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The Sea Hunters I: True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks
by Clive CusslerA nonfiction work by the creator of Dirk Pitt, this book tells thirteen tales of searches for shipwrecks. The circumstances surrounding each are described in detail along with the searches. This book reads like a novel. Among the shipwrecks are the C.S.S. Hunley, a confederate submarine-- the first to sink a ship in battle, The Leopoldville, a troop transport torpedoed by a German U-boat on Christmas eve, 1944 and the discovery of U-20, the German sub that sank the Lusitania in 1915.
Sight Unseen
by Georgina Kleege<P>This elegantly written book offers an unexpected and unprecidented accout of blindness and sight. Legally blind since the age of eleven, Georgina Kleege draws on her experiences to offer a detailed testimony of visual impairment - both her own view of the world and the world's view of the blind. "I hope to turn the reader's gaze outward, to say not only 'Here's what I see' but also "here's what you see,' to show what's both unique and universal," Kleege writes. <P>Kleege describes the negative social status of the blind, analyzes stereotypes of the blind hat have been perpetuated by movies, and discusses how blindness has been portrayed in literature. She vividly conveys the visual experience of someone with severely impaired sight and explains what she cannot (and how her inability to achieve eye contact - in a society that prizes that form of connection - has affected her). <P>Finally she tells of the various ways she reads, and the freedom she felt when she stopped concealing her blindness and acquired skills, such as reading braille, as part of a new blind identity.
Slaves in the Family
by Edward BallThe Ball family hails from South Carolina―Charleston and thereabouts. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Between 1698 and 1865, close to four thousand black people were born into slavery under the Balls or were bought by them. In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. Part historical narrative, part oral history, part personal story of investigation and catharsis, Slaves in the Family is, in the words of Pat Conroy, "a work of breathtaking generosity and courage, a magnificent study of the complexity and strangeness and beauty of the word ‘family.'"<P><P> Winner of the National Book Award
The Boy Next Door
by Gretchen BrinckThis small town could not believe the "shy" kind of "weird" boy could possibly be a killer, even the parents of one child who treated the killer as one of their own. His blatant lies & lack of evidence let him get away with murder even though they knew he was guilty.
Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia
by Peter MaasIn March of 1992, the highest-ranking member of the Mafia in America ever to defect broke his blood oath of silence and testified against his boss, John Gotti. He is Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano, second-in-command of the Gambino organized- crime family, the most powerful in the nation. Because of Gotti's uncanny ability to escape conviction in state and federal trials despite charges that he was the Mafia's top chieftain, the media had dubbed him the "Teflon Don." With Sammy the Bull, this would all change. Today, Gotti is serving life in prison without parole. And as a direct consequence of Gravano's testimony, Cosa Nostra--the Mafia's true name--is in shambles. Peter Maas is the author of the international bestseller The Valachi Papers, which Rudolph Giuliani, then a federal prosecutor and now the mayor of New York City, hailed as "the most important book ever written about the Mafia in America." Until now. In Underboss, based on dozens of hours of interviews with Gravano, much of it written in Sammy the Bull's own voice, we are ushered as never before into the uppermost secret inner sanctums of Cosa Nostra--an underworld of power, lust, greed, betrayal, deception, sometimes even honor, with the specter of violent death always poised in the wings. It is a real world we have often read and heard about from the outside; now we are able to experience it in rich, no-holds-barred detail as if we were there ourselves. Unlike his glamorous boss John Gotti, Sammy the Bull honored Cosa Nostra's ancient traditions, jigging the shadows, avoiding the limelight, staying far from flashbulbs and reporters. But he was present at such key events of the modern Cosa Nostra as the sensational slaying of mob boss Paul Castellano, Gotti's predecessor, in front of a mid- town Manhattan steakhouse. Compulsively readable, Gravano's revelations are of enormous historical significance. "There has never been a defendant of his stature in organized crime," the federal judge in the Gotti trial declared, "who has made the leap he has made from one social planet to another." Gravano's is a story about starting out on the street, about killing and being killed, revealing the truth behind a quarter-century of shocking headlines. It is also a tragic story of a wasted life, of unalterable choices and the web of lies, weakness, and treachery that underlie the so-called Honored Society.
Megamedia: How Giant Corporations Dominate Mass Media, Distort Competition, and Endanger Democracy
by Dean AlgerHow giant corporations dominate mass media, distort competition, and endanger democracy.
Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization
by Graham HancockOn the great mysteries of nature, history, and man.
Alex Haley's Queen: The Story of an American Family
by Alex HaleyThe author of Roots chronicles the remarkable history of the other side of his family, especially his extraordinary grandmother, Queen, the daughter of a slave and a white slave owner
Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801
by Emma DonoghueA groundbreaking work of lesbian scholarship, Passions Between Women discovers and brings together for the first time stories of lesbian desires, acts, and identities from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Where previous historians have concluded that a combination of censorship and ignorance excluded lesbian experience from written history before our era, Emma Donoghue has decisively proved otherwise. She dispels the myth that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lesbian culture was rarely registered in language and that lesbians of this period had no words with which to describe themselves. Far from being invisible, the figure of the woman who felt passion for women was a subject of confusion and contradiction: she could be put in a freak show as a "hermaphrodite," revered as a "romantic friend," or jailed as a "female husband." By examining a wealth of new medical, legal, and erotic source material, and rereading the classics of English literature, Emma Donoghue has uncovered narratives of an astonishing range of lesbian and bisexual identities in Britain between 1668 and 1801. Female pirates and spiritual mentors, chambermaids and queens, poets and prostitutes, country idylls and whipping clubs all take their place in her intriguing panorama of lesbian lives and revisionist and frankly sexual in its outlook, Passions Between Women boldly asserts that relationships between women were, more passionate than the "romantic friendships" oked by other scholarly works.
Donnie Brasco
by Joseph D. Pistone Richard WoodleyDonnie Brasco is Pistone's unforgettable account of how be became part of the mysterious underworld that is the Mafia--the first and only account by a law enforcement agent--and it is amazing and intriguing as the flamboyant, deadly world it portrays.
Liberal Racism
by Jim Sleeperthis is a tough-minded, provocative indictment of the failure of liberalism in the post-Civil Rights era. As Sleeper sees it, liberals once held the moral high ground because they "fought nobly to help this country rise above color." Now, however, liberals have become blinded by race and have abandoned the fight to create what Sleeper calls the "transracial belonging and civic faith for which Americans of all colors so obviously yearn." Much of what Sleeper has to say here flies in the face of politically correct received wisdom about race, but as an effort to remind Americans that all of us are fundamentally responsible for our fates, this is a much-needed corrective to race-based thinking that has proven unproductive.
Perfect Victim
by Christine Mcguire Carla NortonThis is the story behind Colleen Stan's terrifying, seven-year-long imprisonment by Cameron Hooker as told by the district attorney who tried the case. Too bizarre to be anything but true, it is a tale of riveting intensity and gripping courtroom drama.
If Loving You Is Wrong: The Shocking True Story of Mary Kay Letourneau
by Gregg OlsenThe true story of the elementary schoolteacher and mother of four who just couldn't keep her hands off a 13-year-old boy. Worse yet, Mary Kay Letourneau had become obsessed with the slight, Samoan teenager while he was still a student in her sixth-grade class--and he fathered two babies with her. Yet in the hands of true crime writer Gregg Olsen, If Loving You Is Wrong becomes a poignant profile of an emotionally stunted young woman tightly wound up in a web of lies too fragile to sustain the weight of her own compulsions.