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Under and Alone: The True Story of the Undercover Agent Who Infiltrated America's Most Violent Outlaw Motorcycle Gang

William Queen

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Total reviews: 198 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1998, William Queen was a veteran law enforcement agent with a lifelong love of motorcycles and a lack of patience with paperwork. When a “confidential informant” made contact with his boss at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, offering to take an agent inside the San Fernando chapter of the Mongols (the scourge of Southern California, and one of the most dangerous gangs in America), Queen jumped at the chance, not realizing that he was kicking-starting the most extensive undercover operation inside an outlaw motorcycle gang in the history of American law enforcement.

Nor did Queen suspect that he would penetrate the gang so successfully that he would become a fully “patched-in” member, eventually rising through their ranks to the office of treasurer, where he had unprecedented access to evidence of their criminal activity. After Queen spent twenty-eight months as “Billy St. John,” the bearded, beer-swilling, Harley-riding gang-banger, the truth of his identity became blurry, even to himself.

During his initial “prospecting” phase, Queen was at the mercy of crank-fueled criminal psychopaths who sought to have him test his mettle and prove his fealty by any means necessary, from selling (and doing) drugs, to arms trafficking, stealing motorcycles, driving getaway cars, and, in one shocking instance, stitching up the face of a Mongol “ol’ lady” after a particularly brutal beating at the hands of her boyfriend.

Yet despite the constant criminality of the gang, for whom planning cop killings and gang rapes were business as usual, Queen also came to see the genuine camaraderie they shared. When his lengthy undercover work totally isolated Queen from family, his friends, and ATF colleagues, the Mongols felt like the only family he had left. “I had no doubt these guys genuinely loved Billy St. John and would have laid down their lives for him. But they wouldn’t hesitate to murder Billy Queen.”

From Queen’s first sleight of hand with a line of methamphetamine in front of him and a knife at his throat, to the fearsome face-off with their decades-old enemy, the Hell’s Angels (a brawl that left three bikers dead), to the heartbreaking scene of a father ostracized at Parents’ Night because his deranged-outlaw appearance precluded any interaction with regular citizens, Under and Alone is a breathless, adrenaline-charged read that puts you on the street with some of the most dangerous men in America and with the law enforcement agents who risk everything to bring them in.


From the Hardcover edition.

Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Michel Foucault

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Well researched, controversial book 3 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This is one of Michel Foucault's most accessible books (though still pretty heavy going). If in Madness and Civilization, Foucault analyzed the birth of insane asylums and in The Birth of the Clinic the birth of the hospital, in Discipline and Punish, it's the turn of the prisons. The book starts with a gruesome description of the public drawing and quartering of failed regicide Damiens in 1757. Then he goes on to quote a benign prison system of the 1830s. What changed between the two dates? While other authors would consider the birth of modern imprisonment as a triumph of progressive ideals (in comparison with what went on before), Foucault saw this instead as one aspect of increasing social and political control. While greatly researched, one immediately asks itself what Foucault wanted? Did he care about any improvement in the social conditions of prisoners? Or did he believed we should do with prisons altogether? And in which case, what about dangerous criminals? I think Foucault never wanted to answer these questions. I think it's telling that towards the end of his life (after this book was written) Foucault was a fan of the repressive and theocratic regime of Khomeini in Iran. In this, he was similar to those communist intellectuals in the West who criticized failings in their own countries but overlook much worse abuses (and crimes) in the Soviet Union. Another quibble is that the book is so French-centric (with some analysis of developments in England): he takes the evolution of imprisonment in France as an indication of the whole world.

Editorial Review:

In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

Ellen Bass, Laura Davis

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Total reviews: 130 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Courage to Heal is an inspiring, comprehensive guide that offers hope and encouragement to every woman who, was sexually abused as a child -- and those who care about her. Although the effects of child sexual abuse are long-term and severe, healing is possible. The authors weave personal experience with professional knowledge to show the reader how she can come to terms with her past while moving powerfully into the future. They provide clear explanations, practical suggestions, a map of the healing journey, and many moving first-person examples of the recovery process drawn from their interviews with hundreds of survivors.

