On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas at Austin’s clock tower and performed the first televised and (at the time) deadliest mass shooting in American history. Two weeks after the murders, FBI agents interviewed a Catholic priest in Alaska who had known Whitman and his family for fifteen years.Jo Scott-Coe discovered the report of this interview in an online search about the shooting nearly fifty years later. As a stray Cath...

In 1966, Kathy Leissner Whitman was a twenty-three-year-old teacher dreaming of a better future. She was an avid writer of letters, composing hundreds in the years before she was stabbed to death by her husband, Charles Whitman, who went on to commit a mass shooting from the tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Kathy's writing provides a rare glimpse of how one woman described, and sought to change, her short life with a coercive, controlling, and violent partner.Unheard...

2025 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication AwardUnheard Witness foregrounds a young woman’s experience of domestic abuse, resistance, and survival before the mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.In 1966, Kathy Leissner Whitman was a twenty-three-year-old teacher dreaming of a better future. She was an avid writer of letters, composing hundreds in the years before she was stabbed to death by her husband,...

Why would a high school teacher who loves teaching leave school—after half a career in the classroom?Teacher at Point Blank answers this question at a time when concerns about school performance, safety, and teacher attrition are at an all-time and often anxious high. Meditating on subtle and overt forms of violence in secondary public education from an up-close and “pink collar” point of view, Jo Scott-Coe examines her own workplace as a microcosm of the national compulso...

This volume explores the historical, theological, sociological, and ethical dimensions of the current issues threatening the two thousand-year-old Roman Catholic Church. The interdisciplinary analysis contained within the volume exposes the destructive convictions and actions of the Roman Catholic clergy that has produced the current institutional crisis while suggesting options for moving forward. Documenting the cases that constitute the many crises currently surrounding Catholicism, the...

THE BOOK WHICH INSPIRED SPOTLIGHT, 2016 WINNER OF THE BEST PICTURE OSCAR AND THE BEST SCREENPLAY OSCARThis is the true story of how a small group of courageous journalists uncovered child abuse on a vast scale - and held the Catholic Church to account. Betrayal is a ground-breaking work of investigative journalism, now brought brilliantly to life on the screen in the major new movie Spotlight.Winner of the...

A National Indie BestsellerWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Story Prize, and a Windham-Campbell Literature PrizeA Best Book of the Year at The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, Houston Chronicle, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Mashable, Polygon, Kirkus Reviews, and Library JournalA New Yor...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “In this dramatic page-turner, Raymond Arroyo has captured the life and lessons of Mother Angelica, a woman who may well be the patron saint of CEOs.”—Lee Iacocca, The Iacocca Family Foundation, former CEO of the Chrysler CorporationIn 1981, a simple nun, using merely her entrepreneurial instincts and two hundred dollars, launched what would become the world’s largest religious media empire. In the garage of a Birmingham, Alabam...

Get an inside look at the real beginning of outlaw biker culture with this "raucous and heartfelt recounting of the early days of biker clubs" (Roadbike). The story starts one weekend in 1947, at a motorcycle race in Hollister, California. A few members of one club, the no-holds-barred "Boozefighters," got a little juiced up and took their racing to the street. Word of the fracas spread, and soon enough Life magazine was on hand to tell the world, with sensational (albeit posed) pictures o...

From New York Times bestselling author Ross Gay comes an intimate and electrifying collection of essays about the joy that comes from connection.In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and al...

Passionate, independent-minded nonfiction from the international bestselling author of ‘The Corrections’.Jonathan Franzen's ‘Freedom’ was the literary sensation of 2010, whilst ‘The Corrections’ was the best-loved and most written-about novel the previous decade. ‘How to be Alone’, is a collection of the personal essays and painstaking, often humorous reportage that have earned Franzen a wide and loyal readership, including what has come to be known as 'The Harper's Essay', Franzen...

An NPR Best Book of the Year“You will devour these beautifully written—and very important—tales of honesty, pain, and resilience” (Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and City of Girls) from fifteen brilliant writers who explore how what we don’t talk about with our mothers affects us, for better or for worse.As an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started writing an essay a...