Editorial: Phoemixx Classics Ebooks
The Borgias Alexandre Dumas - The Borgias There are dreadful -- perhaps scurrilous -- rumors about the Borgias of renaissance Italy, and here Dumas, author of such classics as THE THREE MUSKETEERS, in his Celebrated Crimes series, dishes up the dirt in all its ugly glory. This book was not written for children
A retired Texas Ranger recalls a career that took him from shootouts in South Texas to film sets in Hollywood. When his picture appeared on the cover of Texas Monthly, Joaquin Jackson became the icon of the modern Texas Rangers. Nick Nolte modeled his character in the movie Extreme Prejudice on him. Jackson even had a speaking part of his own in The Good Old Boys with Tommy Lee Jones. But the role that Jackson has always played the best is that of the man who wears the silver badge cut from a Mexican cinco peso coin, a working Texas Ranger. Legend says that one Ranger is all it takes to put down lawlessness and restore the peace: one riot, one Ranger. In this adventure-filled memoir, Joaquin Jackson recalls what it was like to be the Ranger who responded when riots threatened, violence erupted, and criminals needed to be brought to justice across a wide swath of the Texas-Mexico border from 1966 to 1993. Jackson has dramatic stories to tell. Defying all stereotypes, he was the one Ranger who ensured a fair election—and an overwhelming win for La Raza Unida party candidates—in Zavala County in 1972. He followed legendary Ranger Captain Alfred Y. Allee Sr. into a shootout at the Carrizo Springs jail that ended a prison revolt and left him with nightmares. He captured “The See More Kid,” an elusive horse thief and burglar who left clean dishes and swept floors in the houses he robbed. He investigated the 1988 shootings in Big Bend’s Colorado Canyon and tried to understand the motives of the Mexican teenagers who terrorized three river rafters and killed one. He even helped train Afghan mujahedin warriors to fight the Soviet Union. Jackson’s tenure in the Texas Rangers began when older Rangers still believed that law need not get in the way of maintaining order, and concluded as younger Rangers were turning to computer technology to help solve crimes. Though he insists, “I am only one Ranger. There was only one story that belonged to me,” his story is part of the larger story of the Texas Rangers becoming a modern law enforcement agency that serves all the people of the state. It’s a story that’s as interesting as any of the legends. And yet, Jackson’s story confirms the legends, too. With just over a hundred Texas Rangers to cover a state with 267,399 square miles, any one may become the one Ranger who, like Joaquin Jackson in Zavala County in 1972, stops one riot. “A powerful, moving read . . . One Ranger is as fascinating as the memoirs of nineteenth-century Rangers James Gillett and George Durham, and the histories by Frederick Wilkins and Walter Prescott Webb—and equally as important.” —True West“A straight-shooting book that blow[s] a few holes in the Ranger myth while providing more ammunition for the myth’s continuation. . . . Reads more like a novel than [an] autobiography.” —Austin American-StatesmanVer libro
Author Jack Miles talks about winning a Pulitzer Prize for his book, God: A Biography. Miles explains why he decided to write a biography about God and what he hoped to achieve. Miles explains that he views God as a literary character rather than a religious one for the purpose of the narrative. On NewsHour.Ver libro
'With remarkable courage, insight and access, Mark Shaw takes the reader into the darkest corners of South Africa's ganglands.' – Mandy Wiener The assassination of police investigator Charl Kinnear in Cape Town in 2020 was yet one more in a spate of murders related to the so-called 'guns to gangs' saga, in which state weapons are sold to South Africa's criminal underworld. It began in 2007 when Colonel Christiaan Prinsloo and his cronies began selling thousands of decommissioned police weapons to gang lords. Prinsloo's motive: to fund his son's university fees. The sale of weapons to criminals, which the police service has tried to downplay, has resulted in a killing spree of unprecedented proportions. Cape Town is now one of the most violent places on earth, and in 2019 the army was called in to patrol gang-infested areas. Give us more Guns, based on hundreds of interviews with police, experts and the gangsters themselves, tells the story of this callous crime for the first time. Mark Shaw explores how the guns get into the hands of South Africa's crime bosses and describes the bloodshed that ensues. He also uncovers accounts of rampant corruption within the police and in the state's gun-licensing system, probing the government failure that has been instrumental in arming the country's gangsters.Ver libro