Definitive in scope, The Courage to Heal speaks directly to the survivor in a warm and personal way:

• TAKING STOCK -- outlines the effects of child sexual abuse and the ways women cope over time.
• THE HEALING PROCESS -- explores each stage from the decision to heal and remembering through breaking silence, knowing it wasn't your fault, nurturing the inner child, and grief and anger, to resolution and moving on.
• CHANGING PATTERNS -- offers in-depth guidance for shifting self-defeating patterns in specific areas of one's present life, including self-esteem, feelings, intimacy, sexuality, and dealing with families.
• SUPPORTERS OF SURVIVORS -- provides insight and strategies for partners of survivors, family members, and counselors.
• COURAGEOUS WOMEN -- profiles survivors who share the challenges and triumphs of their own healing journeys.
• HONORING THE TRUTH -- a substantial new Afterword that refutes the "false memory" argument and presents a thorough and enlightening response to the backlash.
• RESOURCE GUIDE -- fully updated for this edition -- informs readers about therapy, healing activities, recommended reading, support groups, self-help programs, and services and organizations.

Big Boy Rules: America's Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq

Steve Fainaru

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

There are tens of thousands of them in Iraq. They work for companies with exotic and ominous-sounding names, like Crescent Security Group, Triple Canopy, and Blackwater Worldwide. They travel in convoys of multicolored pickups fortified with makeshift armor, belt-fed machine guns, frag grenades, and even shoulder-fired missiles. They protect everything from the U.S. ambassador and American generals to shipments of Frappuccino bound for Baghdad’s Green Zone. They kill Iraqis, and Iraqis kill them.

And the only law they recognize is Big Boy Rules.

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter comes a harrowing journey into Iraq’s parallel war. Part MadMax, part Fight Club, it is a world filled with “private security contractors”—the U.S. government’s sanitized name for tens of thousands of modern mercenaries, or mercs, who roam Iraq with impunity, doing jobs that the overstretched and understaffed military can’t or won’t do.

They are men like Jon Coté, a sensitive former U.S. army paratrooper and University of Florida fraternity brother who realizes too late that he made a terrible mistake coming back to Iraq. And Paul Reuben, a friendly security company medic who has no formal medical training and lacks basic supplies, like tourniquets. They are part of America’s “other” army—some patriotic, some desperate, some just out for cash or adventure. And some who disappear into the void that is Iraq and are never seen again.

Washington Post reporter Steve Fainaru traveled with a group of private security contractors to find out what motivates them to put their lives in danger every day. He joined Jon Coté and the men of Crescent Security Group as they made their way through Iraq—armed to the teeth, dodging not only bombs and insurgents but also their own Iraqi colleagues. Just days after Fainaru left to go home, five men of Crescent Security Group were kidnapped in broad daylight on Iraq’s main highway. How the government and the company responded reveals the dark truths behind the largest private force in the history of American warfare. . . .

With 16 pages of photographs
 

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld

Misha Glenny

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Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the deregulation of international financial markets in 1989, governments and entrepreneurs alike became intoxicated by forecasts of limitless expansion into newly open markets. No one would foresee that the greatest success story to arise from these events would be the globalization of organized crime. Current estimates suggest that illegal trade accounts for nearly one-fifth of global GDP.

McMafia is a fearless, encompassing, wholly authoritative investigation of the now proven ability of organized crime worldwide to find and service markets driven by a seemingly insatiable demand for illegal wares. Whether discussing the Russian mafia, Colombian drug cartels, or Chinese labor smugglers, Misha Glenny makes clear how organized crime feeds off the poverty of the developing world, how it exploits new technology in the forms of cybercrime and identity theft, and how both global crime and terror are fueled by an identical source: the triumphant material affluence of the West.

To trace the disparate strands of this hydra-like story, Glenny talked to police, victims, politicians, and members of the global underworld in eastern Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, China, Japan, and India. The story of organized crime’s phenomenal, often shocking growth is truly the central political story of our time. McMafia will change the way we look at the world.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

Philip Gourevitch

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 215 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Average, loses momentum 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I purchased and read this book last year, as I have studied the subject on this one quite extensively.
This book gets off to a good start, but loses interest as the book progresses.
There is also a lack of real-life survivors and witnesses imput, which could have made it more interesting.
The book however shed light onto many of the problems and atrocities that occurred after the genocide - which I wasn't particularly savy about previously - most notablly the problems in the Congo as a result of Genocidaires fleeing and relocating there - and still not losing their blood-lust and total disrespect for life.
Still a good addition to your home library however.
Derek Meade, NSW, Australia

