Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Battle Hardened - An Infantry...

  Craig S. Chapman

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  Battle-Hardened: An Infantry Officer's Harrowing Journey from D-Day to VE Day tells the story of an American soldier's growth from a Second Lieutenant eager to prove his worth in battle to a skilled and resolute commander over the course of the Northern European Campaign. 
  Craig Chapman delves deep into the personal recollections and mental state of Bill Champman as he fought against the Nazis, enduring frontline combat and witnessing horror on a massive scale. Lieutenant Chapman maintains his sanity by isolating his emotions from the chaos of the battlefield, and the young officer turns into a hard-edged warrior who dispassionately orders men to risk their lives yet still manages to hold onto his humanity.

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  Behind the Gates of Gomorrah - A...

  Stephen Seager

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  A darker twist on Orange is the New Black, this true insider's account delivers an eye-opening look into the nation’s largest state-run forensic hospital, a facility that houses the real-life Hannibal Lecters of the world.Psychiatrist Stephen Seager was no stranger to locked psych wards when he accepted a job at California’s Gorman State hospital, known locally as “Gomorrah,” but nothing could have prepared him for what he encountered when he stepped through its gates, a triple sally port behind the twenty-foot walls topped with shining coils of razor wire. Gorman State is one of the nation’s largest forensic mental hospitals, dedicated to treating the criminally insane. Unit C, where Seager was assigned, was reserved for the “bad actors,” the mass murderers, serial killers, and the real-life Hannibal Lecters of the world.Against a backdrop of surreal beauty—a verdant campus-like setting where peacocks strolled the grounds—is a place of remarkable violence, a place where a small staff of clinicians are expected to manage a volatile population of prison-hardened ex-cons, where lone therapists lead sharing circles with sociopaths, where an illicit underground economy flourishes, and where patients and physicians often measure their lives according to how fast they can run. To cross through the gates of Gomorrah is to enter a looking-glass world, where the trappings of the normal calendar year exist—Halloween dances and Christmas parties (complete with visits from Santa), springtime softball teams and basketball leagues, but marked with paroxysms of brutality (Santa goes berserk), and peopled by figures from our nightmares.Behind the Gates of Gomorrah affords an eye-opening look inside a facility to which few people have ever had access. Honest, rueful, and at times darkly funny, Seager’s gripping account of his rookie year blends memoir with a narrative science, explaining both the aberrant mind and his own, at times incomprehensible, determination to remain in a job with a perilously steep learning curve.

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  Richard Cottingham - The True...

  Jack Rosewood

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  The prostitutes working New York City’s Times Square were more than a little bit nervous.A deranged serial killer who apparently melted into the crowd was picking up hookers and sadistically torturing them, leaving some girls wondering if there was a real-life Dr. Frankenstein out there attempting to create his own personal plaything from pieces of his dismembered victims.Some working girls were butchered in seedy hotel rooms, their heads, hands or breasts sliced off, their remains then set ablaze in an effort to dispose of any incriminating evidence.Others narrowly escaped death, but only after enduring hours of terrifying torture that included brutal bite marks, surface knife slashes and stab wounds that all served as bloody foreplay for frenzied sexual assaults.Survivors were found bleeding and delirious, unable to remember much due to the cocktail of drugs they’d been given by their assailant. But their bodies told a horrific story that was almost worse than death, and the sadistic calling cards left by the serial killer would eventually tie together victims in this true crime murder spree that crossed two states.It wasn’t until one victim’s screams grew loud enough that Richard Cottingham, an American serial killer who was part narcissist, part sadist and all evil, was finally caught by police as he fled his hotel room carrying his bag of torture devices. His capture allowed them to close the books on some of the most horrific murder cases in U.S. history.This serial killer biography not only unearths Cottingham’s sick, twisted crime spree, it also delves into the murderer’s psyche, attempting to reveal why an insurance company IT guy’s seemingly normal life would devolve into madness.Among true crime stories, Richard Cottingham’s is particularly brutal, and will likely make you look twice at your own coworkers, and wonder what sick secrets they might be keeping.

