Download or read book White Boy Rick written by Richard Wershe and published by Ebury Press. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soon to be a major motion picture with Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Jason Leigh Meet the boy who ruled the streets of Detroit - and served most of his life in prison as a result. In 1980's Detroit, Rick was a teenage drug-dealing prodigy that ascended through the ranks of a volatile Motor City underworld, rubbing elbows with men twice his age before he could legally drive a car. He averted death in some half-dozen assassination attempts, negotiated million-dollar cocaine deals with Colombian and Cuban drug lords in Miami and Las Vegas, hobnobbed with the Mayor of Detroit, and played ball with a dearth of dirty cops and politicians. At 17, Rick was arrested for a single drug offense and his trial became tabloid fodder across the country. Draped in full-length mink coats, wearing his signature Adidas tracksuit and gold rope-chain around his neck, Rick's sly-grinning face was splashed across newspapers and television news broadcasts. He was presented as the face of youth crime in the crack cocaine era. His romance with the Mayor of Detroit's beautiful niece, almost a decade his senior and the wife of his imprisoned drug-kingpin mentor, only stoked the flames further. What nobody knew was that beyond the veneer of teenage drug chief was a creation of Uncle Sam, a fully bought, paid for and trained undercover operative working exclusively and very secretly for the U.S. government. Today, Rick Wershe, 48, is the longest-serving non-violent juvenile offender in the U.S. prison system - an unfathomable result of the government's War on Drugs in the 1980s. In July 2017 he was finally granted parole. This book will tell his side of the story for the very first time.

Download or read book White Boy Rick written by Richard Wershe, Jr. and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incarcerated for a single drug offense spawning from an arrest at a routine traffic stop when he was just seventeen, Rick Wershe, Jr. served twenty-nine years of a life sentence before he was paroled in 2017. But before he was busted in the late 1980s, he was a pawn of the government, recruited out of the eighth grade and put to work as a paid informant to help bust one of the biggest, most powerful and politically connected drug rings plaguing Detroit—a syndicate tied directly to the city’s brash, controversial mayor. A baby-faced, teenage drug-dealer known as "White Boy Rick" on the streets, Wershe rose through the ranks of the Motor City’s exclusively black and high-octane inner city narcotics scene before he could legally drive a car. He was shot and almost killed, cheated death in some half-dozen assassination attempts, negotiated million-dollar cocaine deals with Colombian and Cuban drug lords in Miami and Las Vegas, hobnobbed with the city’s biggest kingpins and most notorious killers, and played ball with dirty cops and politicians. All with the backing of the FBI and when he should have been in high school. Draped in his full-length mink coats, signature Adidas tracksuit, and gold rope neck chains, Wershe was the poster boy of youth crime in the crack cocaine era and a true media sensation in the Motor City press. His romances with the mayor's beautiful niece, almost a decade his senior, and the wife of his imprisoned drug-kingpin mentor burnished his legend and increased media coverage. But Wershe’s success was also his downfall. When the FBI no longer needed him, they cut him loose. With no education or prospects, he turned to the one thing he knew how to do: sell drugs. Eventually convicted on a single possession charge, Wershe went to prison for nearly thirty years (evn though his peers who had been charged with similar crimes were released in the 90s) and fought against those in the government who wanted to keep his former role as an underage informant for federal law enforcement out of the spotlight. Set during the heyday of the decadent Reagan era, White Boy Rick is the story of an ambitious teenage boy exploited by Uncle Sam, a once-great city in decay, and a nation in the midst of change--a tale of race, class, crime, corruption, and lost innocence that resonates today.

