Mortal Evidence: The Forensics Behind Nine Shocking Cases
Author: Cyril H Wecht
Foreword by Dr. Henry C. Lee
World-renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht leads you into the heart of nine fascinating investigations, focusing each chapter on a single engrossing drama. He reveals the most startling evidence that shows why JonBenet Ramsey's killer most likely came from within her home, why O. J. Simpson probably had an accomplice in the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, shocking revelations about Robert Berdella's grisly torture and sex-abuse crimes against young men, and many intriguing facts about other infamous cases.
If you find the fictional plots of such dramas as C. S. I. exciting, you will be amazed by the true stories told by Dr. Wecht, with the help of two top-flight veteran reporters, Greg Saitz and Mark Curriden.
Table of Contents:
Foreword Dr. Henry C. Lee 7Preface 11
Acknowledgments 17
Teenage Baby Killers? The Truth behind the Death of Baby Boy Grossberg 19
A Fallen Beauty Queen: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey? 43
Sex, Drugs, and a Dead Casino Magnate: How Ted Binion Died 87
The Real Fugitive: Sam Sheppard and His Wife's Murder 125
Shoot-out in Miracle Valley: The Killing of Religious Sect Members 157
Standing by Her Man: Tammy Wynette's Final Song 185
The Trials of O. J.: The Final Verdict 199
Robert Berdella: Madman or Just Murderer? 243
Heavy Metal Murder: The Curious Demise of Robert Curley 275
Afterword 297
Notes 299
Bibliography 307
Index 309
New interesting textbook: Dear Mrs Roosevelt or U S Presidents Factbook
The Second Plane. September 11: Terror and Boredom
Author: Martin Amis
A master not only of fiction but also of fiercely controversial political engagement, Martin Amis here gathers fourteen pieces that constitute an evolving, provocative, and insightful examination of the most momentous event of our time.
At the heart of this collection is the long essay “Terror and Boredom,” an unsparing analysis of Islamic fundamentalism and the West’s flummoxed response to it, while other pieces address the invasion of Iraq, the realities of Iran, and Tony Blair’s lingering departure from Downing Street (and also his trips to Washington and Iraq). Amis’s reviews of pertinent books and films, from The Looming Tower to United 93, provide a far-ranging survey of other responses to these calamitous issues, which are further explored in two short stories: “The Last Days of Muhammed Atta,” its subject self-evident, and “In the Palace of the End,” narrated by a Middle Eastern tyrant’s double whose duties include epic lovemaking, grotesque torture, and the duplication on his own body of the injuries sustained by his alter ego in constant assassination attempts.
Whether lambasted for his refusal to kowtow to Muslim pieties or hailed for his common sense, wide reading, and astute perspective, Amis is indisputably a great pleasure to read—informed, elegant, surprising—and this collection a resounding contemplation of the relentless, manifold dangers we suddenly find ourselves living with.
The Washington Post - Warren Bass
…the argument in The Second Plane bristles with intelligence.
Publishers Weekly
These chronologically ordered essays and stories on the September 11 attacks proceed from initial bewilderment to coruscating contempt for radical Islam. Novelist Amis (House of Meetings) rejects all religious belief as "without reason and without dignity" and condemns "Islamism" as an especially baleful variant. Amis attacks Islamism's tenets as "[a]nti-Semitic, anti-liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic" and characterizes its adherents, from founding ideologue Sayyid Qutb to the ordinary suicide bomber, as sexually frustrated misogynists entranced by a "cult of death." He also takes swipes at Bush and the Iraq war, which he describes as botched and tragically counterproductive, if well intentioned, but scorns those who draw a moral equivalence between Western misdeeds and the jihadist agenda. Amis's concerns are cultural and aesthetic as well as existential: terrorism threatens a reign of "boredom" in the guise of tedious airport security protocols, pedantic conspiracy theories and the dogma-shackled "dependent mind" fostered by Islamist theocracy. As much as Amis's opinions are scathing, blunt and occasionally strident, his prose is subtle, elegant and witty-and certainly never boring. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Stephen K. Shaw - Library Journal
Amis has a reputation, well deserved, for being an intellectual provocateur. This reputation will only grow with the publication of these latest musings on life in what he calls "the Age of Vanished Normalcy." As John Updike, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and others have before him, Amis seeks to make sense of a world in which passenger airplanes are used as weapons of destruction and religious fanaticism has muscled out reasoned deliberation. His critique of Islamism may seem enlightened to some, imbecilic to others. Amis rejects the chimera of moral equivalence between modern, secular civilization and radical Islamic jihadists. He argues that he is not Islamophobic but rather Islamismophobic-that is, opposed to militant Islam. Amis contends that the West shares no common discourse with jihadism and contrasts the Western, secular mind of intellectual curiosity with the strident, noncurious mind of the likes of Mohamed Atta. The most impressive of these 14 pieces is "Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind," in which Amis mounts his own crusade against religious violence and secular triumphalism. Amis is intentionally and controversially combative in this work, which makes it essential reading. Recommended for all libraries.
Kirkus Reviews
Fourteen essays on the theme that "our understanding of September 11 is incremental and can never hope to be intact and entire."Islamism (Islamic fascism to some, Islamofascism to others), notes the ever-provocative British novelist and essayist Amis (House of Meetings, 2007, etc.), may be associated with Saudi Arabia, but it had its modern origins in Greeley, Colo., in 1949. "The story is grotesque and incredible," he writes, "but then so are its consequences." One of those curious consequences, familiar to anyone who has experienced war, terror or extreme stress, is boredom, for in such endeavors when one is not scared witless there is by definition not much going on. The war against Islamist terror has, Amis hazards, an especially boring additional component, our presumed inability to begin to communicate with "a mind with which we share no discourse." Amis's alignment as a self-described "Islamismophobe" puts him in a similar orbit with sometime friend and sometime rival Christopher Hitchens, save that, unlike Hitchens, Amis does not support the war in Iraq, as one of the pieces, an in-flight interview with Tony Blair, makes clear. (But then, that interview hints, Blair didn't much like the war either.) Amis is rather less blustery than Hitchens; one piece is a surprisingly empathetic attempt to get inside 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta's mind. As always, Amis proves eminently readable, his observations enlightening. Who other would ascribe to Kuwait City an "almost artistic cheerlessness" that speaks to the deadening touch of women-hating fundamentalism "under a sinister mist of damp dust"? Amis may not make any friends among the PC set, but he makes clear and inarguable the fact thatthe Islamist enemy is an enemy of reason, just like Hitler and Stalin. "The only thing Islamism can dominate, for now, is the evening news," Amis concludes in good fighting spirit. His book fires a welcome, left-tending salvo.
No comments:
Post a Comment