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  A Narrative of the Most...

  Ukawsaw Gronniosaw

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  Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, also known as James Albert, (born ca. 1705 - 1775) was a freed slave and autobiographer. His autobiography is considered the first published by an African in Britain. Gronniosaw's autobiography was produced in Kidderminster in the late 1760s. Its full title is A Narrative of the Most remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, As related by himself. It was the first Slave narrative in the English language. Published in Bath in 1772, it gives a vivid account of Gronniosaw's life, from his capture in Africa through slavery to a life of poverty in Colchester and Kidderminster. It is devoid of the anti-slavery backlash ubiquitous in subsequent slave narratives. (Summary modified from Wikipedia) 
   
  Note to those who dislike incongruities: This is read by a North American woman.

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  Winter

  Christopher Nicholson

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  “[This] beautifully restrained novel, a meditation on aging, marriage and loss, fictionalizes a well-known period in Thomas Hardy’s life” (The New York Times). 
   
  A November morning in the 1920s finds an elderly man walking the grounds of his Dorchester home, pondering his past and future with deep despondence. That man is the revered novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, and this is a fictionalized account of his final years from the celebrated author of The Elephant Keeper. 
   
  The novel focuses on true events surrounding the London theater dramatization of Hardy’s acclaimed novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, including Hardy’s hand-picked casting of the young, alluring Gertrude Bugler to play Tess. As plans for the play solidify, Hardy’s interest in Gertie becomes a voyeuristic infatuation, causing him to write some of the best poems of his career. However, when Hardy’s reclusive, neglected wife, Florence, catches wind of Hardy’s desire for Gertie to take the London stage, a tangled web of jealousy and missed opportunity ensnares all three characters—with devastating results. 
   
  Told from the perspectives of Hardy, Gertie, and Florence, Winter is “a meditation on love, regret, and an elusive yearning for happiness” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). 
   
  “A book for grown-ups, one that finds the acme of human happiness in a young mother looking out at a starry winter’s night, while she holds her baby in her arms.” —The Washington Post 
   
  “Winter is quietly intelligent and compassionate, but what stands out most is that it is gorgeously, gorgeously written in prose so elegantly crafted that it becomes, paradoxically, almost invisible. It never shouts, never startles, just moves lithely along with an almost miraculous sense of rightness.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

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  Old Man and Me The - Book II -...

  R C Larlham

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  This book is the second in a series. The stories within these first two books comprise the memoirs of the author’s teen years and early adulthood. Timelines in the books overlap and stories in this book sometimes refer to stories in the first book. It is not possible to create a running explanation of the connections without creating some fairly awkward summaries of the earlier stories. We must assume the reader has also read the first book. 
             The author grew up in the postwar years of the ‘40s and ‘50s, mostly on a Northeast Ohio farm. His graduating class of 1960 had 76 (or 78) members. He went to college, joined the Army, went back to college, married his college sweetheart and earned a graduate degree and... that’s another book. Through all of that, he never thought of his life as exciting, or even interesting. He lived the life of a farm kid, with daily chores and special projects as invent. . .er-r, developed by the Old Man or his mother. His brother was less than two years younger than he, and competition between them was fierce. 
  	In this book, you'll travel to Washington on a tour bus with Mr. Larlham's Senior Class friends, and you'll discover a way to relax between Senior Finals, 
  	As Mr. Larlham grew older, conversations with his friends began to include the dreaded phrase, “When I was a boy...” followed by a story his friends found interesting, amusing, heart-wrenching or uplifting. People began telling him he should write some of them down, so he did. The internet provided an audience, and it was suggested he put them into a book. He did, and in 2013 the first The Old Man and Me was published; now the second. In this book, high school years are rounded out, and he eventually escapes the emotional and social disaster that was high school. . .only to become immersed in the deep waters of a college whose classrooms are primarily filled with Preppies.

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