Download or read book Almost White written by Rick Najera and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2013-09-16 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Almost White, award-winning writer, actor, director, comedian, playwright, and producer Rick Najera explores what it means to be a Latino against the ever-changing backdrop of his life as a Hollywood creative. A bona fide chameleon, this L.A.-based everyman is "Mexican hyphen American" or, as he wryly puts it, "almost white." Recognized twice as one of the "100 Most Influential Hispanics" by Hispanic Business Magazine, Najera has worked with and mentored some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, including Cheech Marin, Jimmy Smits, Mario Lopez, Sofia Vergara, and many more. His funny, sad, and sometimes dark memoir tells his story of breaking into mainstream Hollywood, what it takes to struggle against typecasting, and how to challenge the pessimistic narrative that Latinos can only be disenfranchised victims in America. Driven by a satirical stream of consciousness, Najera's journey exposes universal lessons, from confronting the limits we place on our imaginations, to the need to take ownership of our stories instead of being mere performers in another's distorted vision, and the necessity of rising every day to press forward-no matter what. "In the end," says Najera, "perhaps it will be the power of the people and art, not politicians and politics, that will redefine the Latino American dream."

Download or read book Lawyer Boy written by Rick Lax and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2008-07-08 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After college, Rick Lax moved back into his parents' house. The closest thing he had to a job was eating his parents' food, sitting on his parents' couch, and watching The Price is Right. An amateur magician, he spent the rest of his time practicing card tricks and rope tricks. And though he could tie four different slipknots, the necktie posed some difficulties. Rick's father, a successful Michigan attorney, told Rick it was time to move out and enter the real world. Rick certainly wasn't going to get a job, so he went to law school instead. This is the story of Rick's journey from childhood to lawyerhood. In Lawyer Boy, Rick uses the skills he developed as a magician to succeed in class, and learns how to become a lawyer without becoming his father. His journey through law school was exhausting, exciting, and infuriating, and, the way he tells it, so funny it's criminal.

Download or read book The Speckled Beauty written by Rick Bragg and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over but the Shoutin', the warmhearted and hilarious story of how his life was transformed by his love for a poorly behaved, half-blind stray dog. Speck is not a good boy. He is a terrible boy, a defiant, self-destructive, often malodorous boy, a grave robber and screen door moocher who spends his days playing chicken with the Fed Ex man, picking fights with thousand-pound livestock, and rolling in donkey manure, and his nights howling at the moon. He has been that way since the moment he appeared on the ridgeline behind Rick Bragg's house, a starved and half-dead creature, seventy-six pounds of wet hair and poor decisions. Speck arrived in Rick's life at a moment of looming uncertainty. A cancer diagnosis, chemo, kidney failure, and recurring pneumonia had left Rick lethargic and melancholy. Speck helped, and he is helping, still, when he is not peeing on the rose of Sharon. Written with Bragg's inimitable blend of tenderness and sorrow, humor and grit, The Speckled Beauty captures the extraordinary, sustaining devotion between two damaged creatures who need each other to heal.

Download or read book The White Boy Confessions written by Marcus Valdespino and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the powerful autobiography of Marcus Valdespino and deals with gang life and violence in San Antonio and such controversial subjects as race relations, poverty, and interracial crime. The first 29 years of Valdespino's was compelling and tragic. He witnessed his father's drug dealing to high profile people and Marcus, unfortunately followed in his footsteps. Valdespino's story shows the worst of humanity and is chilling in its depiction of sex and violence and heartfelt, poignant and sad in its betrayal of the rite of passage of a young person growing up in this world. "The White Boys Confessions" is also extremely powerful in its social and political commentary. There are several layers of the story contained within it that are both frightening and humorous. All of Valdespino's story -- the bad and the ugly -- is in "The White Boy Confessions". It is a story of not just survival but also redemption.

Download or read book Ranchero written by Rick Gavin and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original and ballsy road-trip of a crime novel—most of it in Desmond's ex-wife's Geo—Ranchero is an unforgettable read and a fantastic series debut. Repo man Nick Reid had a seemingly simple job to do: talk to Percy Dwayne Dubois— pronounced "Dew-boys," front-loaded and hick specific—about the payments he's behind on for a flat screen TV, or repossess it. But Percy Dwayne wouldn't give in. Nope, instead he saw fit to go all white-trash philosophical and decided that since the world was stacked against him anyway, he might as well fight it. He hit Nick over the head with a fireplace shovel, tied him up with a length of lamp cord, and stole the mint-condition calypso coral-colored 1969 Ranchero that Nick had borrowed from his landlady. And he took the TV with him on a rowdy ride across the Mississippi Delta. Nick and his best friend Desmond, fellow repo man in Indianola, Mississippi, have no choice but to go after him. The fact that the trail eventually leads to Guy, a meth cooker recently set up in the Delta after the Feds ran him out of New Orleans, is of no consequence—Nick will do anything to get the Ranchero back. And it turns out he might have to.

