre circuit. Taken under the wing of a talented forger, Decker developed a remarkable ability to recreate works by the old Masters—a skill that helped land him in jail, but also brought him thousands of dollars throughout his life. After stowing away to America in 1921, Decker became a caricaturist for a New York paper. In 1928 he left for Hollywood and became friends with many of its biggest names, including John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, and W. C. Fields. Though Decker struggled to find film work as an artist and set designer, his drawings appeared in numerous publications from coast to coast. He was commissioned to do paintings of, among others, the Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo, Mickey Rooney, and Charlie Chaplin (who bought twelve of his portraits). Eventually, Decker's paintings were exhibited in Rome, New York, and Los Angeles, and his creations graced museum walls alongside many of the great artists, including Van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Daumier. Stories on Decker, his art, and his exhibitions, appeared in all the major newspapers, as well as such magazines as Esquire, Time, and Newsweek. With all of his amazing talent—and scandalous exploits—it's surprising that the name of John Decker isn't more familiar today. In Bohemian Rogue: The Life of Hollywood Artist John Decker, author Stephen C. Jordan seeks to resurrect this forgotten figure of 20th century art. Jordan delves into the mystery of a man who overcame a difficult childhood and notorious apprenticeship to become a respected artist (and outrageous party-giver) in Hollywood. Bohemian Rogue chronicles the relatively brief—but eccentric—life of this neglected painter, caricaturist, and sculptor.

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In this blockbuster fantasy series, perfect for fans of Firekeeper’s Daughter and Iron Widow, fate binds two Black teenagers together as they journey into a magical jungle to hunt down a vicious monster.“Rich in magic and mythos, Beasts of Prey is a feast for all the senses.” —Renée Ahdieh, New York Times bestselling author of The BeautifulAn Instant New York Times and Indie BestsellerThere’s no such thing as magic in the broken city of Lkossa, especially for sixteen-year-old Koffi, who indentured to the notorious Night Zoo, knows the fearsome creatures in her care and paying off her family's debts to secure their eventual freedom can be her only focus. But the night those she loves are gravely threatened by the Zoo’s cruel master, Koffi unleashes a power she doesn’t fully understand, upending her life completely.As the second son of a decorated hero, Ekon is all but destined to become a Son of the Six—an elite warrior—and uphold a family legacy. But on the night of his final rite of passage, Ekon encounters not only the Shetani—a vicious monster that has plagued the city for nearly a century and stalks his nightmares—but Koffi who seems to have the power to ward off the beast. Koffi’s power ultimately saves Ekon, but his choice to let her flee dooms his hopes of becoming a warrior.Desperate to redeem himself, Ekon vows to hunt the Shetani and end its reign of terror, but he can’t do it alone. Koffi and Ekon form a tentative alliance and together enter the Greater Jungle, a world steeped in wild, frightening magic and untold dangers. The hunt begins. But it quickly becomes unclear whether they are the hunters or the hunted.“The hunt for your next YA fantasy book trilogy obsession has ended.” —Entertainment Weekly

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In the autumn of 1777, near Saratoga, New York, an inexperienced and improvised American army led by General Horatio Gates faced off against the highly trained British and German forces led by General John Burgoyne. The British strategy in confronting the Americans in upstate New York was to separate rebellious New England from the other colonies. Despite inferior organization and training, the Americans exploited access to fresh reinforcements of men and materiel, and ultimately handed the British a stunning defeat. The American victory, for the first time in the war, confirmed that independence from Great Britain was all but inevitable. Assimilating the archaeological remains from the battlefield along with the many letters, journals, and memoirs of the men and women in both camps, Dean Snow's 1777 provides a richly detailed narrative of the two battles fought at Saratoga over the course of thirty-three tense and bloody days. While the contrasting personalities of Gates and Burgoyne are well known, they are but two of the many actors who make up the larger drama of Saratoga. Snow highlights famous and obscure participants alike, from the brave but now notorious turncoat Benedict Arnold to Frederika von Riedesel, the wife of a British major general who later wrote an important eyewitness account of the battles. The author, an archaeologist who excavated on the Saratoga battlefield, combines a vivid sense of time and place--with details on weather, terrain, and technology--and a keen understanding of the adversaries' motivations, challenges, and heroism into a suspenseful, novel-like account. A must-read for anyone with an interest in American history, 1777 is an intimate retelling of the campaign that tipped the balance in the American War of Independence.

