A Harrowing True Story of Survival on the Eiger's Deadly North FaceThe Germans call it the Mordwand. The Murder Wall. The north face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps is a vertical mile of unstable limestone, perpetual avalanches, and weather that can turn lethal without warning. Eighteen climbers had already died attempting it. In August 1957, four more went up.They started as two separate teams. Claudio Corti and Stefano Longhi were Italians from Lecco, rely...

The prize-winning, bestselling journalist provides a fascinating glimpse into the mind of "The Happy Face Killer" in the serial murderer's own words . . .In February 1990, Oregon State Police arrested John Sosnovke and Laverne Pavlinac for the vicious rape and murder of Taunja Bennet, a troubled twenty-three-year-old barfly who had a mild intellectual disability since birth. There was just one problem. They had the wrong people.And the real killer wasn't abou...

Monte Sole - Mountain of the Sun - had the bad luck to lie on the main route of withdrawal of the retreating German armies in autumn 1944. As the allied advance stormed up Italy to the very shadow of Monte Sole, Axis frustration over their retreat and the harassing Italian partisans reached its peak. With full authorization of Field Marshall Albert Kesselring, and with an infusion of dread SS reinforcements, the Germans determined to neutralize Monte Sole. The result was, in Kesselring's c...

On the night of July 18, 1969, a black Oldsmobile plunged off a narrow one-lane bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. By morning, the car had been found submerged. Inside was the body of Mary Jo Kopechne, twenty-eight years old, a former campaign worker for Robert Kennedy. The next morning, Senator Ted Kennedy walked into the Edgartown police station and identified himself as the driver.What happened in those hours has never been fully explained. Kennedy himself said his ...

For fifty-seven years, the grizzly bears of Glacier National Park had never killed a human being.That ended on the night of August 12, 1967.In the dark hours before dawn, in two separate locations miles apart, two grizzly bears attacked two young women sleeping at backcountry campsites. Julie Helgeson, nineteen, a seasonal park employee from Minnesota, was dragged from her sleeping bag near Granite Park Chalet and mauled while her companion survived. Michele Koons, also nin...

For more than a year, Jack Olsen embedded himself in the world of big-city police. He rode with them on their beats, visited them in their homes, walked with them into bars and back alleys and onto what he called "the killing grounds of this most dangerous of occupations."What he found became Night Watch.Watch Commander Packer Lind is 37 years old, burly, dedicated, and trying to hold his precinct together. His officers are a ragtag collection of bruisers, smart-alecks, and...

Fire 5 is no ordinary fire company. It's a special roving unit, dispatched wherever trouble is worst across the city. And the men of Fire 5 are no ordinary crew.Narrator Charly Sprockett introduces them one by one: the veterans and the probies, the brawlers and the philosophers, the men swapping funny stories and marital woes between calls. There's the unit's first female firefighter, Lulu Ann Tompkins, whose arrival upends the station's carefully maintained chaos. And there's the ...

In the early 1970s, Jack Olsen gained access to fifteen women working at one of New York City's most prestigious corporations. They were single, educated, well-paid, and by every external measure living the dream. He sat down with each of them and asked them to tell the truth.What they told him was not what anyone expected.Olsen steps back entirely in this book, letting the women speak without interruption, in their own words. What emerges is a portrait of lives lived under...

In 1968, Jack Olsen wrote what Sports Illustrated would later call the most significant series of stories in the magazine's history.Published across five consecutive issues beginning July 1, 1968, "The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story" shattered the comfortable myth that American sport was a level playing field, a rare arena where race didn't matter and Black athletes had found true equality. Olsen proved it was a lie.Black collegiate athletes were recruited for their speed ...

Broussard "Bru" Massy is eight feet two inches tall, a New Orleans piano prodigy who gave up basketball for a music conservatory and then, inexplicably, gave up music for the pros. He can barely fit through a doorway. He has never played organized ball above junior high. And he doesn't talk to reporters.The city's NBA franchise, the hapless Wasps, signs him as a publicity stunt. Nobody expects him to last two weeks.He lasts the whole season. And then some.Told throu...

In the early 1970s, Jack Olsen turned his journalistic eye from the corporate women of New York City to the college campuses of America. What he found was a generation in the middle of reinventing itself.Fourteen young women speak here in their own words, without editorial interruption. They are students navigating the collision between the lives their parents imagined for them and the world they inherited: a counterculture in full bloom, with all the freedom, confusion, alcohol, d...

Every city has a Sweet Street. You know it when you see it: the neon signs, the strip clubs, the honky-tonk bars, the sidewalks that come alive after midnight. Most people hurry past. Jack Olsen went in.In the early 1970s, Olsen embedded himself in the bars and strip clubs of San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, spending months among the hustlers, pimps, strippers, waitresses, bartenders, bouncers, junkies, cops, and club owners who inhabited this shadow economy. He listened t...