With this impassioned memoir, an American convert to Islam “lifts the veil on this ancient and sacred duty” of making a pilgrimage to Mecca (Publishers Weekly). The hadj, or sacred journey, is the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are enjoined to make once in their lifetimes. One of the world’s oldest religious rites, the hadj has continued without break for fourteen centuries. It is, like most things Islamic, shrouded in mystery for Westerners. Here, Michael Wolfe, an American-born writer and recent Muslim convert, recounts his experiences on this journey. Wolfe begins his narrative in Marrakech, Morocco. Beginning with the month-long fast of Ramadan, he immerses himself in the traditional Muslim life of Morocco. Then, in Tangier, he visits mystics and the American author Paul Bowles. From there, he journeys to Mecca, the sacred desert city in Saudi Arabia closed to all but Muslims. Though the buildup to the Gulf War hovers in the background, the age-old rites of the hadj are what most preoccupy Wolfe. His experience profoundly strengthens his bond to the faith he has embraced as an outsider, making it personal and alive. At a time when the eyes of the world are on Islam, The Hadj offers a much-needed look at its human face.Ver libro
In this masterly biography, F.S.L. Lyons tackles the life and times of one of the greatest Irish statesmen of modern times. One of modern Irish biography's great triumphs, Charles Stewart Parnell has never been approached or surpassed. Charles Stewart Parnell, an enigmatic, icy aristocrat, was the unlikely and unchallenged leader of Irish nationalism from the mid-1870s, in its early heroic phase. Without him, Home Rule would not have become the formidable cause that it was. Daniel O'Connell first articulated modern Irish nationalism; Parnell first organised it. As leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1875 until his death in 1891, Parnell became a figurehead for Irish nationalist ambition and used his influence to further the cause of Irish independence in the British parliament. Parnell not only mobilised nationalist Ireland, exploiting discontent with the land system and a desire for political autonomy, he also subverted the usages of nineteenth-century British politics by supporting the introduction of the filibuster into the House of Commons. He divided Gladstone's Liberal party between those who supported Home Rule and those who opposed it and generally forced the Irish question to the heart of British politics where it remained until 1922. Even today, the continuing uncertainty over the future of Northern Ireland is a remote legacy of Parnell. Parnell's fall – the product of his doomed and passionate love affair with Katharine O'Shea – was the most traumatic moment in nationalist history before 1916. It divided a generation. The passions it gave rise to, brilliantly recalled in the Christmas dinner scene of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are fully explored in this magnificent work of scholarship. Charles Stewart Parnell: Table of Contents - The Meeting of the Waters - Apprenticeship - Rising High - Crisis - In the Eye of the Storm - Kilmainham - The New Course - Gathering Pace - Towards the Fulcrum - The Galway 'Mutiny' - The View from Pisgah - In the Shadows - Ireland in the Strand - Apotheosis - The Crash - Confrontation - Breaking-Point - A Time of Rending - Last Chance - La Commedia è Finita - Myth and RealityVer libro
James Dean to Hopper"I saw what you did today. Today you were great." Jack Nicholson to Hopper"We're geniuses, you know that?Isn't it great to be a genius?" The chopper-riding hippie outlaw in Easy Rider. The prophetic madman in the jungle in Apocalypse Now. The terrifying psychopath in Blue Velvet. The kid gone wrong in Rebel Without a Cause. The actor taken under the wing of James Dean who longed to be the next Orson Welles. The hell-raising director who revolutionized Hollywood. An enigmatic man from Dodge City, Kansas, on an endless quest to realize the American Dream. Dennis Hopper has been described as a rebel, an icon, an addict plagued by demons, and one of the most important champions of the pop-art movement. Friend to Warhol, muse to David Lynch, mentor to Sean Penn, champion of Ice-T, Dennis Hopper built a career that was a half-century of rebellion waged at the edge of American popular culture. Tom Folsom's Hopper is a wild ride through Dennis's many lives. Featuring hundreds of interviews with Hopper's fellow actors, artists, musicians, and residents of Taos, New Mexico (where he spent much of his most manic time), as well as his ex-wives and many other people who knew him, Hopper takes you on an extraordinary—and sometimes troubling—journey. From Dennis's early days with his grandparents on a dusty farm in Kansas, where he watched trains go by on their way to Los Angeles, to his formative time in Hollywood as one of a bright new crop of actors straddling the edge of the studio system, to the rebellious 1960s and the start of the independent film movement, to the drug-addled 1970s and beyond, when Hopper staged one of the greatest Hollywood comebacks of all time—Tom Folsom has crafted a biography as unconventional as Dennis Hopper himself.Ver libro
