The Fall of the House of Zeus

The Fall of the House of Zeus PDF Author: Curtis Wilkie
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307460711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
“Masterful . . . an epic tale of backbiting, shady deal-making, and greed [that] reads like a John Grisham novel.”—The Wall Street Journal A real-life legal thriller as timeless as a Greek tragedy, tracing the downfall of one of America’s most famous lawyers and exposing the dark side of Southern politics—from the author of When Evil Lived in Laurel Dickie Scruggs was arguably the most successful plaintiff’s lawyer in America. A brother-in-law of former U.S. Senate majority leader Trent Lott, Scruggs made a fortune taking on mass tort lawsuits against Big Tobacco and the asbestos industries. He was hailed by Newsweek as a latter-day Robin Hood and was portrayed in the movie The Insider as a dapper aviator-lawyer. Scruggs’s legal triumphs rewarded him lavishly, and his success emboldened both his career maneuvering and his influence in Southern politics—but at a terrible cost, culminating in his spectacular fall, when he was convicted for conspiring to bribe a Mississippi state judge. Based on extensive interviews, transcripts, and FBI recordings never made public, The Fall of the House of Zeus uncovers the Washington legal games and power politics: the swirl of fixed cases, blocked investigations, judicial tampering, and a zealous prosecution that would eventually ensnare not only Scruggs but his own son, Zach, in the midst of their struggle with insurance companies over Hurricane Katrina damages. Featuring Trent Lott and Jim Biden, brother of then-Senator Joe Biden, in supporting roles, with cameos by John McCain, Al Gore, and other Washington insiders, Curtis Wilkie’s account of this uniquely American tragedy reveals the seedy underbelly of institutional power.

The Fall of the House of Zeus

The Fall of the House of Zeus PDF Author: Curtis Wilkie
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307460711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Get Book

Book Description
“Masterful . . . an epic tale of backbiting, shady deal-making, and greed [that] reads like a John Grisham novel.”—The Wall Street Journal A real-life legal thriller as timeless as a Greek tragedy, tracing the downfall of one of America’s most famous lawyers and exposing the dark side of Southern politics—from the author of When Evil Lived in Laurel Dickie Scruggs was arguably the most successful plaintiff’s lawyer in America. A brother-in-law of former U.S. Senate majority leader Trent Lott, Scruggs made a fortune taking on mass tort lawsuits against Big Tobacco and the asbestos industries. He was hailed by Newsweek as a latter-day Robin Hood and was portrayed in the movie The Insider as a dapper aviator-lawyer. Scruggs’s legal triumphs rewarded him lavishly, and his success emboldened both his career maneuvering and his influence in Southern politics—but at a terrible cost, culminating in his spectacular fall, when he was convicted for conspiring to bribe a Mississippi state judge. Based on extensive interviews, transcripts, and FBI recordings never made public, The Fall of the House of Zeus uncovers the Washington legal games and power politics: the swirl of fixed cases, blocked investigations, judicial tampering, and a zealous prosecution that would eventually ensnare not only Scruggs but his own son, Zach, in the midst of their struggle with insurance companies over Hurricane Katrina damages. Featuring Trent Lott and Jim Biden, brother of then-Senator Joe Biden, in supporting roles, with cameos by John McCain, Al Gore, and other Washington insiders, Curtis Wilkie’s account of this uniquely American tragedy reveals the seedy underbelly of institutional power.

Kings of Tort

Kings of Tort PDF Author: Alan Lange
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781597252768
Category : Judicial corruption
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Kings of Tort chronicles a tale of judicial bribery and political intrigue in Mississippi ... . It features the story of Dickie Scruggs, who was largely credited with bringing down Big Tobacco in the early 1990s. From his ascent to a net worth of nearly a billion dollars to his downfall stemming from his role in improperly influencing two local judges to influence cases involving fee disputes with other lawyers, the book documents how those in Scruggs's own trusted circle of tort barons turned on him and cooperated with federal authorities. It also shows the political influence he wielded with judges, attorneys general, and even his own brother-in-law, former US Senator Trent Lott" --

Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter

Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter PDF Author: Barbara Robinette Moss
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743219503
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A haunting and triumphant story of a difficult and keenly felt life, Change Me into Zeus's Daughter is a remarkable literary memoir of resilience, redemption, and growing up in the South. Barbara Robinette Moss was the fourth in a family of eight children raised in the red-clay hills of Alabama. Their wild-eyed, alcoholic father was a charismatic and irrationally proud man who, when sober, captured his children's timid awe, but when (more often) drunk, roused them from bed for severe punishment or bizarre all-night poker games. Their mother was their angel: erudite and stalwart -- her only sin her inability to leave her husband for the sake of the children. Unlike the rest of her family, Barbara bore the scars of this abuse and neglect on the outside as well as the inside. As a result of childhood malnutrition and a complete lack of medical and dental care, the bones in her face grew abnormally ("like a thin pine tree"), and she ended up with what she calls "a twisted, mummy face." Barbara's memoir brings us deep into not only the world of Southern poverty and alcoholic child abuse but also the consciousness of one who is physically frail and awkward, relating how one girl's debilitating sense of her own physical appearance is ultimately saved by her faith in the transformative powers of artistic beauty: painting and writing. From early on and with little encouragement from the world, Barbara embodied the fiery determination to change her fate and achieve a life defined by beauty. At age seven, she announced to the world that she would become an artist -- and so she did. Nightly, she prayed to become attractive, to be changed into "Zeus's daughter," the goddess of beauty, and when her prayers weren't answered, she did it herself, raising the money for years of braces followed by facial surgery. Growing up "so ugly," she felt the family's disgrace all the more acutely, but the result has been a keenly developed appreciation for beauty -- physical and artistic -- the evidence of which can be seen in her writing. Despite the deprivation, the lingering image from this memoir is not of self-pity but of the incredible bond between these eight siblings: the raucous, childish fun they had together, the making-do, and the total devotion to their desperate mother, who absorbed most of the father's blows for them and who plied them with art and poetry in place of balanced meals. Gracefully and intelligently woven in layers of flashback, the persistent strength of Barbara Moss's memoir is itself a testament to the nearly lifesaving appreciation for literature that was her mother's greatest gift to her children.

Six Days to Zeus: Please Don't Call me Hero

Six Days to Zeus: Please Don't Call me Hero PDF Author: Samuel Hill
Publisher: BookLocker.com, Inc.
ISBN: 1644385317
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Please Don't Call Me Hero picks up where Alive Day left off, when a mysterious voice from Chief's dark and covert intelligence past calls him from his daughter's cell phone and sends Chief into combat mode. Do they have her? Can he protect her? Chief knows the voice. So why can't he remember who it is and why, after so many years, is this voice back in his life? This book is dedicated to the families who didn't sign up to go to war, but get to pay the consequences anyway. Follow the journey from Alive Day as Chief comes home, meets his new family and faces a diagnosis he neither understands, nor believes in. PTSD. Chief's story encapsulates what happens when soldiers, in this case a 30 year Veteran of Intelligence Operations, comes home to "Fort Living Room". Chief investigates his own moral wounds, attempts to mitigate his own PTSD and the impact it has on the family he loves so dearly---all the while fighting the agony of spinal injuries, surgical reconstructions and an old enemy from his covert intelligence past. This heart wrenching story takes a deep dive into the realities of war and the impact it has on families. After three decades of Covert Intelligence Operations, Chief is faced with a life altering decision: Does he share his past life with his new wife? Or should he keep her in the dark, risking feelings of hurt and betrayal? This voice on the phone reminiscent of an enemy from his past, propels Chief into a downward spiral to an epiphany that changes his life. Please don't call me Hero will bring you inside the heads and the hearts of America's Veterans as they return from a 20 year Global War on terror and the trials they face as they attempt to come home and acclimate into a society they no longer fit into. This is the compelling story of what families of our Veterans have to deal with and the consequences of going to war!

Sons of Zeus

Sons of Zeus PDF Author: Noble Smith
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250025575
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The first entry in an epic series, set during the fifth-century BC war between Athens and Sparta, finds Plataea resident Nikias dreaming of glory in the Olympic games, only to find himself leading a ragtag band of defenders in the wake of a surprise attack.

Zeus

Zeus PDF Author: George O'Connor
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1596434317
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
Tells the story of Zeus and his battle with his father, Kronos, and the Titans. In graphic novel format.

