18 books like Under the Banner of Heaven
Endurance
Bound for Antarctica, where polar explorer Ernest Shackleton planned to cross on foot the last uncharted continent, the Endurance set sail from England, in August 1914. The ship became locked inside an island of ice, and was later crushed. This tale of survival by Shackleton and all 27 of his men for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctice seas defined heroism.
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Killing in Zion
The murder of a polygamous paterfamilias forces a Salt Lake City cop to confront his Mormon past in this historical mystery.After a high-profile case thrusts deputy Art Oveson into the spotlight, Salt Lake City's mayor taps him to head the city's Anti-Polygamy Squad. As a Mormon ashamed that his own ancestors played a part in the church's polygamist past, Art's eager to do his part to remove the…
Shares: Mormons, Murder
Say Nothing
“Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book — as finely paced as a novel — Keefe uses McConville’s murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing,…
Shares: Violence, True Crime, Murder
Invisible Darkness
Invisible Darkness is the story of one of the more bizarre cases in recent memory--killings so sensational that they prompted the Canadian government, in the interests of justice, to silence its national press and to lock foreign journalists out of the courts.To all appearances, Paul and Karla Bernardo had a fairytale marriage--beautiful working-class girl weds bright upper-middle-class guy and…
Shares: True Crime
Nice Girl
Nice Girl? is a 1941 American musical comedy film directed by William A. Seiter and starring Deanna Durbin, Franchot Tone, Walter Brennan, Robert Stack, and Robert Benchley. Based on the play Nice Girl? by Phyllis Duganne, the film is about a young girl who finds herself attracted to one of her fathers business partners who comes to town to give her father a scholarship for his dietary studies.
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Outlaws
What's it like to be an outlaw biker? 'We're dd magnets,' one of them tells Adam Shand. 'Drunks in bars like to test themselves against a so-called outlaw.'
Once seen as a free-wheeling, brawling, pleasure-seeking bunch of misfits rolling down the highways, bikers are now cast as social bogeymen. If you believe the dire warnings of the media and politicians, they are an organised crime threat on…
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Stolen Innocence
In September 2007, a packed courtroom in St. George, Utah, sat hushed as Elissa Wall, the star witness against polygamous sect leader Warren Jeffs, gave captivating testimony of how Jeffs forced her to marry her first cousin at age fourteen. This harrowing and vivid account proved to be the most compelling evidence against Jeffs, showing the harsh realities of this closed community and the…
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Blind Faith
The Marshalls were the model family of Tom’s River, New Jersey, living the American dream of all that money could buy. Rob Marshall was the big breadwinner, king of the country club set. Maria Marshall was his stunningly beautiful wife and the perfect mom to their three great kids.
Then one night Rob, his head bloodied, reported Maria had been brutally slain. Sympathy poured in—until…
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How Gangs Work
"In the wake of the 2011 UK riots and the British government's new American-style 'war on gangs', this book is the definitive account of 'how gangs work'. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with gangs and drawing on a variety of sources, How Gangs Work provides a vivid portrayal of gang life, but not as the British traditionally know it" -Back cover.
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Big Shots
Vast shoplifting ring operating in Britain'A highly organised gang of Australian shoplifters is at work in Britain stealing goods worth hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. New members of the gang are flown from Australia whenever the organisers want replacements.'The Guardian, 15 August 1968From the mid 1960s, a brazen band of Australian thieves ran riot in London for more than a decade,…
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Crimes of Passion
The very term "crimes of passion" evokes deep-seated, atavistic responses in everyone's heart. These are the crimes that are born in the emotional core of women and men who are pushed to do the unthinkable. There are never - well, hardly ever - any of the crass considerations of financial gain, no taint of reward; only release. These crimes are direct responses to betrayal, to broken hearts and…
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By the Fire We Carry
"No part of the judiciary exposes the chasm between American ideals and institutional practice like federal Indian law. In By the Fire We Carry, Nagle, a Cherokee journalist, turns a case most Americans haven’t heard of into a legal thriller." —New York Times Book ReviewNATIONAL BESTSELLERThe New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024 • Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year • NPR 2024 "Books We Loved"…
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A rip in Heaven
It was a headline story in the New York Times and USA Today. It was covered by Court TV and profiled on the Ricki Lake Show. Now, here is the intimate memoir of a shocking crime and its aftermath...one family's immediate and unforgettable story of what victims can suffer long after they should be safe.
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Bad Blood
Details the shocking murders--in Terra Linda, California--of Jim and Naomi Olive by their sixteen-year-old daughter, Marlene, and her nineteen-year-old boyfriend, small-time drug dealer Chuck Riley
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The Authentic Life of Billy, The Kid
Hankering for a mostly true tale about the hard-living desperadoes who inhabited America's desert Southwest in the mid-1800s? This biography of the ill-fated gunslinger Billy, the Kid was written by Pat Garrett, the sheriff who shot Billy down. Although some historians now question the veracity of some of the self-aggrandizing bluster Garrett and his ghostwriter included in the book, The…
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Last Yakuza
The Last Yakuza tells the history of the yakuza like it’s never been told before.Makoto Saigo is half-American and half-Japanese in small-town Japan with a set of talents limited to playing guitar and picking fights. With rock stardom off the table, he turns toward the only place where you can start from the bottom and move up through sheer merit, loyalty, and brute force — the yakuza.Saigo,…
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Death's Shadow
Victims and survivors, angels and demons, intersect along winding roads to imperfect justice.“Bare light bulbs shone against walls painted with graffiti and dried blood, the rooms reeking of a sweet pungent odour like burnt plastic …” So writes award-winning Hamilton Spectator journalist and author Jon Wells in one of four harrowing murder stories in Death’s Shadow. Wells take readers up close…
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Severed
The Black Dahlia murder hit post-War Los Angeles like a bombshell . . . an impenetrable mystery—the haunting crown jewel of LAPD’s “unsolved” murders. Even before her savage death, beautiful 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet and nightclub habitué, was known as the Black Dahlia—now a magnetic icon in American pop culture, an almost mythical symbol of noir Hollywood. In this expanded…
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