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[Daveo]

The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia; by Mike Dash.

 

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Before the notorious Five Families who dominated U.S. organized crime for a bloody half century, there was the one fingered criminal genius Giuseppe Morello, known as “The Clutch Hand” and his lethal coterie of associates.

In The First Family, historian, journalist, and bestselling author Mike Dash brings to life this little known story, following the rise of the Mafia in America from the 1890's to the 1920's, from the lawless villages of Sicily to the streets of Little Italy.

Using an impressive array of primary sources hitherto untapped Secret Service archives, prison records, trial transcripts, and interviews with surviving family members, this is the first Mafia history that applies scholarly rigor to the story of the Morello syndicate and the birth of organized crime on these shores.

 

Progressing from small time scams to counterfeiting rings to even bigger criminal enterprises, Giuseppe Morello exerted ruthless control of Italian neighborhoods in New York, and through adroit coordination with other Sicilian crime families, his Clutch Hand soon reached far beyond the Hudson River.

 

The men who battled Morello’s crews were themselves colorful and legendary figures, including William Flynn, a fearless Secret Service agent, and Lieutenant Detective Giuseppe “Joe” Petrosino of the New York Police Department’s elite Italian Squad, whose pursuit of the brutal gangs ultimately cost him his life.

 

Combining first-rate scholarship and pulse quickening action, and set amid rustic Sicilian landscapes and the streets of old New York, The First Family is a groundbreaking account of the crucial period when the American criminal underworld exploded with violent fury across the nation.

[Daveo]

A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway.

 

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Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I.

A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse.

Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield, weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertion, this gripping, semi autobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep.

 

Ernest Hemingway famously said that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right.

This edition collects all of the alternative endings together for the first time, along with early drafts of other essential passages, offering new insight into Hemingway’s craft and creative process and the evolution of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

Featuring Hemingway’s own 1948 introduction to an illustrated reissue of the novel, a personal foreword by the author’s son Patrick Hemingway, and a new introduction by the author’s grandson Seán Hemingway, this edition of A Farewell to Arms is truly a celebration.

[Daveo]

The Black Hand: The Story of Rene "Boxer" Enriquez and His Life in the Mexican Mafia by Chris Blatchford.

 

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THE BLACK HAND is the true story of Rene Enriquez, aka "Boxer," and his rise in a secret criminal organization, a new Mafia, that already has a grip on all organized crime in California and soon all of the United States.

This Mafia is using a base army of an estimated 60,000 heavily armed, loyal Latino gang members, called Surenos, driven by fear and illicit profits.

They are the most dangerous gang in American history and they wave the flag of the Black Hand.

 

Mafioso Enriquez gives an insider's view of how he devoted his life to the cause, the Mexican Mafia, La Familia Mexicana, also known as La Eme, only to find betrayal and disillusionment at the end of a bloody trail of violence that he followed for two decades.

 

And now, award winning investigative journalist Chris Blatchford, with the unprecedented cooperation of Rene Enriquez, reveals the inner workings, secret meetings, and elaborate murder plots that make up the daily routine of the Mafia brothers.

It is an intense, never-before-told story of a man who devoted his life to a bloody cause only to find betrayal and disillusionment.

 

Based on years of research and investigation, Chris Blatchford has delivered a historic narrative of a nefarious organization that will go down as a classic in mob literature.

[Daveo]

The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie.

 

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Moraes 'Moor' Zogoiby is a 'high-born crossbreed', the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinise spice merchants and crime lords.

He is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile.

As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a labyrinthine tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.

The Moor's Last Sigh is a spectacularly ambitious, funny, satirical and compassionate novel.

It is a love song to a vanishing world, but also its last hurrah.

[Daveo]

The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook

by Joshua Piven & David Borgenicht.

 

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Danger! It lurks at every corner.

Volcanoes.

Sharks.

Quicksand.

Terrorists.

The pilot of the plane blacks out and it's up to you to land the jet. What do you do?

The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook is here to help: jam packed with how to, hands on, step by step, illustrated instructions on everything you need to know FAST-from defusing a bomb to delivering a baby in the back of a cab.

