Lethal Passage

Lethal Passage PDF Author: Erik Larsen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780788195938
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
One morning a 16-year-old boy named Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia high school with a Cobray M-11/9 stuffed in his backpack. That morning he killed one teacher and severely wounded another, and his rampage was just prevented from become one of the worst in America's long and bloody infatuation with guns. This book traces the history of the Cobray from its design and manufacture to the final, illegal transaction that placed it in Elliot's hands--thus providing a stunning expose that will completely reframe the debate surrounding America's gun crisis. Larson immersed himself in America's gun culture, and by following Elliot's gun, he uncovered the lax regulations and skewed interest that have perpetuated handgun violence, which has grown to account for 22,000 deaths and thousands injuries every year. Larson questions the political and economic forces that allowed the Cobray-originally designed as a battlefield weapon--to be marketed to the public. And he explores the broader cultural forces that nurture our fascination with violence and make gunshot death a routine feature of American life.

Lethal Passage

Lethal Passage PDF Author: Erik Larson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679759271
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This devastating book illuminates America's gun culture -- its manufacturers, dealers, buffs, and propagandists -- but also offers concrete solutions to our national epidemic of death by firearm. "Touches on all aspects of the gun issue in this country. Gives great voice to that feeling...that something real must be done." --San Diego Union-Tribune "One of the most readable anti-gun treatises in years." --Washington Post Book World It begins with an account of a crime that is by now almost commonplace: on December 16, 1988, sixteen-year-old Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia high school with a Cobray M-11/9 and several hundred rounds of ammunition tucked in his backpack. By day's end, he had killed one teacher and severely wounded another. In Lethal Passage Erik Larson shows us how a disturbed teenager was able to buy a weapon advertised as "the gun that made the eighties roar." The result is a book that can -- and should -- save lives, and that has already become an essential text in the gun-control debate.

Lethal Passage

Lethal Passage PDF Author: Erik Larsen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780788195938
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
One morning a 16-year-old boy named Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia high school with a Cobray M-11/9 stuffed in his backpack. That morning he killed one teacher and severely wounded another, and his rampage was just prevented from become one of the worst in America's long and bloody infatuation with guns. This book traces the history of the Cobray from its design and manufacture to the final, illegal transaction that placed it in Elliot's hands--thus providing a stunning expose that will completely reframe the debate surrounding America's gun crisis. Larson immersed himself in America's gun culture, and by following Elliot's gun, he uncovered the lax regulations and skewed interest that have perpetuated handgun violence, which has grown to account for 22,000 deaths and thousands injuries every year. Larson questions the political and economic forces that allowed the Cobray-originally designed as a battlefield weapon--to be marketed to the public. And he explores the broader cultural forces that nurture our fascination with violence and make gunshot death a routine feature of American life.

Lethal Logic

Lethal Logic PDF Author: Dennis A. Henigan
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
ISBN: 1597973564
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
“Guns don't kill people; people kill people.” “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” “An armed society is a polite society.” Who hasn't heard these engaging assertions, time and time again? Burned into the national consciousness by years of targeted, disciplined messaging by the National Rifle Association and others, they are just a few of the bumper-sticker slogans that have defined the gun control debate in America. Long ridiculed by gun control advocates, they are the first words that come to mind for most Americans when the gun issue is discussed. This is the first book both to acknowledge the profound and deadly impact of the gun lobby's bumper-sticker logic on the gun control debate and to systematically expose the misguided thinking at the core of the pro-gun slogans. Indeed, the author contends that the gun lobby's remarkable success in blocking passage of lifesaving gun laws is the result, in large part, of its relentless and effective use of these simple and resonant messages. Their persuasive power has been a largely ignored influence on the current politics of gun control, in which the gun lobby wields unprecedented power in the Republican Party, while many Democratic Party leaders see the policy benefits of stronger gun laws as not worth the political risk of standing up to the NRA. The book contends that the current political stalemate over guns will never be broken until the pro-gun slogans are exposed as the cleverly disguised fallacies that they are.

Dead Wake

Dead Wake PDF Author: Erik Larson
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0553446754
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania “Both terrifying and enthralling.”—Entertainment Weekly “Thrilling, dramatic and powerful.”—NPR “Thoroughly engrossing.”—George R.R. Martin On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”—the fastest liner then in service—and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small—hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more—all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history. It is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love. Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster whose intimate details and true meaning have long been obscured by history. Finalist for the Washington State Book Award • One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Miami Herald, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, LibraryReads, Indigo

Creatures of Passage

Creatures of Passage PDF Author: Morowa Yejidé
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1617758884
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
With echoes of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Yejidé's novel explores a forgotten quadrant of Washington, DC, and the ghosts that haunt it. Longlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction “Yejidé’s writing captures both real news and spiritual truths with the deftness and capacious imagination of her writing foremothers: Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and N.K. Jemisin . . . Creatures of Passage is that rare novel that dispenses ancestral wisdom and literary virtuosity in equal measure.” —Washington Post Nephthys Kinwell is a taxi driver of sorts in Washington, DC, ferrying passengers in a 1967 Plymouth Belvedere with a ghost in the trunk. Endless rides and alcohol help her manage her grief over the death of her twin brother, Osiris, who was murdered and dumped in the Anacostia River. Unknown to Nephthys when the novel opens in 1977, her estranged great-nephew, ten-year-old Dash, is finding himself drawn to the banks of that very same river. It is there that Dash—reeling from having witnessed an act of molestation at his school, but still questioning what and who he saw—has charmed conversations with a mysterious figure he calls the “River Man.” When Dash arrives unexpectedly at Nephthys’s door bearing a cryptic note about his unusual conversations with the River Man, Nephthys must face what frightens her most. Morowa Yejidé’s deeply captivating novel shows us an unseen Washington filled with otherworldly landscapes, flawed super-humans, and reluctant ghosts, and brings together a community intent on saving one young boy in order to reclaim itself.