Editorial Review:

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

In April 1994, the Rwandan government called upon everyone in the Hutu majority to kill each member of the Tutsi minority, and over the next three months 800,000 Tutsis perished in the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews. Philip Gourevitch's haunting work is an anatomy of the war in Rwanda, a vivid history of the tragedy's background, and an unforgettable account of its aftermath. One of the most acclaimed books of the year, this account will endure as a chilling document of our time.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

John Berendt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 492 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Fine read, but what the fuss about? 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I enjoyed "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," John Berendt's 1999 blockbuster about the underside of Savannah's genteel lifestyle. But though I enjoyed the story and the characters, I'm not entirely sure why it took off as it did to top the NYT Bestseller list for 200 weeks.

The story is lots of fun and kept me engaged till the end. The story is narrated by a New York journalist hoping to write a story about Savannah. In the first third of the book, he manages to stumble across just about every Southern type, from dueling renovators of old buildings to drag queens, to good ol' boys, to voodoo priestesses and everyone else in between. The collection of roustabouts and ragamuffins is endearing and mostly harmless. They inhabit a dreamy world of quaint customs, elaborate parties, petty rivalries and jealousies, and grand old Southern houses. Then suddenly, a character is found dead in the elegant study of another. The rest of the book traces the intricacies of the trials related to the death.

I was less impressed than some by Berendt's handling of the trials. He breezed through these, leaving out details in one in order to use them for shock value in another. His use of Chablis, the memorable drag queen, seemed added more as comic effect than anything else. Take her out of the book and the plot would not have suffered an iota -- I am *serious*, child!. One wonders whether the fascination for readers is the novelty that the book purportedly features real Savannah houses and landmarks.

"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" is a fun read that probably won't hold up as a classic. Enjoy it anyway.

Editorial Review:

The best non-fiction novel since "In Cold Blood" is a true story of intrigue, murder, forgery and eccentricity set in the steamy, surreal atmosphere of Savannah, Georgia. The unpredictable twists and turns of a murder case are skilfully interwoven with a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South.

Lucky

Alice Sebold

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Total reviews: 257 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Enormously visceral, emotionally gripping, and imbued with the belief that justice is possible even after the most horrific of crimes, Alice Sebold's compelling memoir of her rape at the age of eighteen is a story that takes hold of you and won't let go.

Sebold fulfills a promise that she made to herself in the very tunnel where she was raped: someday she would write a book about her experience. With Lucky she delivers on that promise with mordant wit and an eye for life's absurdities, as she describes what she was like both as a young girl before the rape and how that rape changed but did not sink the woman she later became.

It is Alice's indomitable spirit that we come to know in these pages. The same young woman who sets her sights on becoming an Ethel Merman-style diva one day (despite her braces, bad complexion, and extra weight) encounters what is still thought of today as the crime from which no woman can ever really recover. In an account that is at once heartrending and hilarious, we see Alice's spirit prevail as she struggles to have a normal college experience in the aftermath of this harrowing, life-changing event.

No less gripping is the almost unbelievable role that coincidence plays in the unfolding of Sebold's narrative. Her case, placed in the inactive file, is miraculously opened again six months later when she sees her rapist on the street. This begins the long road to what dominates these pages: the struggle for triumph and understanding -- in the courtroom and outside in the world.

Lucky is, quite simply, a real-life thriller. In its literary style and narrative tension we never lose sight of why this life story is worth reading. At the end we are left standing in the wake of devastating violence, and, like the writer, we have come to know what it means to survive.

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

David Simon

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Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the creator of HBO’s The Wire, the classic book about homicide investigation that became the basis for the hit television show

The scene is Baltimore. Twice every three days another citizen is shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned to death. At the center of this hurricane of crime is the city’s homicide unit, a small brotherhood of hard men who fight for whatever justice is possible in a deadly world.

David Simon was the first reporter ever to gain unlimited access to a homicide unit, and this electrifying book tells the true story of a year on the violent streets of an American city. The narrative follows Donald Worden, a veteran investigator; Harry Edgerton, a black detective in a mostly white unit; and Tom Pellegrini, an earnest rookie who takes on the year’s most difficult case, the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl.

