American Violence

Raining Pitchforks is dedicated To All Children Who Go To Bed Tonight Afraid. This is a book about my experience growing up in an erratic, dangerous and unstable world. It begins when I was seven and ends at age 17; a time frame that encompasses a 10 year span of events with a disastrous ending. Along the way I encounter several important relatives and friends who help and hurt. This remarkable, fast moving story is about courage, optimism and loss. Our American family was changed for generations by World War II. What is now called PTSD took a toll on all of us. It is a true story but some ...

The inspiring story of a Black doctor who was deeply affected by the violence that plagued his Brooklyn childhood and later dedicated himself to addressing trauma and violence as public health issues....

General Stonewall Jackson was like no one anyone had ever seen. In April of 1862 he was merely another Confederate general with only a single battle credential in an army fighting in what seemed to be a losing cause. By middle June he had engineered perhaps the greatest military campaign in American history and was one of the most famous men in the Western World. He had given the Confederate cause what it had recently lacked: hope.

American Oz is a rollicking, gritty, adventurous story of life in the secretive subculture of traveling carnivals. You'll never see your state fair or street festival the same way again. Comerford writes a bold, inspiring true story of a year working behind the scenes with the colorful characters and legends of carnivals. He shares stories of freaks, a carnival pimp, a tramp gold miner, and the last king of the sideshows.

Award-winning journalist and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve was not surprised by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With years of in-depth research and on-the-ground investigative reporting under her belt, Reeve was aware of the preoccupations of the online far right and their journey from the computer to QAnon, militias, and racist groups. At the same time, Reeve saw a parallel growth of counterforces, with citizen vigilantes using new tools and tactics to take down the far right.

In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the US Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Many were beaten and bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance, particularly on the issue of slavery.

In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century.

In the summer of 2017, twenty-two-year-old Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind vanished. A week after she disappeared, police arrested the white couple who lived upstairs from Savanna and emerged from their apartment carrying an infant girl. The baby was Savanna’s, but Savanna’s body would not be found for days. The horrifying crime sent shock waves far beyond Fargo, North Dakota, where it occurred, and helped expose the sexual and physical violence Native American women and girls have endured since the country’s colonization.

One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in innocent sixteen-year-old Bobby being sentenced to prison for thirty-eight years. New Haven native Nicholas Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and what it reveals about the enduring legacies of social and economic disparity. In The Other Side of Prospect, he has produced an immersive portrait of a seminal community in an old American city now beset by division and gun violence.

Despite what major media sources say, violence against Native women is not an epidemic. An epidemic is biological and blameless. Violence against Native women is historical and political, bounded by oppression and colonial violence. This book, like all of Sarah Deer's work, is aimed at engaging the problem head-on - and ending it. The Beginning and End of Rape collects and expands the powerful writings in which Deer has advocated for cultural and legal reforms to protect Native women from endemic sexual violence and abuse.

Fresh off a brutal shootout and still on administrative leave, Detective Carlo D’Scenzi is ready to catch his breath—time with Becky, the kids, and maybe even start healing from the scars he’s buried deep. But when a desperate call comes from Red Miller, the unpredictable informant who’s saved Carlo’s life more than once, everything changes. Red’s son has been kidnapped. The ransom: one million dollars. The kidnapper: Louis “The Shark” Alvarez—a ruthless Miami kingpin with too much money, too many connections, and no fear of consequences. Carlo knows he should call it in. ...

Vanity Madonna Brown was a beautiful smart girl until her innocence was taken away by the very people that were supposed to protect her. She could not count on the crack addicted mother that she once loved, the junkie grandmother whom she had barely seen sober, or the drug dealing uncle that she looked up to. All that she had was her three cousins, who were more like her siblings. Vanity's life brightens when she meets Carlos. Will Carlos be her savior or will he contribute to her downfall? While this series is fictional, the story contained within is not. This is someone's story. This ...

Los Angeles is at the mercy of the CHiLL13 street gang. They are out of control and becoming more emboldened with every shocking move they make. With Diego Rivera as their ruthless leader, the LAPD is always one step behind them until they get some help from two strange sources. The first is a pair of Redondo Beach homicide detectives and the second is a very unusual old woman from Mexico who is visiting relatives. The old woman’s family becomes victims of the gang and it turns out to be the deadliest mistake they could ever make. Rock takes many twists and turns as the story of the old ...

When Ashley first met Keon, she thought she had met the love of her life. It wasn’t long after she cut herself off from all of her family and friends that Keon revealed his true abusive nature. Ashley quickly went from being the target of his affection to the target of his strikes and stomps. It’s not until Keon’s big move into the drug game goes tragically awry that he realizes the usefulness for Ashley again. The problem is, if he can’t get his plan to work, they all could end up dead.

The bizarre snowstorm of August 27, 1967, changed the world forever. The burning snowflakes (spores) delivered death for some and transformation to others. Every surviving human touched by the spores received an unpredictable blessing or curse. Some became gods while others became monsters. It was the first wave of an alien invasion that heralded the coming of the reptile/rodent species known as the Breedite. The carnivorous creatures were known throughout the universe as horrific beings with an insatiable appetite for flesh. The Castaways, who were marked by all the world's governments as ...

Deliver Me From Daddy is the tale of a pastor's daughter trying to break a generational curse. Pastor Simon Wells is a big deal in his town. The community loves him and his charisma draws others from near and far. His daughter Angie knows the truth of what goes on behind closed doors. Desperately trying to maintain a relationship with her dad, she keeps her mouth closed. However, his inconsistencies with her create a wedge between them, causing Angie to suffer in silence. Can Angie emerge and blossom without her father's parental hand? Or is she destined to follow his footsteps into hidden ...

Everything is not what it seems, and everyone isn't who they promise to be. Trinity Black craved for love and a happy life. Wishes can sometimes turn into nightmares. Philip Black walked into Trinity's life, swooped her up and helped her make a better life for herself. Philip was handsome, charming and everything Trinity thought she wanted in a man, she found it intriguing that they even shared the same last names. Trinity was a loyal and loving wife to her husband despite the abuse she was subject to as a child growing by the hand of her mother. Now she is locked in an abusive marriage ...

In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice. Here, in a vital expansion of her declaration, she calls for Reconstruction 2.0, a multilayered plan to reclaim economic and social restitutions - those restitutions promised with emancipation but blocked, again and again, for more than 150 years. And, most of all, Jones delivers strategies for how we can effect change as citizens and allies while nurturing ourselves in the fight against a system that is still rigged.

What would you do if you caught your future father-in-law having an affair? Would you mind your own business? Would you tell? Ex-con, Victor Jackson gets caught up in some major drama while shopping for a wedding band with his good friend, Spencer. When he spots his soon to be millionaire father-in-law snuggled up tightly with a chick half his age at the mall, in broad daylight he quickly comes up with a scheme to profit off of his little discovery by giving up the goods to the Misses. All HELL BREAKS loose when Victor gets more than a simple cash payment from the desperate housewife! Other...

In this bold and provocative book, historian Gregory Smithers investigates how African Americans have narrated, remembered, and represented slave-breeding practices. He argues that while social and economic historians have downplayed the significance of slave breeding, African Americans have refused to forget the violence and sexual coercion associated with the plantation South.