Download or read book My Southern Journey written by Rick Bragg and published by Liberty Street. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From celebrated New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Rick Bragg, comes a poignant and wryly funny collection of essays on life in the south. Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor, he explores enduring Southern truths about home, place, spirit, table, and the regions' varied geographies, including his native Alabama, Cajun country, and the Gulf Coast. Everything is explored, from regional obsessions from college football and fishing, to mayonnaise and spoonbread, to the simple beauty of a fish on the hook. Collected from over a decade of his writing, with many never-before-published essays written specifically for this edition, My Southern Journey is an entertaining and engaging read, especially for Southerners (or feel Southern at heart) and anyone who appreciates great writing.

Download or read book Hell Followed with Us written by Andrew Joseph White and published by Holiday House. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A furious, queer debut novel about embracing the monster within and unleashing its power against your oppressors. “A long, sustained scream to the various strains of anti-transgender legislation multiplying around the world like, well, a virus." —The New York Times INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Sixteen-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised him—the fundamentalist sect that unleashed Armageddon and decimated the world’s population. Desperately, he searches for a place where the cult can’t get their hands on him, or more importantly, on the bioweapon they infected him with. But when cornered by monsters born from the destruction, Benji is rescued by a group of teens from the local Acheson LGBTQ+ Center, affectionately known as the ALC. The ALC’s leader, Nick, is gorgeous, autistic, and a deadly shot, and he knows Benji’s darkest secret: the cult’s bioweapon is mutating him into a monster deadly enough to wipe humanity from the earth once and for all. Still, Nick offers Benji shelter among his ragtag group of queer teens, as long as Benji can control the monster and use its power to defend the ALC. Eager to belong, Benji accepts Nick’s terms…until he discovers the ALC’s mysterious leader has a hidden agenda, and more than a few secrets of his own. Perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and Annihilation. A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year "A defining voice of our generation." –H.E. Edgmon, author of The Witch King "Hands down the best YA horror book I've read." ­–Aden Polydoros, author of The City Beautiful "A chimera of horror, romance, and something stranger." –Rose Szabo, author of What Big Teeth "A timely and riveting tale." –Ray Stoeve, author of Between Perfect and Real

Download or read book Freeway Rick Ross written by Rick Ross and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A notorious drug kingpin reigning over Los Angeles, California and operating across numerous other states, Rick was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996. But following the discovery his drug source was linked to the CIA and he had been used as a pawn in the Iran-Contra scandal, he received a reduced sentence.

Download or read book Feed Your Best Friend Better written by Rick Woodford and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Rick Woodford, the "Dog Food Dude" himself, comes Feed Your Best Friend Better, with easy recipes that will make even humans drool a little bit. Healthy food can enable dogs to live longer, healthier lives, just as it can for humans, and with these meals, treats, and cookies, dogs will never miss commercial kibble. Rick has researched nutrition for dogs and has used the same manuals veterinarians use to develop his recipes. Feed Your Best Friend Better makes the transition to homemade dog food simple, so you can make natural pet food for your dog every day. From nutritional value to portion sizes, these recipes will help dog parents know what their dog is eating. The meals are healthy, and dogs love them. Rick Woodford wants dogs in every family to be healthy and happy. His recipes use a variety of herbs and spices for their antioxidant properties but they smell so good everybody in the house will be drooling. Recipes include: * Puppy Pesto * Bacon Yappetizers * Barkscotti * Mutt Loaf * Gingerbread Mailman In addition to 85 recipes other helpful chapters include: * How to Pick out a Commercial Food; making the ingredient label easy to understand with a breakdown of ingredients that are good for the bowl and those that are best left on the shelf. * Determining Portion Size; information on body type and size help readers understand how much food their dogs need to be in the best shape * Problem Mealtime Behaviors; how to deal with the early morning wake up call, reluctant eaters, counter surfing and more

