Download or read book Genealogy of a Murder Four Generations Three Families One Fateful Night written by Lisa Belkin and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Next Big Idea Club Must-Read Book for May 2023 The multigenerational tale of three families whose paths collide one summer night in 1960 with the murder of a police officer. Independence Day weekend, 1960: a young cop is murdered, shocking his close-knit community in Stamford, Connecticut. The killer remains at large, his identity still unknown. But on a beach not far away, a young Army doctor, on vacation from his post at a research lab in a maximum-security prison, faces a chilling realization. He knows who the shooter is. In fact, the man—a prisoner out on parole—had called him only days before. By helping his former charge and trainee, the doctor, a believer in second chances, may have inadvertently helped set the murder into motion. And with that one phone call, may have sealed a policeman’s fate. Alvin Tarlov, David Troy, and Joseph DeSalvo were all born of the Great Depression, all with grandparents who’d left different homelands for the same American Dream. How did one become a doctor, one a cop, and one a convict? In Genealogy of a Murder, journalist Lisa Belkin traces the paths of each of these three men—one of them her stepfather. Her canvas is large, spanning the first half of the 20th century: immigration, the struggles of the working class, prison reform, medical experiments, politics and war, the nature/nurture debate, epigenetics, the infamous Leopold and Loeb case, and the history of motorcycle racing. It is also intimate: a look into the workings of the mind and heart. Following these threads to their tragic outcome in July 1960, and beyond, Belkin examines the coincidences and choices that led to one fateful night. The result is a brilliantly researched, narratively ingenious story, which illuminates how we shape history even as we are shaped by it.
Download or read book Show Me A Hero written by Lisa Belkin and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW AN HBO MINISERIES Not in my backyard -- that's the refrain commonly invoked by property owners who oppose unwanted development. Such words assume a special ferocity when the development in question is public housing. Lisa Belkin penetrates the prejudices, myths, and heated emotions stirred by the most recent trend in public housing as she re-creates a landmark case in riveting detail, showing how a proposal to build scattered-site public housing in middle-class neighborhoods nearly destroyed an entire city and forever changed the lives of many of its citizens. -- Public housing projects are being torn down throughout the United States. What will take their place? Show Me a Hero explores the answer. -- An important and compelling work of narrative nonfiction in the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground. -- A sweeping yet intimate group portrait that assesses the effects of public policy on individual human lives.
Download or read book First Do No Harm written by Lisa Belkin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Crammed with provocative insights, raw emotion, and heartbreaking dilemmas,” (The New York Times) First, Do No Harm is a powerful examination of how life and death decisions are made at a major metropolitan hospital in Houston, as told through the stories of doctors, patients, families, and hospital administrators facing unthinkable choices. What is life worth? And when is a life worth living? Journalist Lisa Belkin examines how these questions are asked and answered over one dramatic summer at Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas. In an account that is fascinating, revealing, and almost novelistic in its immediacy, Belkin takes us inside a major hospital and introduces us to the people who must make life and death decisions every day. As we walk through the hallways of the hospital we meet a young pediatrician who must decide whether to perform a risky last-ditch surgery on a teenager who has spent most of his fifteen years in a hospital; we watch as new parents battle with doctors over whether to disconnect their fragile, premature twins from the machine that keeps them breathing; we are in the operating room as a poor immigrant, paralyzed from a gunshot in the neck, is asked by doctors whether or not he wishes to stay alive; we witness the worry of a kidney specialist as he decides whether or not to transfer an uninsured baby to the county hospital down the road. We experience critical moments in the lives of these real people as Belkin explores challenging issues and questions involving medical ethics, human suffering, modern technology, legal liability, and financial reality. As medical technology advances, the choices grow more complicated. How far should we go to save a life? Who decides? And who pays?
Download or read book The Family That Never Was written by Jacque Lynn Singer and published by Author House. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly emotional novel follows six generations of one family from the eighteen hundreds to the present. The main thrust of the story revolves around Jacob and Esther, their unabashed love for one-another, and their total lack of love, care, and nurturing of four children whom they brought into the world. The four children, of whom I am the oldest, grow up fending for themselves or relying on me, their Cinderella without glass slippers. The novel chronicles life and death, passionate love, rape and incest, childbirth and abortion, open heart surgery and more, including some fun and fascinating experiences; as well as our innumerable attempts to bring our family together. Along with being a novel abounding with emotion and incredulous happenstances, it hopes to disprove a long-standing adage that people live what they learn; as the four siblings around whom the novel is built have all risen above The Family That Never Was to being successful, loving and caring individuals with thriving families of their own.