Providing frightening and funny real information in the best selling tradition of the Paranoid's Pocket Guide and Hypochondriac's Handbook, this indispensable, indestructible pocket-sized guide is the definitive handbook for those times when life takes a sudden turn for the worse.

The essential companion for a perilous age. Because you never know...

[Daveo]

The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene.

 

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When raised to the level of art, seduction, an indirect and subtle form of power, has toppled empires, won elections and enslaved great minds.

Discover who you, or your pursuer, most resembles.

 

Immerse yourself in the twenty-four maneuvers and strategies of the seductive process, the ritual by which a seducer gains mastery over his target.

Understand how to "Choose the Right Victim," "Appear to Be an Object of Desire," and "Confuse Desire and Reality."

Every bit as essential as The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction is an indispensable primer of persuasion that reveals one of history's greatest weapons and the ultimate form of power.

[Daveo]

The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi.

 

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When the undefeated samurai Miyamoto Musashi retreated to a Cave in 1643 and wrote The Book of Five Rings, a manifesto on swordsmanship, strategy, and winning for his students and generations of samurai to come, he created one of the most perceptive and incisive texts on strategic thinking ever to come from Asia.

 

Musashi gives timeless advice on defeating an adversary, throwing an opponent off-guard, creating confusion, and other techniques for overpowering an assailant that will resonate with both martial artists and everyone else interested in skillfully dealing with conflict.

For Musashi, the way of the martial arts was a mastery of the mind rather than simply technical prowess and it is this path to mastery that is the core teaching in The Book of Five Rings.

 

William Scott Wilson’s translation is faithful to the original seventeenth-century Japanese text while being wonderfully clear and readable.

His scholarship and insight into the deep meaning of this classic are evident in his introduction and notes to the text.

This edition also includes a translation of one of Musashi’s earlier writings, “The Way of Walking Alone,” and calligraphy by Japanese artist Shiro Tsujimura.

[Daveo]

The Truth by Michael Palin.

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“An ingeniously plotted, beautifully written and hugely enjoyable book that raises tricky questions about... our need for heroes and the price of personal compromise.’”

For the first time since his much-beloved tale Hemingway's Chair was published in 1998, Michael Palin pens a new novel featuring the warm and witty story of an everyman, a tantalizing offer, a journey to India, and the search for the truth.

Keith Mabbut is at a crossroads in his life. 
 A professional writer of some repute, he has reached the age of fifty six with nothing resembling the success of his two great literary heroes, George Orwell and Albert Camus. 
When he is offered the opportunity of a lifetime to write the biography of the elusive Hamish Melville, a widely respected and highly influential activist and humanitarian, he seizes the chance to write something meaningful. 
His search to find out the real story behind the legend takes Mabbut to the lush landscapes and environmental hotspots of India.

The more he discovers about Melville, the more he admires him and the more he connects with an idealist who wanted to make a difference.
But is his quarry really who he claims to be? 
As Keith discovers, the truth can be whatever we make it.

In this wonderful, heartwarming novel, Michael Palin turns his considerable skills to fiction in the story of an ordinary man on an extraordinary adventure.

 

 

Edited May 2, 2017 by Daveo

[Daveo]

 

Edited May 2, 2017 by Daveo

[Daveo]

Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

by Robert K. Ressler & Tom Shachtman.

 

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Face-to-face with some of America's most terrifying killers, FBI veteran and ex-Army CID colonel Robert Ressler learned from then how to identify the unknown monsters who walk among us and put them behind bars.

Now the man who coined the phrase "serial killer" and advised Thomas Harris on The Silence of the Lambs shows how is able to track down some of today's most brutal murderers.

 

Just as it happened in The Silence of the Lambs, Ressler used the evidence at a crime scene to put together a psychological profile of the killers.

From the victims they choose, to the way they kill, to the often grotesque souvenirs they take with them, Ressler unlocks the identities of these vicious killers of the police to capture.

 

And with his discovery that serial killers share certain violent behaviors, Ressler's gone behind prison walls to hear the bizarre first hand stories countless convicted murderers.