Originally published fifteen years ago, Homicide became the basis for the acclaimed television show of the same name. This new edition—which includes a new introduction, an afterword, and photographs—revives this classic, riveting tale about the men who work on the dark side of the American experience.

The Souls Of Black Folk

W.E.B. Dubois

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Soul Of All Folk: 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

"The Soul Of Black Folk" Is a book I think everyone should read regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, color, or creed simply because there's something in it for all. W.E.B. Dubois' engaging book falls more inline with the panorama of all American experiences, not just the Black experiences alone: if that makes any sense?
This fine book was originally published in 1903 and is still a significant piece of literature today. The anecdotes that are shared in this book belong in the lexicon of American history, but what's most striking are Dubois' references to Negro music called the sorrow songs, which of course spanned through hundreds of years of sanguineous slavery. And it was these same songs that set the foundation of Gospel, the Blues, Rock n Roll, and the American dream.
The reason I'm using this terminology is because in-spite of the torture blacks suffered they still managed to sing amazing songs such as "Steal Away," and "Poor Rosy." (Some songs were in reference to allegorical content).
Furthermore, the British rock-band Led Zeppelin is a fine example of individual intellectualism insofar as embracing American Negro culture considering they were influenced by this book because in 1968, Led Zeppelin's first album debuted and not only did they cover blues favorites written by Willie Dixon, but they also covered Negro spirituals, which Du Bois referred to as the "Sorrow Songs."
Led Zeppelin's song "How Many More Times" is an opus of Negro "Sorrow Songs." It's amazing that it took the bluesy cadence of an English rock band to pay homage to the very people whose hardship and strife inspired them to borrow the lyrics and the music from this book. It's a wonderful sight to see when people like Jimmy Page and Robert Plant take the time to learn about Black Americanism and about themselves. It just goes to show that all Americans should embrace their African heritage because without acknowledging the Black experience it's impossible to be a true American.
It's upsetting to note that in today's America racism is so rampant that the subject of Rock n Roll history can't even be encroached upon like it was in the 1960's civil rights movement, due to the fact that the political language has significantly changed.
(In layman's terms we can't be honest with ourselves and discuss the sheer fact that racism still dictates our everyday lives simply because the corporate world creates the phony left/right paradigm and ad-hominems through the media, which leaves America with an erroneous history).
Anyway, music played a major role during the 1960's. It helped people prosper through the horrific struggle for independence. The poetry that the slaves introduced over two-hundred years ago would yet again set the recalcitrant atmosphere that was needed when Blacks won the right to vote in 1965. And it was that moment in history that systemic change began. It was almost like an ancestral eidolon cascading over America with the strength and perseverance of a god in love with his people.

Moreover, Dubois elaborates on many subject matter with a linguistic style coming across as the perfect salubrious prolepsis for today's readers.

Sorry to digress, but another high point in the book was Dubois' rebuttal to Booker T. Washington's bourgeois attitude. Even today many Black scholars quote Booker T, but the inquiry was...is that wise? Well, according to Dubois, promulgating Booker T's message was rather pernicious and would only lead to more draconian virulence. Booker T's stance on waiting for White America to become simpatico to the needs of the Negro, while hoping for acceptance to proliferate from them in due time was not realistic at all.
Dubois strongly felt that Booker T's ideas were a depravity, a mummery, and an insult. Waiting for the bully to stop picking on you never works; for some reason Booker T couldn't contemplate that this scenario he was promulgating was ambiguous. If the powers that be are unwilling to negotiate with you then you have no other recourse but recalcitrancy. Booker T was in favor of slow progression, but just imagine what America would be like if Blacks took on Booker T's mindset? Life would be very different that's for sure.
Dubois hits on many touching moments in his memoirs and the personal lives of his students, which everyone reading this will enjoy. "The Soul Of Black Folk" is required reading for all. Give this book a chance! Dubois' writings are an inspirational experience!

Editorial Review:

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being Black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." Thus speaks W.E.B. DuBois in The Soulsof Black Folk, one of the most prophetic and influential works in american literature. in this eloquent collection of essays, first published in 1903, Dubois dares as no one had before to describe the maginitude of american racism and demand an end to it. he draws on his own life for illustration, from his early experiences teaching in the hills of tennesee to the death of his infant son and his historic break with the concilliatory position of Booker T. Washington.