Homage to a Firing Squad

Homage to a Firing Squad PDF Author: Tariq Goddard
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 9780340821473
Category : Assassins
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Four young men are in a car on their way to assassinate the politician Don Rojo. Unfortunately, not one of them has assassinated anyone before, three of them are in love with the Don's daughter, and, unbeknownst to them the politician is lying awake in his Hacienda, contemplating suicide. Goddard describes the events of one bizarre night in prose that is taut, evocative and often darkly funny. As the rain pours down on the Tibidabo road, the would-be-murderers encounter lusty barmaids, crises of conscience, road blocks and - with fatal results - the man who ordered Rojo's assassination, and all the while the Spanish civil war boils around them. Eventually they converge on the hacienda (along with a couple of real assassins, a failed Don Juan and two over-sexed daughters) in a surreal and bullet-ridden climax that puts 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' to shame.

Homage to a Firing Squad

Homage to a Firing Squad PDF Author: Tariq Goddard
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 9780340821473
Category : Assassins
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Four young men are in a car on their way to assassinate the politician Don Rojo. Unfortunately, not one of them has assassinated anyone before, three of them are in love with the Don's daughter, and, unbeknownst to them the politician is lying awake in his Hacienda, contemplating suicide. Goddard describes the events of one bizarre night in prose that is taut, evocative and often darkly funny. As the rain pours down on the Tibidabo road, the would-be-murderers encounter lusty barmaids, crises of conscience, road blocks and - with fatal results - the man who ordered Rojo's assassination, and all the while the Spanish civil war boils around them. Eventually they converge on the hacienda (along with a couple of real assassins, a failed Don Juan and two over-sexed daughters) in a surreal and bullet-ridden climax that puts 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' to shame.

Reflections on Hanging

Reflections on Hanging PDF Author: Arthur Koestler
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820355348
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Reflections on Hanging is a searing indictment of capital punishment, inspired by its author’s own time in the shadow of a firing squad. During the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler was held by the Franco regime as a political prisoner, and condemned to death. He was freed, but only after months of witnessing the fates of less-fortunate inmates. That experience informs every page of the book, which was first published in England in 1956, and followed in 1957 by this American edition. As Koestler ranges across the history of capital punishment in Britain (with a focus on hanging), he looks at notable cases and rulings, and portrays politicians, judges, lawyers, scholars, clergymen, doctors, police, jailers, prisoners, and others involved in the long debate over the justness and effectiveness of the death penalty. In Britain, Reflections on Hanging was part of a concerted, ultimately successful effort to abolish the death penalty. At that time, in the forty-eight United States, capital punishment was sanctioned in forty-two of them, with hanging still practiced in five. This edition includes a preface and afterword written especially for the 1957 American edition. The preface makes the book relevant to readers in the U.S.; the afterword overviews the modern-day history of abolitionist legislation in the British Parliament. Reflections on Hanging is relentless, biting, and unsparing in its details of botched and unjust executions. It is a classic work of advocacy for some of society’s most defenseless members, a critique of capital punishment that is still widely cited, and an enduring work that presaged such contemporary problems as the sensationalism of crime, the wrongful condemnation of the innocent and mentally ill, the callousness of penal systems, and the use of fear to control a citizenry.

Shot in the Heart

Shot in the Heart PDF Author: Mikal Gilmore
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307423646
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A murder tale "from inside the house where murder is born." Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged. Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder. Mikal, burdened with the guilt of being his father's favorite and the shame of being Gary's brother, gracefully and painfully relates his story "from inside the house where murder is born... a house that, in some ways, [he has] never been able to leave." Shot in the Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence, and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long lineage of ruin.

Kafka

Kafka PDF Author: Reiner Stach
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691147515
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 694

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Book Description
This volume "tells the story of the final years of the writer's life, from 1916 to 1924 - a period during which the world Kafka had known came to an end"--Dust cover.

Let the Lord Sort Them

Let the Lord Sort Them PDF Author: Maurice Chammah
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1524760277
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “If you’re one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”—Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation’s death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state’s highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth. Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.

Paper Lantern

Paper Lantern PDF Author: Stuart Dybek
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374146446
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
A collection of short stories of love set in gritty urban environments.

The Bar Book

The Bar Book PDF Author: Jeffrey Morgenthaler
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1452130272
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The Bar Book — Bartending and mixology for the home cocktail enthusiast Learn the key techniques of bartending and mixology from a master: Written by renowned bartender and cocktail blogger Jeffrey Morgenthaler, The Bar Book is the only technique-driven cocktail handbook out there. This indispensable guide breaks down bartending into essential techniques, and then applies them to building the best drinks. Over 60 of the best drink recipes: The Bar Book contains more than 60 recipes that employ the techniques you will learn in this bartending book. Each technique is illustrated with how-to photography to provide inspiration and guidance. Bartending and mixology techniques include the best practices for: Juicing Garnishing Carbonating Stirring and shaking Choosing the correct ice for proper chilling and dilution of a drink And, much more If you found PTD Cocktail Book, 12 Bottle Bar, The Joy of Mixology, Death and Co., and Liquid Intelligence to be helpful among bartending books, you will find Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s The Bar Book to be an essential bartender book.

Death or Deliverance

Death or Deliverance PDF Author: Teresa Iacobelli
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774825707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Soldiers found guilty of desertion or cowardice during the Great War faced death by firing squad. Novels, histories, movies, and television series often depict courts martial as brutal and inflexible, and social memories of this system of frontline justice have inspired modern movements to seek pardons for soldiers executed on the battlefield. In this revealing look at military law in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, Teresa Iacobelli brings to light not only the trials of 25 Canadian soldiers who were executed but also the untold cases of 197 men sentenced to death but spared. Looking beyond stories of callous generals and quick executions, Iacobelli reveals a disciplinary system capable of thoughtful review and compassion for the individual soldier. Published to coincide with the centennial anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, Death or Deliverance reconsiders an important and unexamined chapter in the history of both a war and a nation.

Exposing the Real Che Guevara

Exposing the Real Che Guevara PDF Author: Humberto Fontova
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781595230270
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
FONTOVA/EXPOSING THE REAL CHE GUEVA

Manet and the Execution of Maximilian

Manet and the Execution of Maximilian PDF Author: John Elderfield
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
ISBN: 9780870704239
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Manet and the Execution of Emperor Maximillian ISBN 0-87070-423-0 / 978-0-87070-423-9 Paperback, 7.5 x 9.25 in. / 120 pgs / 35 color and 45 b&w. / U.S. $29.95 CDN $36.00 November / Nonfiction and Criticism