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A new look at the way in which medieval European literature depicts torture and brutality. An ugly subject, but one that needs to be treated thoroughly and comprehensively, with a discreet wit and no excessive relish. These needs are richly satisfied in Larissa Tracy's bold and important book. DEREK PEARSALL, ProfessorEmeritus, Harvard University. Torture - that most notorious aspect of medieval culture and society - has evolved into a dominant mythology, suggesting that the Middle Ages was a period during which sadistic torment wasinflicted on citizens with impunity and without provocation: popular museums displaying such gruesome implements as the rack, the strappado, the gridiron, the wheel, and the Iron Maiden can be found in many modern European cities.These lurid images of medieval torture have re-emerged within recent discussions on American foreign policy and the introduction of torture legislation as a weapon in the "War on Terror", and raised questions about its history and reality, particularly given its proliferation in some literary genres and its relative absence in others. This book challenges preconceived ideas about the prevalence of torture and judicial brutality in medieval society byarguing that their portrayal in literature is not mimetic. Instead, it argues that the depictions of torture and brutality represent satire, critique and dissent; they have didactic and political functions in opposing the statusquo. Torture and brutality are intertextual literary motifs that negotiate cultural anxieties of national identity; by situating these practices outside their own boundaries in the realm of the barbarian "Other", medieval and early-modern authors define themselves and their nations in opposition to them. Works examined range from Chaucer to the Scandinavian sagas to Shakespeare, enabling a true comparative approach to be taken. Larissa Tracy isAssociate Professor, Longwood University.

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In early modern Britain, there was an argument that war at sea, especially war in Spanish America, was an ideal means of warfare, offering the prospect of rich gains at relatively little cost whilst inflicting considerable damageon enemy financial resources. In early modern Britain, there was an argument that war at sea, especially war in Spanish America, was an ideal means of warfare, offering the prospect of rich gains at relatively little cost whilst inflicting considerable damageon enemy financial resources. This book examines that argument, tracing its origin to the glorious memory of Elizabethan maritime war, discussing its supposed economic advantages, and investigating its influence on British politics and naval policy during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13) and after. The book reveals that the alleged economic advantages of war at sea were crucial in attracting the support of politicians of different political stances. It shows how supporters of war at sea, both in the government as well as in the opposition, tried to implement pro-maritime war policy by naval operations, colonial expeditions and by legislation, and how their attempts wereoften frustrated by diplomatic considerations, the incapacity of naval administration, and by conflicting interests between different groups connected to the West Indian colonies and Spanish American trade. It demonstrates how, after the War of the Spanish Succession, arguments for active colonial maritime war continued to be central to political conflict, notably in the opposition propaganda campaigns against the Walpole ministry, culminating in the War of Jenkins's Ear against Spain in 1739. The book also includes material on the South Sea Company, showing how the foundation of this company, later the subject of the notorious 'Bubble', was a logical part of British strategy. Shinsuke Satsuma completed his doctorate in maritime history at the University of Exeter.

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'Powerful and Important' Guardian'Powerful' Financial Times'More twists and turns than a Hollywood spy thriller' Spectator'A story we all need to hear' New Statesman'Gripping... Araujo's accretion of detail has a powerful effect' New York Times*Shortlisted for the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing*Deep in the heart of the Amazon, an entire region has lived under the control of one notorious land baron: Josélio de Barros. Josélio cut a grisly path to success: having arrived in the jungle with a shady past, he quickly made a name for himself as an invincible thug who grabbed massive tracts of public land, burned down the jungle and executed or enslaved anyone trying to stop him.Enter Dezinho, the leader of a small but robust farm workers' union fighting against land grabs, ecological destruction, and blatant human rights abuses. When Dezinho was killed in a shocking assassination, the local community held its breath. Would Josélio, whom everyone knew had ordered the hit, finally be brought to account? Or would authorities look the other way, as they had hundreds of times before?Dezinho's widow, Dona Joelma, was not about to let that happen. After his murder, she stepped into the spotlight, orchestrating a huge push to bring national media attention to the injustices in the Amazon.Set against the backdrop of Bolsonaro's devastating cuts to environmental protections, Brazil's rapidly changing place in the geopolitical spectrum, and the Amazon's crucial role in climate change, Masters of the Lost Land is both a gripping epic into one of the last wild places on Earth and an urgent illustration of how people are fighting for - and winning - justice for their futures and the environment.