Getting inside the mind of a killer to understand how and why he kills, is one of the FBI's most effective ways of helping police bring in killers who are still at large.

 

Join Ressler as he takes you on the hunt for today's most dangerous psychopaths.

It is a terrifying journey you will not forget

[Daveo]

Poirot: The Complete Ariadne Oliver, Vol. 2 (Hercule Poirot & Ariadne Oliver Omnibus ) by Agatha Christie.

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The final POIROT omnibus, featuring the last four appearances of the detective's side kick, the sleuthing crime novelist Ariadne Oliver: Third Girl, Hallowe'en Party, Elephants Can Remember and The Pale Horse. 
Poirot and Mrs Oliver continue their sleuthing in the 1960's in four uncharacteristically 'modern' novels with an added twist of danger?
Third Girl Poirot finally admits he is growing old as a perplexed girl thinks she may have killed someone.
Here Christie dragged Poirot into the swinging 60's and effectively squared him up against a world featuring sex, drugs and hippies. 
Hallowe'en Party A teenage murder witness is drowned in a tub of apples. 
This was only the second time Christie wrote about the death of a child, and is all the more engrossing for it. 
Elephants Can Remember An old husband and wife double murder has never been solved, until now. 
This was the very last Poirot story that Agatha Christie wrote, and garnered good reviews. 
The Pale Horse A priest's death leads to sinister goings on in an old country inn. 
This bonus novel featured Mrs Oliver for once without Poirot and was one of Christie's darkest stories, blending witchcraft and murder.

[Daveo]

Wiseguy; Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi.

 

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Nicholas Pileggi’s vivid, unvarnished, journalistic chronicle of the life of Henry Hill, the working class Brooklyn kid who knew from age twelve that “to be a wiseguy was to own the world,” who grew up to live the highs and lows of the mafia gangster’s life has been hailed as “the best book ever written on organized crime”

 

This is the true crime bestseller that was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s film masterpiece GoodFellas, which brought to life the violence, the excess, the families, the wives and girlfriends, the drugs, the payoffs, the paybacks, the jail time, and the Feds…with Henry Hill’s crackling narration drawn straight out of Wiseguy and overseeing all the unforgettable action.

 

Read it and experience the secret life inside the mob, from one who’s lived it.

[Daveo]

Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up in Florida by Daniel Hopsicker.

 

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Investigating the associations of Mohamed Atta and other terrorist pilots in Venice, Florida, as they prepared for the 9/11 attacks, this work discloses the FBI's massive post attack cover up to conceal their knowledge of the terrorists' activities. Unreported stories including the assassination attempt on President George W. Bush on the morning of September 11, 2001, and the rampant drug trafficking of the flight school financier are fully discussed, with attention to the stunning evidence of the CIA's knowledge that hundreds of Arab flight students were pouring into southwest Florida.

This examination of the conspiracy behind the 9/11 investigation and the CIA complicity in the illegal activities that allowed the known terrorists to continue offers truth behind the "official" story of the attacks.

[Daveo]

Deadlock by Sean Black.

 

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Set in Pelican Bay High Security Prison, a high concept race-against time thriller featuring elite bodyguard Ryan Lock.

His mission should have been straightforward: to keep one man alive for one week.

 

ONE PRISONER

Super-intelligent and brutally violent, Frank 'Reaper' Hays is a leading member of America's most powerful white supremacists prison gang.

 

ONE BODYGUARD

Ex-military bodyguard Ryan Lock has been hired to protect him. His mission is to keep Reaper alive for a week until he can be brought to trial.

 

ONE WEEK TO STAY ALIVE

But Lock soon realises that he faces the toughest assignment of his career, just to survive.

[Daveo]

False Friends: The 9th Spider Shepherd Thriller 
by Stephen Leather.

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The ninth book in the bestselling Dan 'Spider' Shepherd series.

The most wanted man in the world is dead. 
Now those loyal to him seek revenge.

When Navy Seals track down and kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, it's obvious there was a traitor on the inside. 
After the false friends are revealed to be two British students, Malik and Chaudhry, former Islamic fundamentalists recruited by MI5 - they become targets themselves.