Download or read book American Dream written by Jason DeParle and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-08-30 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this definitive work, two-time Pulitzer finalist Jason DeParle, author of A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves, cuts between the mean streets of Milwaukee and the corridors of Washington to produce a masterpiece of literary journalism. At the heart of the story are three cousins whose different lives follow similar trajectories. Leaving welfare, Angie puts her heart in her work. Jewell bets on an imprisoned man. Opal guards a tragic secret that threatens her kids and her life. DeParle traces their family history back six generations to slavery and weaves poor people, politicians, reformers, and rogues into a spellbinding epic. With a vivid sense of humanity, DeParle demonstrates that although we live in a country where anyone can make it, generation after generation some families don’t. To read American Dream is to understand why.
Download or read book Reading 1922 written by Michael North and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-10-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging study returns to a truly remarkable year, the year in which both Ulysses and The Waste Land were published, in which The Great Gatsby was set, and during which the Fascisti took over in Italy, the Irish Free State was born, the Harlem Renaissance reached its peak, Charlie Chaplin's popularity crested, and King Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered. In short, the year which not only in hindsight became the primal scene of literary modernism but which served as the cradle for a host of major political and aesthetic transformations resonating around the globe. In his previous study, the acclaimed Dialect of Modernism (OUP, 1994), Michael North looked at the racial and linguistic struggles over the English language which gave birth to the many strains of modernism. Here, he expands his vision to encompass the global stage, and tells the story of how books changed the future of the world as we know it in one unforgettable year.
Download or read book Lives of the Presidents written by Kathleen Krull and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1998 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on the lives of presidents as parents, husbands, pet-owners, and neighbors while also including humorous anecdotes about hairstyles, attitudes, diets, fears, and sleep patterns.
Download or read book American Baby written by Gabrielle Glaser and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book The shocking truth about postwar adoption in America, told through the bittersweet story of one teenager, the son she was forced to relinquish, and their search to find each other. “[T]his book about the past might foreshadow a coming shift in the future… ‘I don’t think any legislators in those states who are anti-abortion are actually thinking, “Oh, great, these single women are gonna raise more children.” No, their hope is that those children will be placed for adoption. But is that the reality? I doubt it.’”[says Glaser]” -Mother Jones During the Baby Boom in 1960s America, women were encouraged to stay home and raise large families, but sex and childbirth were taboo subjects. Premarital sex was common, but birth control was hard to get and abortion was illegal. In 1961, sixteen-year-old Margaret Erle fell in love and became pregnant. Her enraged family sent her to a maternity home, where social workers threatened her with jail until she signed away her parental rights. Her son vanished, his whereabouts and new identity known only to an adoption agency that would never share the slightest detail about his fate. The adoption business was founded on secrecy and lies. American Baby lays out how a lucrative and exploitative industry removed children from their birth mothers and placed them with hopeful families, fabricating stories about infants' origins and destinations, then closing the door firmly between the parties forever. Adoption agencies and other organizations that purported to help pregnant women struck unethical deals with doctors and researchers for pseudoscientific "assessments," and shamed millions of women into surrendering their children. The identities of many who were adopted or who surrendered a child in the postwar decades are still locked in sealed files. Gabrielle Glaser dramatically illustrates in Margaret and David’s tale--one they share with millions of Americans—a story of loss, love, and the search for identity.
Download or read book Of Bears and Ballots written by Heather Lende and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This book will inspire people to work with and for their neighbors in all kinds of ways!” —Bill McKibben, author of Falter Heather Lende was one of the thousands of women inspired to take an active role in politics during the past few years. Though her entire campaign for assembly member in Haines, Alaska, cost less than $1,000, she won! And tiny, breathtakingly beautiful Haines isn’t the sleepy town it appears to be. Yes, the assembly must stop bears from rifling through garbage on Main Street, but there is also a bitter debate about the fishing boat harbor and a vicious recall campaign that targets three assembly members, including Lende. In Of Bears and Ballots we witness the nitty-gritty of passing legislation, the lofty ideals of our republic, and the way our national politics play out in one small town. With her entertaining cast of offbeat but relatable characters, the writer whom the Los Angeles Times calls “part Annie Dillard, part Anne Lamott” brings us an inspirational tale about what living in a community really means, and what we owe one another.