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Drawing on sources as diverse as Supreme Court decisions, nightclub comedy, congressional records, and cultural theory, Obscene Gestures explores the many contradictory vectors of twentieth-century moralist controversies surrounding literary and artistic works from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, 2 Live Crew, Tony Kushner, and others. Patrick S. Lawrence dives into notorious obscenity debates to reconsider the divergent afterlives of artworks that were challenged or banned over their taboo sexual content to reveal how these controversies affected their critical reception and commercial success in ways that were often determined at least in part by racial, gender, or sexual stereotypes and pernicious ethnographic reading practices. Starting with early postwar touchstone cases and continuing through the civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements, Lawrence demonstrates on one level that breaking sexual taboos in literary and cultural works often comes with cultural cachet and increased sales. At the same time, these benefits are distributed unequally, leading to the persistence of exclusive hierarchies and inequalities. Obscene Gestures takes its bearings from recent studies of the role of obscenity in literary history and canon formation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, extending their insights into the postwar period when broad legal latitude for obscenity was established but when charges of obscenity still carried immense symbolic and political weight. Moreover, the rise of social justice movements around this time provides necessary context for understanding the application of legal precedents, changes in the publishing industry, and the diversification of the canon of American letters. Obscene Gestures, therefore, advances the study of obscenity to include recent developments in the understanding of race, gender, and sexuality while refining our understanding of late-twentieth-century American literature and political culture.

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Killer twists. Heroes to believe in. Trust Baldacci.Private Investigator and WWII veteran, Aloysius Archer, returns to solve a new case in Hollywood in Dream Town, a riveting thriller from international number 1 bestselling author, David Baldacci.All that glitters . . .1952, Los Angeles. It is New Year’s Eve and PI Aloysius Archer is dining with his friend and rising Hollywood actress Liberty Callahan when they’re approached by Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter who would like to hire him, as she suspects someone is trying to kill her.Murder and mysteryA visit to Lamb’s Malibu residence leaves Archer knocked unconscious after he stumbles over a dead body in the hallway; and Lamb seems to have vanished. With the police now involved in the case, a close friend and colleague of Lamb’s employs Archer to find out what’s happened to the screenwriter.The City of Angels – or somewhere much, much darker?Archer’s investigation takes him from the rich, glamorous and glitzy LA to the seedy, dark side of the city, and onward to the gambling mecca of Las Vegas, just now hitting its stride as a hot spot for celebrities and a money-making machine for the mob. In a place where cops and crooks work hand in hand, Archer will cross paths with Hollywood stars, politicians and notorious criminals. He’ll almost die several times, and he’ll discover bodies and secrets from the canyons and beaches of Malibu and the luxurious mansions of Bel Air and Beverly Hills to the narcotics clubs of Chinatown.With the help of Liberty and his PI partner Willie Dash, Archer will risk everything and leave no stone unturned in finding the missing Eleanor Lamb, and in bringing to justice killers who would love nothing better than to plant Archer six feet under.

