Download or read book Survived by One written by Robert E. Hanlon and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality. A future. As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.

Download or read book To Kill a Mockingbird written by Harper Lee and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Voted America's Best-Loved Novel in PBS's The Great American Read Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

Download or read book Death of a Salesman written by Arthur Miller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1998-05-01 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity—and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room. "By common consent, this is one of the finest dramas in the whole range of the American theater." —Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times "So simple, central, and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it." —Time

Download or read book The Lodger written by Marie Belloc Lowndes and published by Standard Ebooks. This book was released on 2022-04-30T17:06:09Z with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lodger is the first known novelization of the Jack the Ripper story. It follows the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, a maid and butler. An eccentric lodger, Mr. Sleuth, arrives at their lodging-house just as a wave of horrific murders begins to sweep London. The Buntings become engrossed in the newspaper sensationalism as well the detailed accounts of their young friend, a Scotland Yard detective. Lowndes first wrote The Lodger as a short story published in McClure’s Magazine, then later published the novelization in the Daily Telegraph as a serial. It was very successful, with over a million copies sold within a few decades. Writers like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein praised it, with one contemporary reviewer calling it “the best novel about murder written by any living author.” It has since been adapted to other media, notably as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s first movies. Today the novel is still considered the best fictional adaptation of the Jack the Ripper legend. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Download or read book Murder in the Cathedral written by T. S. Eliot and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: T. S. Eliot's most famous drama, a retelling of the murder of the archbishop of Canterbury Murder in the Cathedral, written for the Canterbury Festival in 1935, was one of T. S. Eliot’s first dramatic achievements, and it remains one of the great plays of the century. It takes as its subject matter the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, depicting the events that led to his assassination, in his own cathedral church, by the knights of Henry II in 1170. Like Greek drama, the play’s theme and form are rooted in religion, ritual purgation and renewal, and it was this return to the earliest sources of drama that brought poetry triumphantly back to the English stage at the time. "The theatre is enriched by this poetic play of grave beauty and momentous decision." —The New York Times

Download or read book Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes written by Patricia Highsmith and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short stories filled with “satire, mischief, and menace” by the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley (Harper’s Bazaar). These ten stories chronicle a world gone slightly mad, with dark, inventive takes on environmental degradation, apocalyptic disaster, political chaos, religious conservatism, and more. From a winner of both an O. Henry Award and a Silver Dagger Award, among other honors, and the author of Strangers on a Train, the basis for the classic Hitchcock film, this collection of short fiction is filled with “afterimages that will tremble—but stay—in our minds” (The New Yorker). “Whereas we read Stephen King or Ruth Rendell to relish the thrills that come from carefully controlled verbal terror, Highsmith is not to be taken so lightly. She conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil—personal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Tales—and all of Highsmith’s writing—is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.” —The Boston Phoenix “Combining the best features of the suspense genre with the best of existential fiction . . . The stories are fabulous, in all senses of that word.” —Paul Theroux

Download or read book Confessions of a Murder Suspect written by James Patterson and published by jimmy patterson. This book was released on 2012-09-24 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Patterson returns to the genre that made him famous with a #1 New York Times bestselling teen detective novel about the mysterious Angel family . . . and the dark secrets they're keeping from one another. On the night Malcolm and Maud Angel are murdered, Tandy Angel knows just three things: 1) She was the last person to see her parents alive. 2) The police have no suspects besides Tandy and her three siblings. 3) She can't trust anyone-maybe not even herself. As Tandy sets out to clear the family name, she begins to recall flashes of experiences long buried in her vulnerable psyche. These memories shed light on her family's dark secrets, and digging deeper into her powerful parents' affairs proves to be a disturbing and dangerous game. Who knows what any of the Angels are truly capable of?

Download or read book THE SADIST written by Karl Berg and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2015-08-02 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1929, the German city of Dusseldorf was afflicted by a horrifying series of brutal, random and often fatal attacks upon women and young girls. With weapons ranging from knives and hammers to his bare strangling hands, a shadowy predator left a mounting trail of sexual assault, carnage and murder in his wake, fomenting mortal terror amongst the local populace. Police finally arrested Peter Kurten, a convicted felon, in connection with the crimes; his subsequent confessions revealed a staggering career of evil, documented in at least 69 cases of theft, arson, rape, throttling, stabbing, hammering, hacking, mutilation, blood-drinking and corpse immolation spanning some 30 years. THE SADIST, an in-depth forensic and psychiatric report on Kurten by Dr. Karl Berg, was published in 1931 in the "Deutschen Zeitschrift fur die Gesamte Gerichtliche Medizin”, revealing fully for the first time the irreconcilable lusts, compulsions, obsessions, pathologies and atrocities of a remorseless and psychopathic sex-killer – the inhuman monster known as the Vampire of Dusseldorf. The report is illustrated by 8 pages of detailed and disturbing forensic photographs.

Download or read book Mein Kampf written by Adolf Hitler and published by ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع. This book was released on 2024-02-26 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Madman, tyrant, animal—history has given Adolf Hitler many names. In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), often called the Nazi bible, Hitler describes his life, frustrations, ideals, and dreams. Born to an impoverished couple in a small town in Austria, the young Adolf grew up with the fervent desire to become a painter. The death of his parents and outright rejection from art schools in Vienna forced him into underpaid work as a laborer. During the First World War, Hitler served in the infantry and was decorated for bravery. After the war, he became actively involved with socialist political groups and quickly rose to power, establishing himself as Chairman of the National Socialist German Worker's party. In 1924, Hitler led a coalition of nationalist groups in a bid to overthrow the Bavarian government in Munich. The infamous Munich "Beer-hall putsch" was unsuccessful, and Hitler was arrested. During the nine months he was in prison, an embittered and frustrated Hitler dictated a personal manifesto to his loyal follower Rudolph Hess. He vented his sentiments against communism and the Jewish people in this document, which was to become Mein Kampf, the controversial book that is seen as the blue-print for Hitler's political and military campaign. In Mein Kampf, Hitler describes his strategy for rebuilding Germany and conquering Europe. It is a glimpse into the mind of a man who destabilized world peace and pursued the genocide now known as the Holocaust.