Download or read book How to Kill a Marriage written by Laurie Best and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-04-13 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every marriage is different and every couple is sure to undergo their own set of hardships, and joyful moments. Conflict however is a widespread antagonist that will seep into every marriage and relationship like unwanted sea water seeps into a boat. How to Kill a Marriage is a unique true story, that uncovers the raw authentic struggles of marriage, and relationships. You will feel like a fly on the wall as the author vividly depicts real conflict and imperfect resolution. This book will engage your emotions and make you reconsider your ideas about unconditional love, relationships, and break ups. There is a thin line between love and hate and a parallel twisted comparison between a marriage ending and a murder. This story uses comparative literature to help paint the picture of how we all have the ability within us to gruesomely murder the purest forms of love.
Download or read book BRITISH WAR FILMS 1939 45 written by S. P. Mackenzie and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cinema was the most popular form of entertainment during the Second World War. Film was a critically important medium for influencing opinion. Films, such as In Which We Serve and One of Our Aircraft is Missing, shaped the British people's perceptions of the conflict. British War Films, 1939-45 is an account of the feature films produced during the war, rather than government documentaries and official propaganda, making the book an important index of British morale and values at a time of desperate national crisis.
Download or read book Anatomy of Injustice written by Raymond Bonner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row. In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim's body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt's battle to save Elmore's life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation's ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.
Download or read book All Grown Up Now written by Kenneth D. King and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All Grown Up Now is an autobiographical novel about one man's journey from being a green kid on Oklahoma, to being "all grown up now".Two gay men in early 1980s Oklahoma find themselves in a lifelong friendship that transcends the simple label of “friends.” When domestic violence tears their world apart, a desperate act sets the course for healing and a profound new outlook on life. A tale of retail, revenge, re-invention, reckless behavior, and really good clothes, Kenneth D. King's debut is a rollicking coming-of-age story. Growing up as a young gay man in Oklahoma City, the capital city of Places To Not Grow Up Fabulous In, King is designing Barbie dresses by the age of four and knows that his destiny lies as a fashion designer in The Big City. Which Big City isn't necessarily named—it is more of an ideal, where pageantry, fabulous parties, and beautiful clothes are the staples of life. Working tirelessly to graduate from college with a degree in fashion merchandising, he takes his first job as a window display designer, where he meets colleague Mark and strikes up a friendship that will change them both forever.When Mark moves with his significant other, Victor, to San Francisco, he takes a job as a display manager for a chain of stores and hires Ken. Big City, here he comes! But Mark and Victor keep a dark secret of spousal abuse that strains the friendship to its limits. But when Mark needs to be rescued, Ken is there to execute an intricate—and dangerous—kidnapping to save his friend. What he doesn't fully realize, however, is how dramatically that act of friendship will change the course of both of their lives.Beginning as a collection of stories that helped King make sense of an important, tumultuous friendship in his life, this riveting, non-linear depiction of their relationship and the tragic pain caused by domestic violence is as heartbreaking as it is hilarious. Depicting moments in the author's life that sparkle individually, All Grown Up Now: A Friendship in Three Acts creates a jewel of a work that is funny, engaging, and powerful.Kenneth D. King is an haute couture designer in New York. His couture clothing and accessories are in many private collections, have appeared in music videos and television commercials, and are in the permanent museum collections of the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. You can view his design work at: www.kennethdking.com. A writer of books on different aspects of design and sewing technique, King's published works include various articles to Threads magazine, Designer Techniques (Sterling Publishing, 1996), Designer Bead Embroidery (Quarto Publishing, 2006), Cool Couture (Creative Publishing, 2008), and eleven self-published books on CD covering different couture garment construction topics. From 1994-1996 King appeared as the sewing expert on twenty-six episodes of the PBS television series "Sewing Today" and has appeared on a number of TV shows promoting his couture creations and sewing expertise.