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Killer twists. Heroes to believe in. Trust Baldacci. Private Investigator and WWII veteran, Aloysius Archer, returns to solve a new case in Hollywood in this riveting thriller from international number 1 bestselling author, David Baldacci.All that glitters . . . 1952, Los Angeles. It is New Year’s Eve and PI Aloysius Archer is dining with his friend and rising Hollywood actress Liberty Callahan when they’re approached by Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter who would like to hire him, as she suspects someone is trying to kill her.Murder and mysteryA visit to Lamb’s Malibu residence leaves Archer knocked unconscious after he stumbles over a dead body in the hallway; and Lamb seems to have vanished. With the police now involved in the case, a close friend and colleague of Lamb’s employs Archer to find out what’s happened to the screenwriter.The City of Angels – or somewhere much, much darker?Archer’s investigation takes him from the rich, glamorous and glitzy LA to the seedy, dark side of the city, and onward to the gambling mecca of Las Vegas, just now hitting its stride as a hot spot for celebrities and a money-making machine for the mob. In a place where cops and crooks work hand in hand, Archer will cross paths with Hollywood stars, politicians and notorious criminals. He’ll almost die several times, and he’ll discover bodies and secrets from the canyons and beaches of Malibu and the luxurious mansions of Bel Air and Beverly Hills to the narcotics clubs of Chinatown.With the help of Liberty and his PI partner Willie Dash, Archer will risk everything and leave no stone unturned in finding the missing Eleanor Lamb, and in bringing to justice killers who would love nothing better than to plant Archer six feet under.

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This book is part of a series of titles that are a spin-off of the Shingo Prize-winning book Leveraging Lean in Healthcare: Transforming Your Enterprise into a High Quality Patient Care Delivery System. Each book in the series focuses on a specific aspect of healthcare that has demonstrated significant process and quality improvements after a Lean implementation.Emergency departments have become notorious for long wait times and questionable quality of care. By adopting Lean manufacturing concepts, hospitals can turn the emergency department into a valuable service for the hospital and the community it serves.Leveraging Lean in the Emergency Department: Creating a Cost Effective, Standardized, High Quality, Patient-Focused Operation supplies a functional understanding of Lean emergency department processes and quality improvement techniques. It is ideal for healthcare executives, leaders, process improvement team members, and inquisitive frontline workers who want to implement and leverage Lean.Supplying detailed descriptions of Lean tools and methodologies, the book identifies powerful Lean solutions specific to the needs of the emergency department. The first section provides an overview of Lean concepts, tools, methodologies, and applications.The second section focuses on the application of Lean in the emergency department within the confines of the hospital or clinic. Presenting numerous examples, stories, case studies, and lessons learned, it examines the normal operation of each area in emergency departments and highlights the areas where typical problems occur.Next, the book walks readers through various Lean initiatives and demonstrates how Lean tools and concepts have been used to achieve lasting improvements to processes and quality of care. It also supplies actionable blueprints that readers can duplicate or modify for use in their own institutions. Illustrating leadership’s role in achieving departmental goals, this book will provide you with a well-rounded understanding of how Lean can be applied to achieve significant improvements throughout the entire continuum of care.

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Crime perpetrated by healthcare professionals is increasingly pervasive in today’s hospitals and other healthcare settings. Patients, coworkers, and employers are vulnerable to exploitation, fraud, abuse, and even murder. Investigative journalist Kelly M. Pyrek interviews experts who provide accounts concerning the range of criminality lurking in the healthcare setting in Healthcare Crime: Investigating Abuse, Fraud, and Homicide by Caregivers. Examines the root causes and the opportunitiesThe book begins by offering perspectives on how the stressors inherent in the healthcare profession can contribute to aberrant behavior by medical practitioners. It then examines breaches of patient privacy, which can easily occur in today’s age of technology. Highlighting appalling cases of exploitation, the book also suggests guidelines to safeguard patient privacy. Identifies the victims most at risk, and those who are their greatest threats In a chapter on abuse and assault, the book cites psychological studies that explain the root causes of victimization. It highlights the patient populations most at risk: disabled, psychiatric, and elderly, and identifies the chief victimizers: physicians, psychiatrists, dentists, pediatricians, and nursing assistants and aides. The book also examines the types of financial fraud and theft that can be perpetrated against not only patients but also employers and government agencies, and provides expert insight on how to take preventative measures. Discusses notorious serial murders in the medical professionProviding accounts of well-known healthcare-related homicides and suspicious deaths, the book also presents insights from forensic and serial murder experts as to why these incidents occur, warning signs to watch out for, and how to conduct a proper investigation. The final chapter examines simple, straightforward strategies for improving the level of quality of care and safety provided by healthcare institutions. With greater accountability and oversight, patients can once again feel secure that their providers are embracing the maxim "Above all, do no harm."