Download or read book Do it Afraid written by Joyce Meyer and published by FaithWords. This book was released on 2008-11-16 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has Fear Got the Best of You? Everyone who has ever lived has known the torment of fear. Like all of us, you experience fear almost every time you move toward a closer relationship with God. Fear will try to push you back and is always ready to attack you through your thoughts. But you can live free from it! God's promise is that you will be able to overcome this powerful emotion. In this book, Joyce Meyer shows that even though fear will surely challenge you, the Holy Spirit can still help you walk in faith. Find out: -How to keep fear from controlling your life -How to move forward in spite of your fears -How God stays faithful regardless of what you're feeling -The one basic fear underneath all fears. You can act on God's Word and defeat this enemy. Now is the time to seize victory by stepping out to do it afraid!

Download or read book The Hard Sell written by Evan Hughes and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inside story of a band of entrepreneurial upstarts who made millions selling painkillers—until their scheme unraveled, putting them at the center of a landmark criminal trial. • SOON TO BE THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE PAIN HUSTLERS STARRING EMILY BLUNT AND CHRIS EVANS "Unfolds with the velocity and verve of a Scorsese film…A tour de force."—Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing John Kapoor had already amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he founded Insys Therapeutics. It was the early 2000s, a boom time for painkillers, and he developed a novel formulation of fentanyl, the most potent opioid on the market. Kapoor, a brilliant immigrant scientist with relentless business instincts, was eager to make the most of his innovation. He gathered around him an ambitious group of young lieutenants. His head of sales—an unstable and unmanageable leader, but a genius of persuasion—built a team willing to pull every lever to close a sale, going so far as to recruit an exotic dancer ready to scrape her way up. They zeroed in on the eccentric and suspect doctors receptive to their methods. Employees at headquarters did their part by deceiving insurance companies. The drug was a niche product, approved only for cancer patients in dire condition, but the company’s leadership pushed it more widely, and together they turned Insys into a Wall Street sensation. But several insiders reached their breaking point and blew the whistle. They sparked a sprawling investigation that would lead to a dramatic courtroom battle, breaking new ground in the government’s fight to hold the drug industry accountable in the spread of addictive opioids. In The Hard Sell, National Magazine Award–finalist Evan Hughes lays bare the pharma playbook. He draws on unprecedented access to insiders of the Insys saga, from top executives to foot soldiers, from the patients and staff of far-flung clinics to the Boston investigators who treated the case as a drug-trafficking conspiracy, flipping cooperators and closing in on the key players. With colorful characters and true suspense, The Hard Sell offers a bracing look not just at Insys, but at how opioids are sold at the point they first enter the national bloodstream—in the doctor’s office.

Download or read book Late Late at Night written by Rick Springfield and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features four bonus videos! Watch Rick discuss the events that have shaped his life; step inside his recording studio to hear him discuss his music, his acting career, coming to America, and his love of dogs; and watch Rick's “What’s Victoria’s Secret?” music video and his unplugged version of “I Get Excited.” In a searingly candid memoir which he authored himself, Grammy Award-winning pop icon Rick Springfield pulls back the curtain on his image as a bright, shiny, happy performer to share the startling story of his rise and fall and rise in music, film, and television and his lifelong battle with depression. In the 1980s, singer-songwriter and actor Rick Springfield seemed to have it all: a megahit single in “Jessie’s Girl,” sold-out concert tours, follow-up hits that sold more than 17 million albums and became the pop soundtrack for an entire generation, and 12 million daily viewers who avidly tuned in to General Hospital to swoon over his portrayal of the handsome Dr. Noah Drake. Yet lurking behind his success as a pop star and soap opera heartthrob and his unstoppable drive was a moody, somber, and dark soul, one filled with depression and insecurity. In Late, Late at Night, the memoir his millions of fans have been waiting for, Rick takes readers inside the highs and lows of his extraordinary life. By turns winningly funny and heartbreakingly sad, every page resonates with Rick’s witty, wry, self-deprecating, brutally honest voice. On one level, he reveals the inside story of his ride to the top of the entertainment world. On a second, deeper level, he recounts with unsparing candor the forces that have driven his life, including his longtime battle with depression and thoughts of suicide, the shattering death of his father, and his decision to drop out at the absolute peak of fame. Having finally found a more stable equilibrium, Rick’s story is ultimately a positive one, deeply informed by his passion for creative expression through his music, a deep love of his wife of twenty-six years and their two sons, and his life-long quest for spiritual peace.