When Evil Lived in Laurel: The "White Knights" and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer

When Evil Lived in Laurel: The Author: Curtis Wilkie
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324005769
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
One of NPR's Best Books of the Year Finalist for the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime The inside story of how a courageous FBI informant helped to bring down the KKK organization responsible for a brutal civil rights–era killing. By early 1966, the work of Vernon Dahmer was well known in south Mississippi. A light-skinned Black man, he was a farmer, grocery store owner, and two-time president of the Forrest County chapter of the NAACP. He and Medgar Evers founded a youth NAACP chapter in Hattiesburg, and for years after Evers’s assassination Dahmer was the chief advocate for voting rights in a county where Black registration was shamelessly suppressed. This put Dahmer in the crosshairs of the White Knights, with headquarters in nearby Laurel. Already known as one of the most violent sects of the KKK in the South, the group carried out his murder in a raid that burned down his home and store. A year before, Tom Landrum, a young, unassuming member of a family with deep Mississippi roots, joined the Klan to become an FBI informant. He penetrated the White Knights’ secret circles, recording almost daily journal entries. He risked his life, and the safety of his young family, to chronicle extensively the clandestine activities of the Klan. Veteran journalist Curtis Wilkie draws on his exclusive access to Landrum’s journals to re-create these events—the conversations, the incendiary nighttime meetings, the plans leading up to Dahmer’s murder and its erratic execution—culminating in the conviction and imprisonment of many of those responsible for Dahmer’s death. In riveting detail, When Evil Lived in Laurel plumbs the nature and harrowing consequences of institutional racism, and brings fresh light to this chapter in the history of civil rights in the South—one with urgent implications for today.

The Fall of Koli

The Fall of Koli PDF Author: M. R. Carey
Publisher: Orbit
ISBN: 0316458708
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
M. R. Carey's Rampart trilogy is "an epic post-apocalyptic fable" (Kirkus) like no other, set in a world where nature has turned against us. Now, in the unforgettable final chapter, the world that was lost comes back to haunt those who have survived–and Koli's journey comes to its astonishing close. "A gorgeous, borderline flawless trilogy." –Seanan McGuire What will the future hold for those who are left? Koli has come a long way since being exiled from his small village of Mythen Rood. In his search for the fabled tech of the Old Times, he knew he'd be battling shunned men, strange beasts and trees that move as fast as whips. But he has already encountered so much more than he bargained for. Now that Koli and his companions have found the source of the signal they've been following - the mysterious "Sword of Albion"—there is hope that their perilous journey will finally be worth something. They're searching for a way to help humanity fight back against nature. But what they'll find is an ancient war that never ended . . . The Rampart Trilogy The Book of Koli The Trials of Koli The Fall of Koli For more from M. R. Carey, check out: The Girl With All the Gifts Fellside The Boy on the Bridge Someone Like Me By the same author, writing as Mike Carey: The Devil You Know Vicious Circle Dead Men's Boots Thicker Than Water The Naming of the Beasts

The Sky Throne

The Sky Throne PDF Author: Chris Ledbetter
Publisher: Month9Books, LLC.
ISBN: 194510791X
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
When the family of young Zeus is attacked by Hyperion, Zeus's mother is knocked unconscious and his best friend is left for dead. Stacking epic insult upon fatal injury, Zeus discovers the woman who raised him is not his biological mother. But to ensure her safety while she recovers, a heavyhearted Zeus leaves her behind to seek answers at Mount Olympus Preparatory Academia. Zeus embarks on a quest to discover who ordered the attack on his home, avenge the death of his friend, and find his birth mother. When some of his new schoolmates vanish, Zeus's quest is turned upside down, and the only way to make things right is to access the power of the Sky Throne, confront a most dangerous enemy, and take his life back. On his way to becoming king of the Greek gods, Zeus will learn to seize power, neutralize his enemies, and fall in love.

Circle of Greed

Circle of Greed PDF Author: Patrick Dillon
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767929950
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
Circle of Greed is the epic story of the rise and fall of Bill Lerach, once the leading class action lawyer in America and now a convicted felon. For more than two decades, Lerach threatened, shook down and sued top Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, Apple, Time Warner, and—most famously—Enron. Now, the man who brought corporate moguls to their knees has fallen prey to the same corrupt impulses of his enemies, and is paying the price by serving time in federal prison. If there was ever a modern Greek tragedy about a man and his times, about corporate arrogance and illusions and the scorched-earth tactics to not only counteract corporate America but to beat it at its own game, Bill Lerach's story is it.