It wasn’t until Libby Phelps was an adult, a twenty-five year old, that she escaped the Westboro Baptist Church. She is the granddaughter of its founder, Fred Phelps, and when she left, the church and its values were all she’d known. She didn’t tell her family she was leaving. It happened in just a few minutes; she ran into her house, grabbed a bag, and fled. No goodbyes.Based in Topeka, Kansas, the Westboro Baptist Church community is one the country’s most notorious evangelical g...

James Holmes killed or wounded seventy people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Only one man was allowed to record extensive interviews with the shooter. This is what he found.On July 20, 2012 in Aurora, Colorado, a man in dark body armor and a gas mask entered a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises with a tactical shotgun, a high-capacity assault rifle, and a sidearm. He threw a canister of tear gas into the crowd and began firing. Soon twelve...

New York Times Bestseller: The "astonishing" true crime story of a notorious black widow who preyed on her husband and daughter and faked her own death ( The Washington Post Book World ).Pretty, smart, and pampered, Audrey Marie Hilley grew up in a small Alabama town believing she was entitled to the best of everything. But marriage to her high school sweetheart, a cushy secretarial job, and moth...

One morning in August of 2007, Didier Pourquery’s daughter, Agathe, only a few days away from her twenty-third birthday, stopped breathing. Seven years after her death, her father tells her story, based on his notes taken during the last three weeks of her life. He shares not only his sadness and loss, but also the joy that characterized his relationship with his daughter.At her birth, Agathe’s doctors said the average life expectancy for a child born with cystic fibrosis was twent...

**A Washington Post bestseller!A chilling and compassionate look at how close an innocent man was to being put death with a foreword by Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking.**What is worse than having a client on Death Row in Texas? Having a client on Death Row in Texas who is innocent and not knowing if you will be able to stop his execution in time.Grace and Justice on Death Row: A Race Against Time to Free an Innocent Man te...

A landmark in the fight against the death penalty. Extensively researched and brilliantly written . . . The Wrong Men is a gem.” Martin Garbus, criminal defense attorneyEvery day, innocent men across America are thrown into prison, betrayed by a faulty justice system, and robbed of their lives-either by decades-long sentences or the death penalty itself. Injustice tarnishes our legal process from start to finish. From the racial discrimination and violence used by...

A 2015 Amelia Bloomer List Selection"You will be a son, my daughter." With these stunning words Ukmina learned that she was to spend her childhood as a boy.In Afghanistan there is a widespread practice of girls dressing as boys to play the role of a son. These children are called bacha posh: literally "girls dressed as boys." This practice offers families the freedom to allow their child to shop and work-and in some cases, it saves them from the di...

Behind Her Softly Sexy FacadeGun Barrel City, Texas. Police searching for missing Fire Department Captain Jimmy Don Beets dug inside a wishing well in the neatly-tended garden of his wife, 48-year-old Betty Lou Beets. Not only did they find his body, but that of Betty Lou's fourth husband, Doyle Wayne Barker. Each had been shot in the head and buried in a sleeping bag. It wasn't long before investigators unearthed the terrible truth.

A compelling memoir and account of the Independent Fundamental Baptist church and its shocking history of religious abuse.Jocelyn Zichterman was born, raised, married into, and finally, with her family, fled the Independent Fundamental Baptist church. Founded by the fiery preacher Bob Jones, with several hundred thousand members, IFB congregants are told they must not associate with members of other Baptist denominations and evangelicals, with an emphasis o...

The best way to hear the story of Raoul Wallenberg is through his own words. Put together from three different collections, Letters and Dispatches is the most thorough book of Wallenberg’s writings and letters. With his disappearance behind the Iron Curtain in January of 1945, he became tragically mysterious. While the story of Wallenberg has been told many times over, the best way we can possibly understand and relate to him is through his written word, which Letters and Disp...

An updated edition of the classic study that took "an enormous step toward filling some of the voids in the literature of slavery" ( The Washington Post Book World).One of the most important books published on slave society, Stolen Childhood focuses on the millions of children and youth enslaved in 19th-century America. This enlarged and revised edition reflects the abundance of new scholarship on slavery that has emerged.

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Michael Benfante went to work, just like he had day after day, at his office on eighty-first floor in the World Trade Center North Tower. Moments after the first plane struck, just twelve floors above him, Benfante organized his terrified employees, getting them out the office and moving down the stairwells. On his way down, he and another co-worker encountered a woman in a wheelchair on the sixty-eighth floor. Benfante, the woman and Benfante’s co-worker th...