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Was Richard Nixon actually a madman, or did he just play one?When Richard Nixon battled for the presidency in 1968, he did so with the knowledge that, should he win, he would face the looming question of how to extract the United States from its disastrous war in Vietnam. It was on a beach that summer that Nixon disclosed to his chief aide, H. R. Haldeman, one of his most notorious, risky gambits: the madman theory. In On Nixon's Madness, Zachary Jonathan Jacobson examines the enigmatic president through this theory of Nixon's own invention. With strategic force and nuclear bluffing, Nixon attempted to coerce his foreign adversaries through sheer unpredictability. As his national security advisor Henry Kissinger noted, Nixon's strategy resembled a poker game in which he "push[ed] so many chips into the pot" that the United States' foes would think the president had gone "crazy." From Vietnam, Pakistan, and India to the greater Middle East, Nixon applied this madman theory. Foreign relations were not a steady march toward peaceful coexistence but rather an ongoing test of mettle. Nixon saw the Cold War as he saw his life, as a series of ordeals that demanded great risk and grand gestures. For decades, journalists, critics, and scholars have searched for the real Nixon behind these acts. Was he a Red-baiter, a worldly statesman, a war criminal or, in the end, a punchline? Jacobson combines biography and intellectual and cultural history to understand the emotional life of Richard Nixon, exploring how the former president struggled between great effusions of feeling and great inhibition, how he winced at the notion of his reputation for rage, and how he used that ill repute to his advantage.

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Poisoned cigars, seductive apparitions, minds and empires in the last of their decline and the most notorious kiss in dramatic history – decadent plays challenged the moral as much as the dramatic imagination of their own day, and continue to probe horizons of taste and the possibilities of stagecraft. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many writers reacted to urban modernity by embracing decadent themes and styles, and dramatists were no exception. Decadence offered these writers a framework for exploring nonconformist identities and beliefs that challenged behavioural norms as much as the desirability of modern progress. Decadent plays were at once behind the times in their celebration of antiquity, and forward-thinking in their staging of themes that have become all the more timely in the 21st century, including queerness, unconventional eroticism, and critiques of empire and industrial progress. Equally, the diversity of decadent drama cannot be pigeon-holed; many of these plays still have the capacity to offend worldviews, and invite us to interrogate present-day conventions and propriety. International in scope and eclectic in content, this edited anthology is an authoritative and accessible introduction to a fast-expanding field of decadent literature. The first publication of its kind to deal with decadent drama, and featuring plays translated into English for the first time, Decadent Plays: 1890 to 1930 breaks new ground by foregrounding decadence as a dramatic sensibility in this most pivotal of periods in the history of modern drama. Featuring canonical and little-known works by Oscar Wilde, Michael Field, Lesya Ukrainka, Rachilde, Remy de Gourmont, Jean Lorrain, Leonid Andreyev, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Maurice Maeterlinck, Izumi Kyoka, and Djuna Barnes, this anthology is an essential introduction to decadent drama that will pique the interest of specialists and non-specialists alike.

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From the classical dialogues of Plato to current political correctness, manipulating language to advance a particular set of values and ideas has been a time-honored practice. During times of radical social and political change, the terms of debate themselves become sharply contested: how people reject, redefine, and reappropriate key words and phrases gives important symbolic shape to their vision of the future. Especially in cataclysmic times, who one is or wants to be is defined by how one writes and speaks. The language culture of early Soviet Russia marked just such a tenuous state of symbolic affairs. Partly out of necessity, partly in the spirit of change, Bolshevik revolutionaries cast off old verbal models of identity and authority and replaced them with a cacophony of new words, phrases, and communicative contexts intended to define and help legitimatize the new Soviet order. Pitched to an audience composed largely of semiliterate peasants, however, the new Bolshevik message often fell on deaf ears. Embraced by numerous sympathetic and newly empowered citizens, the voice of Bolshevism also evoked a variety of less desirable reactions, ranging from confusion and willful subversion to total disregard. Indeed, the earliest years of Bolshevik rule produced a communication gap that held little promise for the makings of a proletarian dictatorship. This gap drew the attention of language authorities—most notably Maxim Gorky—and gave rise to a society-wide debate over the appropriate voice of the new Soviet state and its citizenry. Drawing from history, literature, and sociology, Gorham offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of this critical debate, demonstrating how language ideologies and practices were invented, contested, and redefined. Speaking in Soviet Tongues shows how early Soviet language culture gave rise to unparalleled verbal creativity and utopian imagination while sowing the seeds for perhaps the most notorious forms of Orwellian "newspeak" known to the modern era.

