Mark Bowden has written about crime throughout his long and illustrious career, and was recognized in 2010 with a lifetime achievement award by the International Thriller Writers organization. The Case of the Vanishing Blonde collects six of his most riveting stories -- acounts spanning four decades of searing characters and unsettling tales to illustrate all manner of crimes and the ways technology has progressively altered criminal investigation....

"It all started when journalist Jillian Lauren asked LAPD Homicide Detective Mitzi Roberts about which case Roberts was most proud of closing. "Samuel Little," Roberts answered. The now 79-year-old Little had murdered approximately 90 women over six decades and repeatedly got away with the murders due to lack of evidence (or jurisdiction); Roberts finally brought him to justice by tying him to the murders of three Los Angeles women. Surprised she...

An empirical investigation of financial crises during the last 800 years.

Examines many of the failed designs and inventions that led to greater improvements siting as examples the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and the space shuttle disasters.

Honest, engaging, and inspiring, Our School tells the story of Downtown College Prep, a public charter high school in San Jose that recruits underachieving students and promises to prepare them for four-year colleges and universities. The average student enters ninth grade with fifth-grade reading and math skills. Many have slid through school without doing homework. Some barely speak English. Tracking the innovative and pioneering program, award-winning...

In this thrilling true crime book, bestselling and award-winning author John Ferak explores the murder, investigation, trial, conviction and eventual exoneration-the largest such ever in the United States-of the Beatrice 6. On February 5, 1985, one of the coldest nights on record, Beatrice, Nebraska widow Helen Wilson was murdered inside her second-floor apartment. The news of six arrests was absolutely stunning to the locals in this easy-going,...

Mrs. Zajac is feisty, funny, and tough. She likes to call herself an "old-lady schoolteacher." (She is thirty-four.) Around Kelly School, she is famous for her discipline: "She is mean, bro," says one of her students. But children love her. And so will the reader of this extraordinarily moving book by the author of House and The Soul of a New Machine. Mrs. Zajac spends her working life "among schoolchildren." To some it might seem a small world, a...

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. "A heartfelt memoir and a suspenseful story" of a murdered mother (Gabourey Sidibe, Book of the Month Club).

When Sarah Perry was twelve, she saw a partial eclipse; she took it as a good omen for her and her mother, Crystal. But that moment of darkness foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine. It took twelve years to find...

Fertig tells the inspiring, heartbreaking stories of three young people as they struggle to learn to read before it is too late. At the same time, the author tells a story of great change in schools as teachers and parents question the meaning of education as never before.

"Part case studies, part meditation on the past, present and future of the disease, [this book] traces Alzheimer's disease from its discovery and tells the story of the biomedical breakthroughs that may allow it to finally be prevented and treated by medicine. While it is a scathing indictment of our health care system, it is also an argument for how we can live with dementia; the ways patients can reclaim their autonomy and redefine their sense of...