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American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood & the Crime of the Century
Howard Blum · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking
Brendan I. Koerner · 327 pages
In an America torn apart by the Vietnam War and the demise of sixties idealism, airplane hijackings were astonishingly routine. Over a five-year period starting in 1968, the desperate and disillusioned seized commercial jets nearly once a week. Some hijackers wished to escape to foreign lands; others aimed to swap hostages for sacks of cash. The longest-distance hijacking in American history took
Black Friday: The True Story Of The Bombay Bomb Blasts
S. Hussain Zaidi · 295 pages
Explores the events following the March 2, 1993, bombings that ripped through Mumbai, India, offering a cinematic study on just how such a tragedy can change a city. A policeman, determined to apprehend the culprits responsible for a continuing series of bombings, discovers a powerful businessman has been shifting funds in the Mumbai underworld in order to finance the bombings.
Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America
James R. Green · 383 pages
Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever
Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard · 324 pages
This book is a riveting historical narrative of the heart-stopping events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the first work of history from mega-bestselling author Bill O'Reilly. The anchor of The O'Reilly Factor recounts one of the most dramatic stories in American history -- how one gunshot changed the country forever. In the spring of 1865, the bloody saga of America's Civil
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
Kate Moore · 480 pages
As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were conside
Thunderstruck
Erik Larson · 480 pages
A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world's "great hush." In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men--Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication--whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy
The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars
Paul Collins · 325 pages
On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New York, but the police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspec
Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders
Vincent Bugliosi, Curt Gentry · 676 pages
Prosecuting attorney in the Manson trial, Vincent Bugliosi held a unique insider's position in one of the most baffling and horrifying cases of the twentieth century: the cold-blooded Tate-LaBianca murders carried out by Charles Manson and four of his followers. What motivated Manson in his seemingly mindless selection of victims, and what was his hold over the young women who obeyed his orders? H
"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa
Charles Brandt · 320 pages
"I heard you paint houses" are the first words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran. To paint a house is to kill a man. The paint is the blood that splatters on the walls and floors. In the course of nearly five years of recorded interviews Frank Sheeran confessed to Charles Brandt that he handled more than twenty-five hits for the mob, and for his friend Hoffa. Sheeran learned t
One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway
Asne Seierstad · 530 pages
"On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the wooded island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country's governing Labour Party. In [this book], the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and i
Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983
Barbara Kingsolver · 224 pages
Novelist Barbara Kingsolver began her writing career with Holding the Line. It is the story of how women's lives were transformed by an eighteen-month strike against the Phelps-Dodge Copper Corporation. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, the story is partly oral history and partly social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community.
Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
Jefferson R. Cowie · 464 pages
Asserts that the 1970s were the last stand of the American working class, a time when the goals of the New Deal finally faded away to make room for Reaganomics and a widening of the gap between classes.
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels · 56 pages
"The Communist Manifesto," penned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is a revolutionary treatise advocating for the overthrow of capitalist systems and the establishment of a classless society. Published in 1848, its succinct yet powerful prose remains a cornerstone of socialist ideology, inspiring movements worldwide.
Columbine
Dave Cullen · 417 pages
On April 20, 1999, two boys left an indelible stamp on the American psyche. Their goal was simple: to blow up their school, Oklahoma-City style, and to leave "a lasting impression on the world." Their bombs failed, but the ensuing shooting defined a new era of school violence-irrevocably branding every subsequent shooting "another Columbine." When we think of Columbine, we think of the Trench Coat
Paddy Whacked
T.J. English · 480 pages
Here is the shocking true saga of the Irish American mob. In Paddy Whacked, bestselling author and organized crime expert T. J. English brings to life nearly two centuries of Irish American gangsterism, which spawned such unforgettable characters as Mike "King Mike" McDonald, Chicago's subterranean godfather; Big Bill Dwyer, New York's most notorious rumrunner during Prohibition; Mickey Feathersto
Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War
Thomas G. Andrews · 386 pages
"On a spring morning in 1914, in the stark foothills of southern Colorado, members of the United Mine Workers of America clashed with guards employed by the Rockefeller family, and a state militia beholden to Colorado’s industrial barons. When the dust settled, nineteen men, women, and children among the miners’ families lay dead. The strikers had killed at least thirty men, destroyed six mines, a
The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas
Anand Giridharadas · 327 pages
Days after 9/11, an avowed "American terrorist" named Mark Stroman, seeking revenge, walked into the Dallas minimart where Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a former Bangladesh Air Force officer, has found temporary work and shoots him, nearly killing him. Giridharadas traces the making of these two men, Stroman and Bhuiyan, and of their fateful encounter, following them as they rebuild shattered lives. Ten year
Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
Vincent Bugliosi · 688 pages
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
David Grann · 352 pages
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
Robin D.G. Kelley · 392 pages
A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: d
Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw
Mark Bowden · 384 pages
Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw is a book by Mark Bowden that details the efforts by the governments of the United States and Colombia, their respective military and intelligence forces, and Los Pepes to stop illegal activities committed by Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and his subordinates. It relates how Escobar was killed and his cartel dismantled. Bowden originally
The Woman Who Wasn't There: The True Story of an Incredible Deception
Robin Gaby Fisher, Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr. · 304 pages
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker · 433 pages
"Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motley crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would forever change history. The Many Headed-Hydra recounts their stories in a sweeping history of the role of the dispossessed in the making of the modern world."--BOOK JACKET.