Download or read book The Boys written by Rick Schatzberg and published by powerHouse Books. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When two old friends died unexpectedly, Rick Schatzberg spent the next two years photographing the remaining group of a dozen men. Now in their 67th year, they have been close since early childhood. Schatzberg collected vintage photos that tell the story of this shared history and uses them to introduce each individual as they are today. These are paired with large-format portraits which connect the boy to the man. Mixing in text with these images, Schatzberg depicts friendship, aging, loss, and memory as the group arrives at the threshold of old age. The Boys juxtaposes elements of place, personal history, and identity. The people and locale described are a specific product of the mid-20th-century suburban American landscape, but the book’s themes are radically universal.

Download or read book Gorilla Convict written by Seth Ferranti and published by Strategic Media Books. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Gorilla Convict" is a selected compilation of Seth's work that has appeared on his long running blog at gorillaconvict.com. Online since 2005, the blog gives the scoop on street legends, the mafia, prison gangs, hip-hop and hustling and life in the belly of the beast. What makes this collection so unique is that Seth writes his blog and stories from his cell block in the Federal Bureau of Prisons where he has spent nearly two decades in prison. He founded the Gorilla Convict website from prison, and his intriguing and amazing stories have created a large and dedicated audience from prison. The book gives the reader real, raw and in your face stories that have not been written from the mainstream news media point of view. They are written by a man who understand the criminal and convict codes and who lives and resides with the men he writes about in the belly of the beast. This collection of crime, prison and street lore is as inside as you can get.

Download or read book So Help Me Golf written by Rick Reilly and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beloved New York Times bestselling author and golf aficionado shares his insatiable curiosity, trademark sense of humor, and vast knowledge of the game in this cavalcade of original pieces about why we love the sport, now featuring three additional new pieces. This is the book Rick Reilly has been writing in the back of his head since he fell in love with the game of golf at eleven years old. He unpacks and explores all of the wonderful, maddening, heart-melting, heart-breaking, cool, and captivating things about golf that make the game so utterly addictive. We meet the PGA Tour player who robbed banks by night to pay his motel bills, the golf club maker who takes weekly psychedelic trips, and the caddy who kept his loop even after an 11-year prison stint. We learn how a man on his third heart nearly won the U.S. Open, how a Vietnam POW saved his life playing 18 holes a day in his tiny cell, and about the course that's absolutely free. Reilly mines all of the game’s quirky traditions—from the shot of bourbon you take before you tee off at Peyton Manning’s course, to the way the starter at St. Andrews announces to your group (and the hundreds of tourists watching), “You’re on the first tee, gentlemen.” He means that quite literally: St. Andrews has the first tee ever invented. We’ll visit the eighteen most unforgettable holes around the world (Reilly has played them all), including the hole in Indonesia where the biggest hazard is monkeys, the one in the Caribbean that's underwater, and the one in South Africa that requires a shot over a pit of alligators; not to mention Reilly’s attempt to play the most mini-golf holes in one day. Reilly expounds on all the great figures in the game, from Phil Mickelson to Bobby Jones to the simple reason Jack Nicklaus is better than Tiger Woods. He explains why we should stop hating Bryson DeChambeau unless we hate genius, the greatest upset in women’s golf history, and why Ernie Els throws away every ball that makes a birdie. Plus all the Greg Norman stories Reilly has never been able to tell before, and the great fun of being Jim Nantz. Connecting it all will be the story of Reilly’s own personal journey through the game, especially as it connects to his tumultuous relationship with his father, and how the two eventually reconciled through golf. This is Reilly’s valentine to golf, a cornucopia of stories that no golfer will want to be without. **The Sports Librarian’s Best of 2022 – Sports Books**