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  The Last Jewish Gangster: The...

  David Larson

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  The second installment of this saga of gangland lore follows gregarious gangster, Michael Hardy, further down his twisted criminal path. The Last Jewish Gangster, The Middle Years, starts in 1968 with Hardy sentenced to twelve years in the world’s most dangerous prison in Mexico after taking the rap for his mother’s counterfeiting scheme, hoping to have finally earned her love and respect. Once he’s released from prison, Hardy returns to Brooklyn and tries to go straight, but drifts back into a world of crime. He gets Sammy “the Bull” Gravano to join his crew to pull major heists like kidnapping drug lords for million-dollar ransoms, and robbing cop bag men. To evade the law, he goes to Europe and ends up in Israel where he works on a Kibbutz, touching the hem of his Jewish heritage. Hardy devolves further into a gangster’s life when he returns to Brooklyn, running a finger of the Mob’s Five-Fingers International Car Theft Ring, participating in a stolen airline ticket scam, and doing fourteen hits for the Mob, still hoping his mother will take notice. When she gets busted for the car theft ring, she turns him in to reduce her time. Crushed by his mother’s callous self-interest, Hardy ends up cutting a deal with Rudy Giuliani to nab a dirty cop to reduce his time and negotiate his place in the witness protection program. Relocating to LA under an alias, it doesn’t take long for Hardy to land a gig as muscle for a Hollywood studio and meet his future wife, a sex worker who stole from his mother. The lines between love and revenge begin to blur.

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  Little Avalanches - A Memoir

  Becky Ellis

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  As a young girl, Becky is forced to hide from phantom Nazis, subjected to dental procedures without pain medication, and torn from her mother again and again. Growing up in the shadow of her father's PTSD, she wants to know what is wrong but knows not to ask. Her father won't talk about being a Timberwolf, a unit of specially trained night fighters that went into combat first and experienced a 300 percent casualty rate. He returns home with thirteen medals and becomes a doctor, but is haunted by his past. 
   
   
   
  Seeing only his explosive and often dangerous personality, Becky distances herself from the man she wants to love. Yet on the eve of his ninetieth birthday, when Becky looks at the vulnerable man he's become, something shifts, and she asks about the war. He breaks seventy years of silence, offering an unfiltered account of war without glory and revealing the extent of the trauma he's endured. She spends the next several years interviewing, researching, and ultimately understanding the demons she inherited. Because his story is incomplete without hers, and hers is inconceivable without his, Ellis offers both, as well as their year-long aching conversation marked by moments of redeeming grace. With compassionate, unflinching writing, Little Avalanches reminds us that we are profoundly shaped by the secrets we keep and forever changed by the stories we share.

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  Other Ways to Win - A...

  Lee Craigie

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  WINNER: Vikki Orvice Women’s Sports Writing Award, Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Awards
   
  ‘I rode back down the hill to the athlete’s village. Some of Team Scotland had been watching on the big screen and I arrived to hugs of congratulations. I went inside for a shower and ceremoniously dropped my heart rate monitor into the bin. It was the first day of the rest of my life.’
   
  A little before 1.30 p.m. on Sunday 21 July 2013, Lee Craigie crossed the finish line at Cathkin Braes in the southern outskirts of Glasgow several minutes ahead of her nearest competitor to become the British cross-country mountain bike champion. Lee’s win was the culmination of seven years of training and sacrifice, but it marked the beginning of the end of her competitive career; less than a year later, at the same venue, this time representing her native Scotland at the Commonwealth Games, she crossed the line and quit professional bike racing for good.
   
  Lee Craigie is one of Scotland’s great bike racers, yet she has accomplished much more since retiring. In Other Ways to Win she tells her story of growing up near Glasgow and discovering the freedom of cycling – skipping French lessons and heading off into the Campsie Fells to see just how far she could ride. These teenage adventures established cycling as the thread which would run through her life – not only through her racing life and into a new life of two-wheeled adventure, but also through the positive impact she would have on the lives of others, particularly encouraging other women through her work with the Adventure Syndicate. Written with breathtaking honesty, she recounts epic adventures along the Tour Divide, Silk Road and the Highland Trail 550, and examines themes of friendship, loss, identity and the power of the outdoors – and of course cycling.
   
  Lee's story is a welcome reminder that there is more than one way to win at cycling – and life.

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  Partisan Song - A Holocaust...

  James A. Grymes

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  Prior to the Holocaust, Moshe Gildenman lived a simple life as a cultural leader in his hometown of Korets, Ukraine. When the Nazis murdered 2,200 Jews in his peaceful community, including his wife and daughter, Moshe responded not with prayer and grieving but with a cry for revenge. If Moshe was going to die, he was going to take as many Nazis with him as possible. Bearing only a revolver, five bullets, and a Yiddish songbook, Moshe escaped to the forest with his son, a nephew, and nine other Jews. Fighting under the alias Uncle Misha, the engineer devised a number of intricate missions for the small but fearless brigade that became known as Uncle Misha's Jewish Group.Operating in Ukraine under the leadership of their unlikely commander, this undaunted band of brothers and sisters is credited with carrying out more than 150 combat operations, blowing up bridges and other strategic targets. Even after the Nazis were driven out of Ukraine, Uncle Misha insisted on staying in the fight all the way to Berlin, until the last German was defeated. The enthralling and profoundly moving story of Uncle Misha's extraordinary paramilitary success resounds powerfully with the enduring camaraderie he forged around forest campfires and his unyielding dedication to avenging the murders of his loved ones, liberating his homeland, and keeping his people's legacy alive.

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  The Secret Prison Governor

  Anonymous Anonymous

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  An eye-opening, thought-provoking and mind-blowing account from a genuine prison governor of what it's really like behind bars. 
   
  How do you bring order to the lawless? 
   
  The Secret Prison Governor has spent decades surrounded by every type of prisoner known to man, from petty thieves and common drug dealers to crime bosses and dangerous serial killers. 
   
  Since starting as a rookie, he has experienced the reality of the UK's harsh prison system and the hard challenge of ruling those within it. 
   
  In his own words, the Secret Prison Governor spares no detail of prison life, whether that's breaking up shiv fights, investigating and crushing vast networks of contraband, negotiating with hardened criminals or dealing with full-scale cellblock gang wars. 
   
  This is the brutal truth of what life is really like behind bars.

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  The Poisonous Solicitor

  Stephen Bates

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  A brilliant narrative investigation into the 1920s case that inspired Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. 
   
  In 1922, Major Herbert Armstrong, a Hay-on-Wye solicitor, was found guilty of, and executed for, poisoning his wife, Katharine, with arsenic. 
   
  Armstrong's case has all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, from a plot by Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers (indeed some aspects of his story appear in Sayers' Unnatural Death). It is a near-perfect whodunnit. 
   
  One hundred years later, Agatha Award-shortlisted Stephen Bates examines and retells the story of the case, evoking the period and atmosphere of the early 1920s, a time of newspaper sensationalism, hypocrisy and sanctimonious morality.

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