Dan 'Spider' Shepherd must teach the pair how to survive undercover with al-Qaeda closing in. 
But Spider is not used to playing the handler. 
And with the line between mentor and friend beginning to blur, and a terrorist plot putting thousands of lives at stake, can he protect everyone before it's too late?

 

[Daveo]

Voice of the Violin (Inspector Montalbano Mysteries)

by Andrea Camilleri.

 

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Inspector Montalbano, praised as “a delightful creation” has been compared to the legendary detectives of Georges Simenon, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler.

As the fourth mystery in the internationally bestselling series opens, Montalbano’s gruesome discovery of a lovely, naked young woman suffocated in her bed immediately sets him on a search for her killer.

Among the suspects are her aging husband, a famous doctor; a shy admirer, now disappeared; an antiques dealing lover from Bologna; and the victim’s friend Anna, whose charms Montalbano cannot help but appreciate.

But it is a mysterious, reclusive violinist who holds the key to the murder.

[Daveo]

At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

by George Tenet.

 

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In the whirlwind of accusations and recriminations that emerged in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq war, one man's vital testimony has been conspicuously absent.

Candid and gripping, At the Center of the Storm recounts George Tenet's time at the Central Intelligence Agency, a revealing look at the inner workings of the most important intelligence organization in the world during the most challenging times in recent history.

With unparalleled access to both the highest echelons of government and raw intelligence from the field, Tenet illuminates the CIA's painstaking attempts to prepare the country against new and deadly threats, disentangles the interlocking events that led to 9/11, and offers explosive new information on the deliberations and strategies that culminated in the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

 

Beginning with his appointment as Director of Central Intelligence in 1997, Tenet unfolds the momentous events that led to 9/11 as he saw and experienced them: his declaration of war on al Qaeda; the CIA's covert operations inside Afghanistan; the worldwide operational plan to fight terrorists; his warnings of imminent attacks against American interests to White House officials in the summer of 2001; and the plan for a coordinated and devastating counterattack against al Qaeda laid down just six days after the attacks.

 

Tenet's compelling narrative then turns to the war in Iraq as he provides dramatic insight and background on the run-up to the invasion, including a firsthand account of the fallout from the inclusion of "sixteen words" in the president's 2003 State of the Union address, which claimed that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium from Africa; the true context of Tenet's own now-famous "slam dunk" comment regarding Saddam's WMD program; and the CIA's critical role in an administration predisposed to take the country to war. In doing so, he sets the record straight about CIA operations and shows readers that the truth is more complex than suggested in other versions of recent history offered thus far.

 

Through it all, Tenet paints an unflinching self-portrait of a man caught between the warring forces of the administration's decision-making process, the reams of frightening intelligence pouring in from around the world, and his own conscience. In At the Center of the Storm, George Tenet draws on his unmatched experience within the opaque mirrors of intelligence and provides crucial information previously undisclosed to offer a moving, revelatory profile of both a man and a nation in times of

[Daveo]

Musical Wind Instruments (Dover Books on Music)

by Adam Carse.

 

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This comprehensive guide presents an informative overview of wind instruments used in European orchestras, military, and other wind bands during the past 400 years.

Included are well-illustrated, descriptive passages about the various types and sizes of woodwinds, flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons and brass instruments, trumpets, cornets, horns, trombones, bugles, and related instruments.

For this historical survey, the author has incorporated information and materials from numerous sources: old instruments from public and private collections, catalogs, and photographs; written descriptions, instructions for playing the instruments, fingering charts, and illustrations of old instruments from contemporary sources; as well as contemporary music specifically written for an instrument.

Among other topics, chapters cover the lengthening slide and valve systems of brass instruments, the mechanics of woodwinds and brass, the transverse flute and whistle-flute, saxophone, bassoon, and bugle horns.

Brief descriptions accompany the illustrations.

A valuable guide for musicians, teachers, and music students, this book will delight and inform music lovers.

Includes 30 photos, 41 drawings and diagrams, and 11 charts.

[Daveo]

The Viking Gods: From Snorri Sturluson's Edda

by Snorri Sturluson,

 

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The books in this series contain short texts from the original stories from Viking Age.

