Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

Nicholas Pileggi

Nonfiction / Entertainment / Journalism

Nicholas Pileggi’s vivid, unvarnished, journalistic chronicle of the life of Henry Hill-the working-class Brooklyn kid who knew from age twelve that “to be a wiseguy was to own the world,” who grew up to live the highs and lows of the gangster’s life-has been hailed as “the best book ever written on organized crime” (Cosmopolitan). This is the true-crime bestseller that was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s film masterpiece GoodFellas, which brought to life the violence, the excess, the families, the wives and girlfriends, the drugs, the payoffs, the paybacks, the jail time, and the Feds… with Henry Hill’s crackling narration drawn straight out of Wiseguy and overseeing all the unforgettable action. Read it and experience the secret life inside the mob-from one who’s lived it. Now with an introduction by Martin Scorcese.
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One of Us

One of Us

Åsne Seierstad

Nonfiction / Journalism

A harrowing and thorough account of the massacre that upended Norway, and the trial that helped put the country back togetherOn July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of Norway's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and what led up to it. What made Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become a terrorist? As in her bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul, Seierstad excels at the vivid portraiture of lives under stress. She delves deep into Breivik's troubled childhood, showing how a hip-hop and graffiti aficionado became a right-wing activist and Internet game addict, and then an entrepreneur, Freemason, and self-styled master warrior who sought to...
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Gunship Ace

Gunship Ace

Al Venter

Journalism / Military History / Politics

This book describes the full career of this storied aerial warrior, from the bush and jungles of Africa to the forests of the Balkans and the merciless mountains of today’s Afghanistan. Along the way the reader encounters a multiethnic array of enemies ranging from ideological to cold-blooded to pure evil, as well as well as examples of incredible heroism for hire.
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Orwell in Spain

Orwell in Spain

George Orwell

Fiction / Politics / Journalism

The volume collects together, for the first time ever, Orwell's writings on his experience of the Spanish Civil War - the chaos at the Front, the futile young deaths for what became a confused cause, the antique weapons and the disappointment many British Socialists felt on arriving in Spain to help. ORWELL IN SPAIN includes the complete text of HOMAGE TO CATALONIA.
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Hitch-22

Hitch-22

Christopher Hitchens

Politics / Essays / Journalism

Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide. In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political. This is the story of his life, lived large.
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Barrel of a Gun

Barrel of a Gun

Al Venter

Journalism / Military History / Politics

In his journeys, Venter associated with an array of similarly daring soldiers and journalists, from “Mad Mike” Hoare to Danny Pearl, as well as elite soldiers from around the world, many of whom, he sadly relates, never emerged from the war zones they entered. The creator of countless documentaries and books, from warfare to shark diving to nuclear proliferation, Al Venter has here offered the reader his own personal combat experiences, in all their multi-faceted fascination.
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Animal Farm and 1984

Animal Farm and 1984

George Orwell

Fiction / Politics / Journalism

ANIMAL FARMGeorge Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is an intimate part of our contemporary culture. It is the account of the bold struggle, initiated by the animals, that transforms Mr. Jones's Manor Farm into Animal Farm—a wholly democratic society built on the credo that All Animals Are Created Equal. Out of their cleverness, the pigs Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball emerge as leaders of the new community in a subtle evolution that proves disastrous. The climax is the brutal betrayal of the faithful horse Boxer, when totalitarian rule is reestablished with the bloodstained postscript to the founding slogan: But some Animals Are More Equal Than Others. . . .1984In 1984, London is a grim city where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a...
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A May-September Wedding

A May-September Wedding

Bill Sanderson

History / Writing / Journalism

Thirty-five year old Phyllida Schuyler lost her husband in a car accident and her best friend Brenda Richardson to cancer a short time later.Brenda made her husband Cal and her best friend promise to help each other.Friendship leads to love, but Cal has a problem getting closer to Phyl - three of his children are older than her.
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