Download or read book Kill Alex Cross written by James Patterson and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2011-11-14 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With relentless danger around every corner, Detective Alex Cross is hunting down a kidnapper . . . but only if someone powerful doesn't kill him first. The President's son and daughter are abducted, and Detective Alex Cross is one of the first on the scene. But someone very high-up is using the FBI, Secret Service, and CIA to keep him off the case and in the dark. A deadly contagion in the water supply cripples half of the capital, and Alex discovers that someone may be about to unleash the most devastating attack the United States has ever experienced. As his window for solving both crimes narrows, Alex makes a desperate decision that goes against everything he believes-one that may alter the fate of the entire country. Kill Alex Cross is fast, exciting, and tightly wound, full of "fast-and-furious action" (Washington Post).

Download or read book The Black House written by Patricia Highsmith and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-12-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not-quite accidental." —John Gross, New York Times Book Review Horrific tragedy becomes disturbingly ordinary in The Black House, a masterful collection of short stories, written during a particularly dark time in Patricia Highsmith's life. As readers will discover, the work eerily evokes the warm familiarities of suburban life: the manicured lawns, the white picket fences, and the local pubs, each providing the backbone for her chilling portraits. Seemingly small indiscretions and infidelities—along with love affairs and murder—consume the characters that commit them. Cycles of destructive jealousy overwhelm the cheating protagonists of "Blow It" and "When in Rome," and the title story explores small-town male camaraderie and the destructive secret it masks. This enthralling collection of eleven stories presents Highsmith at her finest: melancholy, suspenseful, and sizzling with a powerful awareness of human emotion.

Download or read book The Tragedy of Brady Sims written by Ernest J. Gaines and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A courthouse shooting leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order—in the final novella by the beloved Ernest J. Gaines. After Brady Sims pulls out a gun in a courtroom and shoots his own son, who has just been convicted of robbery and murder, he asks only to be allowed two hours before he'll give himself up to the sheriff. When the editor of the local newspaper asks his cub reporter to dig up a "human interest" story about Brady, he heads for the town's barbershop. It is the barbers and the regulars who hang out there who narrate with empathy, sadness, humor, and a profound understanding the life story of Brady Sims—an honorable, just, and unsparing man who with his tough love had been handed the task of keeping the black children of Bayonne, Louisiana in line to protect them from the unjust world in which they lived. And when his own son makes a fateful mistake, it is up to Brady to carry out the necessary reckoning. In the telling, we learn the story of a small southern town, divided by race, and the black community struggling to survive even as many of its inhabitants head off northwards during the Great Migration.

Download or read book Killing Orders written by Sara Paretsky and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V.I.'s battleaxe Aunt Rosa is under investigation by the FBI and SEC after counterfeit stock certificates were found at St. Albert's Priory, where she serves as treasurer. As malicious as her aunt is, V.I. knows she's not dishonest, so V.I. vows to protect her from taking the fall. But V.I. starts questioning the strength of her family ties when a menacing voice on the phone threatens to throw acid into her eyes if she doesn't butt out. The stakes are high as she begins to sniff out a connection between Chicago's most powerful institutions: the Church and the Mob.

Download or read book The Crime at Black Dudley written by Margery Allingham and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE FIRST CAMPION MYSTERY 'Margery Allingham stands out like a shining light' Agatha Christie A suspicious death and a haunted family heirloom were not advertised when Dr George Abbershaw and a groupof London's brightest young things accepted an invitation to the mansion of Black Dudley. Skulduggery is most certainly afoot, and the party-goers soon realise that they're trapped in the secluded house. Amongst them is a stranger who promises to unravel the villainous plots behind their incarceration - but can George and his friends trust the peculiar young man who calls himself Albert Campion?

Download or read book Helter Skelter The True Story of the Manson Murders written by Vincent Bugliosi and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001-12-04 with total page 698 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of the Manson murders.

Download or read book Cannabis Britannica written by James H. Mills and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2003-09-11 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cannabis Britannica explores the historical origins of the UK's legislation and regulations on cannabis preparations before 1928. It draws on published and unpublished sources from the seventeenth century onwards, from archives in the UK and India, to show how the history of cannabis and the British before the twentieth century was bound up with imperialism. James Mills argues that until the 1900s, most of the information and experience gathered by British sources were drawn from colonial contexts as imperial administrators governed and observed populations where use of cannabis was extensive and established. This is most obvious in the 1890s when British anti-opium campaigners in the House of Commons seized on the issue of Government of India excise duties on the cannabis trade in Asia in order to open up another front in their attacks on imperial administration. The result was that cannabis preparations became a matter of concern in Parliament which accordingly established the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. The story in the twentieth century is of the momentum behind moves to include cannabis substances in domestic law and in international treaties. The latter was a matter of the diplomatic politics of imperialism, as Britain sought to defend its cannabis revenues in India against American and Egyptian interests. The domestic story focuses on the coming together of the police, the media, and the pharmaceutical industry to form misunderstandings of cannabis that forced it onto the Poisons Schedule despite the misgivings of the Home Office and of key medical professionals. The book is the first full history of the origins of the moments when cannabis first became subjected to laws and regulations in Britain.

Download or read book Dostoevsky Letters and Reminiscences written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: