The Grifter, the Poet, and the Runaway Train PDF Download

Author: Geoffrey Douglas
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493041495
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

View

Book Description
For over 20 years, Geoffrey Douglas has written feature-length pieces for Yankee magazine that chronicle extraordinary stories that have taken place in New England. Some have been about public events, widely reported––a Maine town turning against itself under the weight of an influx of Somalis, a fatal fire in Worcester MA, a Vermont reporter’s defense of marriage equality. Others, have been more private, the stories of men and women surviving, facing choices, living life––a small-time jockey scratching out an existence at county-fair racetracks; the long, sad fall of a Maine lottery winner, a poet’s love affair with his town. The best of these, taken together, make for a rich and updated collection of New England portraits: mostly ordinary lives, upended by choice or chance, turned suddenly, unexpectedly remarkable.

Author: Geoffrey Douglas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781493041480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
For over 20 years, Geoffrey Douglas has written feature-length pieces for Yankee magazine that chronicle extraordinary stories that have taken place in New England. Some have been about public events, widely reported--a Maine town turning against itself under the weight of an influx of Somalis, a fatal fire in Worcester MA, a Vermont reporter's defense of marriage equality. Others, have been more private, the stories of men and women surviving, facing choices, living life--a small-time jockey scratching out an existence at county-fair racetracks; the long, sad fall of a Maine lottery winner, a poet's love affair with his town. The best of these, taken together, make for a rich and updated collection of New England portraits: mostly ordinary lives, upended by choice or chance, turned suddenly, unexpectedly remarkable.

Author: Gary Flinn
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1467144924
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

View

Book Description
The city of Flint waxed and waned with the automotive industry of the twentieth century. Where they have not vanished completely, crumbling signs of past opulence stand as painful reminders of more recent struggles. ... Local author Gary Flinn uncovers the abandoned places and lost traditions from the Vehicle City's past."--Back cover

Author: Max Barry
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143125427
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

View

Book Description
"About as close you can get to the perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell. Lexicon reads like Elmore Leonard high out of his mind on Snow Crash." —Lev Grossman, New York Times bestselling author of The Magicians and The Magician King “Best thing I've read in a long time . . . a masterpiece.” —Hugh Howey, New York Times bestselling author of Wool Stick and stones break bones. Words kill. They recruited Emily Ruff from the streets. They said it was because she's good with words. They'll live to regret it. They said Wil Parke survived something he shouldn't have. But he doesn't remember. Now they're after him and he doesn't know why. There's a word, they say. A word that kills. And they want it back . . .

Author: Eric Jerome Dickey
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101135573
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 488

View

Book Description
New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey takes readers on the ride of a lifetime in this fierce novel of seduction, intrigue, and betrayal featuring hit man Gideon. Gideon trusts no one. But when his former lover resurfaces in need of his skills, Gideon accepts. The assignment leads to Argentina and a team of international mercenaries who will maim, kill, and torture to achieve victory. One of them has a connection to Gideon that neither assassin is aware of, a secret link that reaches into Gideon's past and plunges him into a double-cross so explosive no one will make it out unscarred.

Author: Geoffrey Douglas
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 1401395325
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 246

View

Book Description
Fifty years ago, in the fall of 1957, two thirteen-year-old boys were enrolled at an elite, boys-only New England boarding school. One of them, descended from wealth and eminence, would go on to Yale, then to a career as a navy officer and Vietnam war hero, and finally to the U.S. Senate, from where he would fall just short of the White House. The other was a scholarship student, a misfit giant of a boy from a Pennsylvania farm town who would suffer shameful debasements at the hands of his classmates, then go on to a solitary and largely anonymous life as a salesman of encyclopedias and trailer parts--before dying, alone, twelve months after his classmate's narrow loss on Election Day 2004. It is around these two figures, John Kerry and a boy known here only as Arthur, the bookends of a class of one hundred boys, that Geoffrey Douglas--himself a member of that boarding-school class--builds this remarkable memoir. His portrait of their lives and the lives of five others in that class--two more Vietnam veterans with vastly divergent stories, a federal judge, a gay New York artist who struggled for years to find his place in the world, and Douglas himself--offers a memorable look back to a generation caught between the expectations of their fathers and the sometimes terrifying pulls of a society driven by war, defiance, and self-doubt. The class of 1962 was not so different from any other, with its share of swaggerers and shining stars, outcasts and scholarship students. Its distinction was in its timing: at the precise threshold of the cultural and political upheavals of the late 1960s. The world these boys had been trained to enter and to lead, a world very similar to their fathers', would be exploded and recast almost at the moment of their entrance--forcing choices whose consequences were sometimes lifelong. Douglas's chronicle of those times and choices is both a capsule history of an era and a literary tour de force.

Author: George Douglas
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1466880813
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 167

View

Book Description
Geoffrey Douglas's The Game of Their Lives: The Untold Story of the World Cup's Biggest Upset tells the inspirational underdog story of the 1950s World cup, a must-read for soccer fanatics. In the late spring of 1950, eleven young immigrants' sons, most of them strangers to each other, came together for the love and fun of a game of soccer. They came from Missouri, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York, from jobs in canneries, brickyards, post offices, classrooms, and bars, to play for their country in the 1950 World Cup, resulting in what has since been called, by scores of sources for more than forty years, the greatest upset victory in the history of American sports. But no one in America at the time paid attention. Their only public honor--roughly twenty minutes' worth--was from a throng of strangers in a Brazilian mining town. Geoffrey Douglas's The Game of Their Lives is the story of the lives of these men: their jobs, wives, sweethearts, neighborhoods, the innocence of their era, the anonymity in which they worked and played. It is the story of heroism, stoicism, and simple unsung grace. Of a time before television, endorsement contracts, movie rights for serial killers, and seven-figure idols who denigrate us all. And ultimately--though it is not a sports story--it is the story of a game, played brilliantly. A single game of soccer, the greater game of life.

Author: George Douglas
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1466862858
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 206

View

Book Description
In the early morning of February 17, 1991, a nineteen-year-old Yale student on his way home from a party was shot through the heart on a New Haven street by a single bullet from a .22-caliber handgun. His wallet, with forty-six dollars inside, was left intact beside him. As murders go, it was senseless, motiveless, and as random as a blindly flung stone. The boy was white, privileged, and widely loved, a scholar and athlete, with a future that seemed assured. The boy accused in his killing, a sixteen-year-old gang member from the inner city, was an angry, desperate youth whose life careened almost daily--as ghetto lives often do--between the never-distant prospects of jail and death. Dead Opposite is the story of these two boys--and of the boys and men, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, and friends who peopled their lives. Geoffrey Douglas tells the story of hope and hopelessness, ignorance and rage; of waste and courage and loss. But above all, it is the story of the chasm that divides us one from the other: black from white; rich from poor; the suburbs of Chevy Chase, Maryland, from the squalor and despair of New Haven's meanest streets. You will see and hear both stories. And by the end, you not only will have touched the differences of race, wealth, education, and hope, but will have seen and heard also the commonness that links us all--the love of a parent, the dreams of a child--that joins us, one to the other, as the humans we finally, sometimes sadly, are.

Author: Martin T. Biegelman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118235452
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 247

View

Book Description
The ultimate tool for understanding, investigating and preventing fraud Fraud is an evil with a life of its own that leaves a financial, repetitional, and emotional toll on its victims. While monumental scandals, such as Enron, WorldCom, and Madoff's Ponzi scheme make the front pages, fraud is a daily occurrence impacting companies and individuals alike. Faces of Fraud reveals must-know characteristics of fraudsters and the skills needed to outwit them. Recognized Fraud Fighting Expert Martin Biegelman draws from his 40 years of experience fighting fraud to profile not only the key traits fraudsters share, but also the qualities fraud examiners must possess to be successful. Each chapter contains stories from actual cases that the author investigated Profiles the must-know characteristics of fraudsters and the skills you'll need to outwit them Reveals the traits of accomplished fraud examiners Explores the best practices in fraud detection, investigation and prevention to cultivate in order to maximize success Written by fraud fighting expert Martin T. Biegelman Although fraud will never be completely eradicated, there is much that can be done to reduce the number and size of frauds that take place in any organization. Boiling down the key lessons the author has culled from his long career, Faces of Fraud entertains and informs with stories from real cases the author investigated over his long career, and imparts useful tips you can start using right away in the fraud examination field.

Author: Janet Gleeson
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 9780857501943
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 576

View

Book Description
The life of Harriet Spencer, Countess of Bessborough, was one of both respectability and high scandal. The aristocracy of the eighteenth century were the A-list celebrities of the day; their lives, loves, fashions and misfortunes avidly reported in the press. They dominated the political world as well as the social, and Harriet was at the very heart of this powerful clique. She was born into the wealth and privilege of the Spencer family - and was the great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales. Following in the train of her sister, the charismatic Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Harriet became one of the most glamorous and influential women of the Regency age. At a time when marriage was an aristocratic woman's only career choice, Harriet made an excellent match, to Frederick, Viscount Duncannon. But the marriage proved unhappy and Harriet soon embarked on a series of illicit affairs, including one with the charismatic playwright Richard Sheridan. In Naples she met and fell in love with the handsome young aristocrat Lord Granville Leveson Gower, a man twelve years her junior. And so began the affair that became the last, untold story of enduring love in the Regency period, an open secret within just a tiny circle. It only ended when Granville married her niece, Georgiana's daughter, taking into his care the two illegitimate children he had by Harriet. Harriet's was a life intertwined with public scandal, royal intrigue and high political drama. She was petted and spoiled by Marie Antoinette; she witnessed the French Revolution and George III's madness. She successfully dodged the Prince Regent's amorous advances; quarrelled bitterly with Byron, when her daughter Caroline Lamb embarked on a scandalous affair with him; and travelled through war-torn Europe during the rise and fall of Napoleon. She survived her sister Georgiana by twenty years, living to see the Battle of Waterloo and the coronation of George IV. An Aristocratic Affair opens a window on aristocratic life at its most intimate, and brings one of the Regency period's most colourful characters vividly to life.