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  The true life of Pablo Escobar -...

  Astrid María Legarda Martínez

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  "Hello beautiful. I am Popeye."
  
  In 1998 I met Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez—alias "Popeye"—lieutenant to the Medellín Cartel's leader, Pablo Escobar Gaviria. Our first encounter was at the high security yard of the Modelo Prison in Bogotá, Colombia.
  
  I visited the prison frequently as a journalist for RCN TV. I was always conducting interviews and speaking to the inmates, uncovering news about what was really happening inside the prison. At that time, stories about confrontations between guerrilla and paramilitary factions were everyday news. You could often hear shots inside the prison as the different sides fought for control.
  
  I had always wanted to meet one of the members of the Medellín Cartel. I was curious to know who they were, what they looked like, and what these men, who belonged to the most powerful drug cartel that has ever existed in Colombia, were thinking. At the high security yard I was able to talk with two of them. The most notorious was Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez.
  
  "Hello beautiful. I am Popeye." The man who sat in front of me stared at me. His pale skin reflected the six years he had been in prison; in fact, it looked as if he had never once stepped outside. Popeye smiled at me with curiosity while his cold eyes examined me from head to toe. We were introduced by another inmate, Ángel Gaitán Mahecha, a man accused of paramilitarism and homicide.
  
  My first impression was surprise and curiosity; I also examined him from head to toe. He wasn't quite six feet tall. His slim body and the smile on his face almost put me at ease. I thought this man couldn't possibly frighten anyone, and yet I couldn't forget the number of homicides in which he had been involved. I wanted to see into the mind of the man who planned and participated in the most horrible homicides that the cartel had carried out in their war against the state.

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  Happy Alchemy - On the Pleasures...

  Robertson Davies

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  The acclaimed playwright, novelist, and author of Fifth Business explores the performing arts in this witty and insightful essay collection. Though best known for his award-winning fiction, Robertson Davies enjoyed a long and varied career as an actor, playwright, journalist and critic. Happy Alchemy collects an equally diverse range of Davies’ writings—including speeches, articles, prologues to plays, a ghost story set to music, and even a scenario for a film. In this eclectic volume, Davies shares his many musings on music, theatre, opera, and more. These pieces, many of them published here for the first time, touch on topics from Greek tragedy to Scottish Folklore and from Lewis Carroll to Carl Jung.

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  Lalechka

  Amira Keidar

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  It's a warm and muggy Saturday night in August of 1942. The Nazis are liquidating the ghetto of Shedlitz, an industrial town east of Warsaw, Poland. Zippa, a twenty-seven-year-old Jewish woman, finds temporary shelter in a small attic, together with her baby daughter and a hundred frightened Jews. When the Nazi noose is tightened around her neck, Zippa asks her husband Jacob, a Jewish policeman in the ghetto, to save their little girl from certain death. The young father manages to smuggle his wife and daughter to the gentile part of town, where Zippa's childhood girlfriends Sophia and Irena reside.This is the real story of one Jewish family confronted by the terror of Nazi rule. The book follows Lalechka, the little girl born into the chaos of war and holocaust and forced to struggle with the reversals of fortune that led her each time into foreign and terrifying regions. But, beyond that, it is the story of the true friendship of three girls in early twentieth-century Poland, a friendship that won't cower before government dictates.

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  Red Rose Crew - A True Story Of...

  Daniel J. Boyne

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  In 1975, a group of amazing women rowed their way to international success and glory, battling sexual prejudice, bureaucracy, and male domination in one of the most grueling and competitive sports around. Among the members of the first international women's crew team — and one of the first women's teams anywhere — were Gail Pearson, the soft-spoken MIT professor who fought equally hard off the water to win the political battles neccessary for her team to succeed; lead rower Carie Graves, a statuesque bohemian from rural Wisconsin who dropped out of college and later became the most intense rower of the crew; and Lynn Stillman, a tiny sixteen-year-old coxswain from California.On hand to guide them was Harry Parker, the legendary Harvard men's crew coach who overcame his doubts about the ability of women to withstand the rigors of hard training. From their first dramatic bid at the 1975 World Championships to their preparations for their first Olympic Games in 1976, this gripping story of bravery, determination, and indomitable spirit captures a compelling moment in the history of sports and of America.Foreword by David Halberstam.

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  The Double Helix - A Personal...

  James D. Watson

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  The classic personal account of Watson and Crick’s groundbreaking discovery of the structure of DNA—with an introduction by the author of A Beautiful Mind. 
   
  By identifying the structure of DNA, the molecule of life, Francis Crick and James Watson revolutionized biochemistry and won themselves a Nobel Prize. At the time, Watson was only twenty-four, a young scientist hungry to make his mark. His uncompromisingly honest account of the heady days of their thrilling sprint against other world-class researchers to solve one of science’s greatest mysteries gives a dazzlingly clear picture of a world of brilliant scientists with great gifts, very human ambitions, and bitter rivalries. 
   
  With humility unspoiled by false modesty, Watson relates his and Crick’s desperate efforts to beat Linus Pauling to the Holy Grail of life sciences, the identification of the basic building block of life. Never has a scientist been so truthful in capturing in words the flavor of his work.

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  Memoir of a Race Traitor -...

  Mab Segrest

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  In 1994, Mab Segrest first explained how she “had become a woman haunted by the dead.” Against a backdrop of nine generations of her family’s history, Segrest explored her experiences in the 1980s as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent far-right movement in North Carolina. 
   Memoir of a Race Traitor became a classic text of white antiracist practice. bell hooks called it a “courageous and daring [example of] the reality that political solidarity, forged in struggle, can exist across differences.” Adrienne Rich wrote that it was “a unique document and thoroughly fascinating.” Juxtaposing childhood memories with contemporary events, Segrest described her journey into the heart of her culture, finally veering from its trajectory of violence toward hope and renewal. 
   Now, amid our current national crisis, driven by an increasingly apocalyptic white supremacist movement, Segrest returns with an updated edition of her classic book. With a new introduction and afterword that explores what has transpired with the far right since its publication, the book brings us into the age of Trump—and to what can and must be done.

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