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What if political rhetoric is unavoidable, an irreducible part of politics itself? In contrast to the familiar denunciations of political horse-trading, grandstanding, and corporate manipulation from those lamenting the crisis in liberal democracy, this book argues that the “politics of politics,” usually associated with rhetoric and sophistry, is, like it or not, part of politics from the start. Denunciations of the sorry state of current politics draw on a dogmatism and moralism that share an essentially metaphysical and Platonic ground. Failure to deconstruct that ground generates a philosophically and politically debilitating selfrighteousness that this book attempts to understand and undermine. After a detailed analysis of Foucault’s influential late concept of parrhesia, which is shown to be both philosophically and politically insufficient, close readings of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Derrida trace complex relations between sophistry, rhetoric, and philosophy; truth and untruth; decision; madness and stupidity in an exploration of the possibility of developing an affirmative thinking of politics that is not mortgaged to the metaphysics of presence. It is suggested that Heidegger’s complex accounts of truth and decision must indeed be read in close conjunction with his notorious Nazi commitments but nevertheless contain essential insights that many strident responses to those commitments ignore or repress. Those insights are here developed—via an ambitious account of Derrida’s often misunderstood interruption of teleology—into a deconstructive retrieval of the concept of dignity. This lucid and often witty account of a crucial set of developments in twentieth-century thought prepares the way for a more general re-reading of the possibilities of political philosophy that will be undertaken in Volume 2 of this work, under the sign of an essential scatter that defines the political as such.

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Film scholarship has long been dominated by textual interpretations of specific films. Looking Past the Screen advances a more expansive American film studies in which cinema is understood to be a social, political, and cultural phenomenon extending far beyond the screen. Presenting a model of film studies in which films themselves are only one source of information among many, this volume brings together film histories that draw on primary sources including collections of personal papers, popular and trade journalism, fan magazines, studio publications, and industry records.Focusing on Hollywood cinema from the teens to the 1970s, these case studies show the value of this extraordinary range of historical materials in developing interdisciplinary approaches to film stardom, regulation, reception, and production. The contributors examine State Department negotiations over the content of American films shown abroad; analyze the star image of Clara Smith Hamon, who was notorious for having murdered her lover; and consider film journalists’ understanding of the arrival of auteurist cinema in Hollywood as it was happening during the early 1970s. One contributor chronicles the development of film studies as a scholarly discipline; another offers a sociopolitical interpretation of the origins of film noir. Still another brings to light Depression-era film reviews and Production Code memos so sophisticated in their readings of representations of sexuality that they undermine the perception that queer interpretations of film are a recent development. Looking Past the Screen suggests methods of historical research, and it encourages further thought about the modes of inquiry that structure the discipline of film studies.Contributors. Mark Lynn Anderson, Janet Bergstrom, Richard deCordova, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Sumiko Higashi, Jon Lewis, David M. Lugowski, Dana Polan, Eric Schaefer, Andrea Slane, Eric Smoodin, Shelley Stamp