Please Scream Inside Your Heart

Please Scream Inside Your Heart PDF Author: Dave Pell
Publisher: Hachette Go
ISBN: 0306847418
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
From the publisher of the NextDraft newsletter comes a cathartic and humorous ride through the unnerving, maddening hellscape of the 2020 press cycle, reestablishing the line between "real" news and real life. Please lower your shoulder restraint and keep your hands and feet in. You’re about to board a roller coaster ride through a year that was at once laughable and lethal. If you’ve got an anti-anxiety prescription, now would probably be a good time to call in a refill. Please Scream Inside Your Heart is a time capsule; a real-time ride through the maddening hell that was the 2020 news cycle—when historic turmoil and media mania stretched American sanity, democracy, and toilet paper. Who better to examine this unhinged period in all of its twists and turns than news addict Dave Pell, aka the internet’s Managing Editor? Fueled by the wisdom and advice of his two Holocaust-surviving parents, for whom parts of this story were all too familiar, Pell puts the key stories of 2020 into context with pith and punch; highlighting turning points that widened America’s divisions, deepened our obsession with a media-driven civil war, and nearly knocked the country off its tracks. Pell also examines the role of technology in society—and how we somehow built the exact opposite of what we thought we were building. Why did the lies spread faster than the truth? How did our tech addiction contribute to the nightmare? Why do you feel a vibration in your pocket right now? In 2020, the news was everywhere, and everything was political—even the air we breathed. So brace yourself as you’re hurtled through the twists and turns of the corkscrewiest year in American history; one that included two impeachment trials, a global pandemic, Black Lives Matter, the biggest election of a lifetime, a slide towards autocracy, and a warning from the makers of Lysol not to drink their products.

On Thin Ice

On Thin Ice PDF Author: Eric Larsen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493022970
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
In March 2014, Eric Larsen and Ryan Waters set out to traverse nearly 500 miles across the melting Arctic Ocean, unsupported, from Northern Ellesmere Island to the geographic North Pole. Despite being one of the most cold and hostile environments on the planet, the Arctic Ocean has seen a steady and significant reduction of sea ice over the past seven years due to climate change. Because of this, Larsen’s and Waters’ trip—dubbed the “Last North Expedition”—is expected to be the last human-powered trek to the North Pole, ever. Filled with stunning, full-color photos and GPS maps plotting his progress, On Thin Ice is Larsen’s first-person account of this historic two-man expedition. Traveling across the retreating sea ice on skis, snowshoes, and even swimming through semi-frozen arctic slush, Larsen and Waters each pulled over 320 pounds of gear behind them on sleds through temperatures that plummeted to nearly 70 degrees below zero. At times, they covered little over a mile a day. They were stalked by polar bears and ran out of food. It was, in Larsen’s words, “easily one of the most difficult expeditions in the world.” More than just a heart-stopping adventure narrative, however, On Thin Ice offers an intimate and haunting look at the rapidly changing face of the Arctic due to global climate change.

Paramilitarism

Paramilitarism PDF Author: Uğur Ümit Üngör
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198825242
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
From the deserts of Sudan to the jungles of Colombia, from the streets of Belfast to the mountains of Kurdistan, paramilitaries have appeared in violent conflicts. Ungor presents a comparative and global overview of paramilitarism, showing how states use it to successfully outsource mass political violence against civilians.

Rosmersholm [and] The Lady from the Sea

Rosmersholm [and] The Lady from the Sea PDF Author: Henrik Ibsen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Norwegian drama
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description


The Perfect Predator

The Perfect Predator PDF Author: Steffanie Strathdee
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0316418072
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
An electrifying memoir of one woman's extraordinary effort to save her husband's life-and the discovery of a forgotten cure that has the potential to save millions more. "A memoir that reads like a thriller." -New York Times Book Review "A fascinating and terrifying peek into the devastating outcomes of antibiotic misuse-and what happens when standard health care falls short." -Scientific American Epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee and her husband, psychologist Tom Patterson, were vacationing in Egypt when Tom came down with a stomach bug. What at first seemed like a case of food poisoning quickly turned critical, and by the time Tom had been transferred via emergency medevac to the world-class medical center at UC San Diego, where both he and Steffanie worked, blood work revealed why modern medicine was failing: Tom was fighting one of the most dangerous, antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the world. Frantic, Steffanie combed through research old and new and came across phage therapy: the idea that the right virus, aka "the perfect predator," can kill even the most lethal bacteria. Phage treatment had fallen out of favor almost 100 years ago, after antibiotic use went mainstream. Now, with time running out, Steffanie appealed to phage researchers all over the world for help. She found allies at the FDA, researchers from Texas A&M, and a clandestine Navy biomedical center -- and together they resurrected a forgotten cure. A nail-biting medical mystery, The Perfect Predator is a story of love and survival against all odds, and the (re)discovery of a powerful new weapon in the global superbug crisis.