Dear William

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER 2022 NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDS FINALIST — MEMOIR "Shot through with hope, purpose and an unflinching love, it's a story that must be read." —Newsweek "Essential, poignant, and insightful reading." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review Award-winning columnist and author David Magee addresses his poignant story to all those who will benefit from better understanding substance misuse so that his hard-earned wisdom can save others from the fate of his late son, William. The last time David Magee saw his son alive, William told him to write their family’s story in the hopes of helping others. Days later, David found William dead from an accidental drug overdose. Now, in a memoir suggestive of Augusten Burroughs meets Glennon Doyle, award-winning columnist and author David Magee answers his son's wish with a compelling, heartbreaking, and impossible to put down book that speaks to every individual and family. With honesty and heart, Magee shares his family’s intergenerational struggle with substance abuse and mental health issues, as well as his own reckoning with family secrets—confronting the dark truth about the adoptive parents who raised him and a decades-long search for identity. He wrestles with personal substance misuse that began at a young age and, as a father, he sees destructive patterns repeat and develop within his own children. While striving to find a truly authentic voice as a writer despite authoring nearly a dozen previous books, Magee ultimately understands that William had been right and their own family’s history is the story he needs to tell. A poignant and uplifting message of hope translates unimaginable tragedy into an inspirational commitment to saving others, as David founded the William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing at the University of Mississippi. His mission to share solutions to self-medication and addiction, particularly as it touches America’s high school and college students, emphasizes that William’s story is about much more than a tragic addiction—it’s an American story of a family broken by loss and remade with love. Dear William inspires readers to find purpose, build resilience, and break the cycles that damage too many individuals and the people who love them. It’s a life-changing book revealing how voids can be filled, and peace—even profound, lasting happiness—is possible.

Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were brutally murdered at her home on Bundy Drive in Brentwood, California, on the night of June 12, 1994. The days and weeks that followed were full of spectacle, including a much-watched car chase and the eventual arrest of O. J. Simpson for the murders. The televised trial that followed was unlike any that the nation had ever seen. Long since convinced of O. J.’s guilt, the world was shocked when the jury of the “trial of the century” read the verdict of not guilty. To this day, the LAPD, Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, mainstream media, and much of the world at large remain firmly convinced that O. J. Simpson got away with murder. According to private investigator William Dear, it is precisely this assuredness that has led both the police and public to overlook a far more likely suspect. Dear now compiles more than seventeen years of investigation by his team of forensic experts and presents evidence that O. J. was not the killer. In O. J. Is Innocent and I Can Prove It, Dear makes the controversial, but compelling, case that it may have been the “overlooked suspect,” O. J.’s eldest son, Jason, who committed the grisly murders. Sure to stir the pot and raise some eyebrows, this book is a must-read.

When James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from the Michigan State University campus in 1979, he was no ordinary college dropout. Egbert was a computer genius at sixteen, a boy with an I.Q. of 180-plus and an extravagant imagination. He was a fanatic Dungeons & Dragons player—before the game was widely known—and he and his friends played a live version in a weird labyrinth of tunnels and rooms beneath the university. These secret passages even ran within the walls of the buildings themselves. After Egbert disappeared, there were rumors of witch cults, drug rings, and homosexuality to try to explain the mystery. When the police search came to a dead end, the Egbert family called in one of the most colorful private investigators of our era, William Dear, of Dallas, who is a kind of real-life James Bond. Dear's search for the boy reads like a sensational novel—but every detail is true. Dear crawled through baking-hot tunnels, flew over the campus in a helicopter, and called into play every intuition he could muster. He realized that he must out-play and "out-psych" the brilliant, game-playing mind of Dallas Egbert. In the end, he did. The story of the tortuous search, the discovery of the boy, his return to his parents—and the final tragedy—is told here for the first time. This is the story of a generation, not just the story of Dallas Egbert alone; and anybody who has known a game-playing, computer-age adolescent will recognize some of the possibilities for genius, and for danger.

"There are letters concerning the establishing of the Corps of Discovery's first winter camp in December 1803, preparations for setting out into the country west of Fort Mandan in 1805, and Clark's fossil dig at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, in 1807. There are also letters about Lewis's disturbed final days that shed light on whether he committed suicide or was murdered.

"I don't care who you hire, or what the company has to pay him … so long as he's the best there is." This anguished cry from the wife of murder victim Dean Milo would draw private investigator Bill Dear into one of the most frustrating and ultimately triumphant cases of his career. Dean Milo was a phenomenally successful businessman who had built a tiny family business into a $50 million-a-year corporation. Along the way he had established a lengthy list of enemies that began with his immediate family and stretched throughout the social and business community. His fast-track ride to the top came to a violent halt on August 11, 1980, when Milo was found dead in his luxurious Ohio home, shot twice in the head. A blank telegram form lay nearby. Four months after his death, the investigation remained a confusing collection of non sequiturs. Clues pointed toward Milo's involvement with the Mafia, the drug world, and the gay community. His own family refused to cooperate with the author¬ities. And time was ticking by … In desperation, Maggie Milo turned to Texas private eye Bill Dear. This is the gripping story of the remarkable collaboration between Dear and the police detectives of Akron, Ohio, that led to eleven convictions, an Ohio record. It is also a tale of the human weakness, desperation, and overwhelming greed that led to a sudden death.

Breaking nearly eight decades of silence, Essie Mae Washington–Williams comes forward with a story of unique historical magnitude and incredible human drama. Her father, the late Strom Thurmond, was once the nation's leading voice for racial segregation (one of his signature political achievements was his 24–hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, done in the name of saving the South from "mongrelization"). Her mother, however, was a black teenager named Carrie Butler who worked as a maid on the Thurmond family's South Carolina plantation. Set against the explosively changing times of the civil rights movement, this poignant memoir recalls how she struggled with the discrepancy between the father she knew–one who was financially generous, supportive of her education, even affectionate–and the Old Southern politician, railing against greater racial equality, who refused to acknowledge her publicly. From her richly told narrative, as well as the letters she and Thurmond wrote to each other over the years, emerges a nuanced, fascinating portrait of a father who counseled his daughter about her dreams and goals, and supported her in reaching them–but who was unwilling to break with the values of his Dixiecrat constituents. With elegance, dignity, and candor, Washington–Williams gives us a chapter of American history as it has never been written before–told in a voice that will be heard and cherished by future generations.

Sir Peter Ustinov's beautifully crafted autobiography is told with exquisite wit and insight. From his birth in April 1921, it spans his extraordinary career as actor, playwright, film star and director, confirming his early belief that he is 'irrevocably betrothed to laughter'. Ustinov's renowned gift for mimicry is exploited to the full in Dear Me. Eccentric relatives, school masters, sergeant majors and manic Hollywood moguls are all brought unforgettably to life.

‘Moving – at times almost unbearably so – and fascinating’ Antonia Fraser A family’s story of human tenacity, faith and a race for survival in the face of unspeakable horror and cruelty perpetrated by the Nazi regime against the Jewish people.