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This long-awaited study, the magnum opus of a leading railroad historian, describes the conception, construction, and early operation of the first narrow gauge railroads in northern California. It is lavishly illustrated by some 600 photographs and drawings, almost three-quarters of which have never before been published. The topic is approached through an unusual lens: the history of the relatively small but extraordinarily inventive contracting and engineering firm of the brothers Thomas and Martin Carter. The Carters were able to reduce the cost and complexity of light railroad construction to the point where local narrow gauge lines could initially compete with the state’s notorious railroad monopolies. Pioneering a mobile manufacturing operation that could supply locally funded short lines with rolling stock (which traditionally came from East Coast manufacturers), the Carter Brothers began with a line to serve Salinas Valley wheat farmers, desperate to achieve an independent means for conveying their crops to the wharf in Monterey. The narrow gauge railroad that resulted was an act of political and economic defiance, but ultimately a hopeless assault on the "Octopus"—the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads. Rallying around the example set in Monterey, a narrow gauge movement in California flourished in the mid-1870s, with the rapid launching of five more companies—the North Pacific Coast, the Santa Cruz Railroad, the Santa Cruz & Felton, the Nevada County Narrow Gauge, and the South Pacific Coast—all of which drew on the Carter Brothers for manufacturing and engineering. Soon, Thomas and Martin Carter were not only selling railroad supplies and engineering to all six short lines, but had won management positions with the strongest, the South Pacific Coast. Until personal and financial disaster overtook them in 1880, the Carters were at the forefront of not just a new business, but a new technology.

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Over the years, Edward Fowler, an American academic, became a familiar presence in San'ya, a run-down neighborhood in northeastern Tokyo. The city's largest day-labor market, notorious for its population of casual laborers, drunks, gamblers, and vagrants, has been home for more than half a century to anywhere from five to fifteen thousand men who cluster in the mornings at a crossroads called Namidabashi (Bridge of Tears) in hopes of getting work. The day-labor market, along with gambling and prostitution, is run by Japan's organized crime syndicates, the yakuza. Working as a day laborer himself, Fowler kept a diary of his experiences. He also talked with day laborers and local merchants, union leaders and bureaucrats, gangsters and missionaries. The resulting oral histories, juxtaposed with Fowler's narrative and diary entries, bring to life a community on the margins of contemporary Japan. Located near a former outcaste neighborhood, on what was once a public execution ground, San'ya shows a hidden face of Japan and contradicts the common assumption of economic and social homogeneity. Fowler argues that differences in ethnicity and class, normally suppressed in mainstream Japanese society, are conspicuous in San'ya and similar communities. San'ya's largely middle-aged, male day-laborer population contains many individuals displaced by Japan's economic success, including migrants from village communities, castoffs from restructuring industries, and foreign workers from Korea and China. The neighborhood and its inhabitants serve as an economic buffer zone—they are the last to feel the effects of a boom and the first to feel a recession. They come alive in this book, telling urgent stories that personify such abstractions as the costs of modernization and the meaning of physical labor in postindustrial society.

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In an original and provocative reading of Vladimir Nabokov's work and the pleasures and perils to which its readers are subjected, Eric Naiman explores the significance and consequences of Nabokov's insistence on bringing the issue of art's essential perversity to the fore. Nabokov's fiction is notorious for the interpretive panic it occasions in its readers, the sense that no matter how hard he or she tries, the reader has not gotten Nabokov "right." At the same time, the fictions abound with characters who might be labeled perverts, and questions of sexuality lurk everywhere.Naiman argues that the sexual and the interpretive are so bound together in Nabokov's stories and novels that the reader confronts the fear that there is no stable line between good reading and overreading, and that reading Nabokov well is beset by the exhilaration and performance anxiety more frequently associated with questions of sexuality than of literature. Nabokov's fictions pervert their readers, obligingly training them to twist and turn the text in order to puzzle out its meanings, so that they become not better people but closer readers, assuming all the impudence and potential for shame that sexually oriented close-looking entails.In Nabokov, Perversely, Naiman traces the connections between sex and interpretation in Lolita (which he reads as a perverse work of Shakespeare scholarship), Pnin, Bend Sinister, and Ada. He examines the roots of perverse reading in The Defense and charts the enhanced attention to the connection between sex and metafiction in works translated from the Russian. He also takes on books by other authors—such as Reading Lolita in Tehran—that misguidedly incorporate Nabokov's writing within frameworks of moral usefulness. In a final, extraordinary chapter, Naiman reads Dostoevsky's The Double with Nabokov-trained eyes, making clear the power a strong writer can exert on readers.

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