These new translations unlock the treasures of the Classical texts and will make a valued gift for friends, relatives or business associates.

The Viking Gods contains excerpts from Snorri Sturluson's Edda, which was written around 1220 and is the most important source on the gods of the Vikings.

It's the story of the mythical kingdom of Asgard, ruled by the almighty god Odin, with Thor, Loki, Balder and the Valkyries.

[Daveo]

The Sayings of the Vikings by Björn Jónasson.

 

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This is the authentic Havamal, the famous northern guide on how to manage everyday life, which gave spiritual nourishment to the Vikings on their long journeys across the seas to discover new lands.

It advises on the art of living, friendship, money, happiness, eating, traveling and even positive thinking.

[Daveo]

The Blooding by Joseph Wambaugh.

 

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Fifteen year old Lynda Mann's savagely raped and strangled body is found along a shady footpath near the English village of Narborough.

Though a massive 150-man dragnet is launched, the case remains unsolved.

Three years later the killer strikes again, raping and strangling teenager Dawn Ashforth only a stone's throw from where Lynda was so brutally murdered.

But it will take four years, a scientific breakthrough, the largest manhunt in British crime annals, and the blooding of more than four thousand men before the real killer is found."Wambaugh's darkest nonfiction since "The Onion Field." . . .

A meticulous and suspenseful reconstruction . . . . A powerful and elegant police procedural."

 

"Like that cop that he was, Wambaugh brings his English colleagues to vivid life, and like the instinctive reporter that he is, he makes Narborough seem more like Brigadoon than contemporary Britain.

For this one, both thumbs up.

[Daveo]

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice by Bill Browder.

 

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A real-life political thriller about an American financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin's corruption.

 

Bill Browder's journey started on the South Side of Chicago and moved through Stanford Business School to the dog eat dog world of hedge fund investing in the 1990's.

It continued in Moscow, where Browder made his fortune heading the largest investment fund in Russia after the Soviet Union's collapse.

But when he exposed the corrupt oligarchs who were robbing the companies in which he was investing, Vladimir Putin turned on him and, in 2005, had him expelled from Russia.

 

In 2007, a group of law enforcement officers raided Browder's offices in Moscow and stole $230 million of taxes that his fund's companies had paid to the Russian government.

Browder's attorney Sergei Magnitsky investigated the incident and uncovered a sprawling criminal enterprise.

A month after Sergei testified against the officials involved, he was arrested and thrown into pre-trial detention, where he was tortured for a year.

On November 16, 2009, he was led to an isolation chamber, handcuffed to a bedrail, and beaten to death by eight guards in full riot gear.

 

Browder glimpsed the heart of darkness, and it transformed his life: he embarked on an unrelenting quest for justice in Sergei's name, exposing the towering cover-up that leads right up to Putin.

A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world.

[Daveo]

The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell,

 

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Sweden, winter, 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off.

A few days later a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead.

The dead men were criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit.

But what appears to be an open and shut case soon takes on a far more sinister aspect.

Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea, to Riga in Latvia, where he is plunged into a frozen, alien world of police surveillance, scarcely veiled threats, and lies.

Doomed always to be one step behind the shadowy figures he pursues, only Wallander's obstinate Desire to see that justice is done brings the truth to light.

 

[Daveo]

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

 

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Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonic era, Alexandre Dumas's thrilling adventure story is one of the most widely read romantic novels of all time.

In it the dashing young hero, Edmond Dantès, is betrayed by his enemies and thrown into a secret dungeon in the Chateau d'If, doomed to spend his life in a dank prison cell.

The story of his long, intolerable years in captivity, his miraculous escape, and his carefully wrought revenge creates a dramatic tale of mystery and intrigue and paints a vision of France, a dazzling, dueling, exuberant France, that has become immortal.

[Daveo]

Letters To Felice by Franz Kafka.

 

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Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer were written between 1912 and 1917, during which time they were twice engaged to be married. This complex relationship, which coincided with a period of great productivity for Kafka, gave him both hope and strength, but gradually disillusionment and the onset of illness drove them apart.

These letters remain as a monument to the inner life of a creative artist.