Heart Shots

When Damon Lee Lane joins the US Marine Corps with two of his friends, he’s not quite sure what the future holds. Thrust into the middle of the Vietnam War, he must use his wits and courage so that he and his fellow Marines survive. But there is more going on than he knows during the battles and near misses he experiences. Heart Shots provides insight into what’s happening inside Damon’s heart, where all things are processed. Even as he struggles, Damon learns that there is a Higher Power at work who guides, preserves, and helps us in times of trouble. As the war grows more volatile, Damon’s experiences become increasingly traumatic. Who will live? Who will die? And will Damon Lee Lane become just another name on the wall?

“A heart shot is what every big game hunter hopes for,” Editor Mary Zeiss Stange explains in the introduction to Heart Shots, “that perfect shot placement, whether of bullet or arrow, which ensures a quick, humane kill. A heart shot is also what the best hunting writing has always aimed for—that certain image, or theme, or turn of phrase that strikes to the core of our flesh-and-blood humanity, piercing the tissue-thin membrane between life and death.” Hunting and writing about it have not commonly been thought of as women’s work, but today women are hunting and writing about it in unprecedented numbers. This collection of stories by 46 hunters who happen to be female shows us that in fact some women have always hunted, and some have written dazzling accounts of their experiences. What you’ll find in k to nature and basics and to express in narrative, image, and metaphor the complex meaning of being predator, such impulses are ageless and genderless. There are differences in the way women go about hunting and telling its story. Some are subtle and some are startling. In this marvelous collection a full range of writers from hard-edged realists to contemplative naturalists express the complex thought and emotion that constitute hunting with intelligence and insight. These women are aware of the fact that they are doing something distinctly out of the ordinary. And this is a book distinctly out of the ordinary as well, to be enjoyed, pondered, and savored by women and men alike, all who appreciate a good story well told. [Stories and essays written by Mary Jobe Akeley, Kim Barnes, Nellie Bennett, Durga Bernhard, Courtney Borden, and many more.]

A Deer Authority’s Best Tips from Decades in the Field As a seasoned hunter, host of a hunting television show, and acclaimed author and editor, Peter J. Fiduccia has amassed prodigious experience in pursuit of the whitetail. Now, he shares his tips, tactics, and techniques with readers, touching on every topic related to hunting whitetail deer. Some of his tips include: Core Areas: key strategies to take a buck in his core area Deer Calls: surefire advice to guarantee a buck will respond to grunt calls Using Scents: a radical scent tactic reveals how to attract bucks during the rut Shot Placement: how to regularly make dead-on one-shot kills Wounded Deer: methods that will drastically improve your tracking skills Scrape Hunting: fail-proof strategies to flush out a mature buck Weather: up your buck hunting success using barometric pressure and weather fronts Terrain: how to identify the places mature bucks regularly travel Fiduccia covers these and many more subjects in Shooter's Bible Guide to Deer Hunting. Hunters will find many ways to hone their skills and bag more deer with this handy guide.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged. Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder. Mikal, burdened with the guilt of being his father's favorite and the shame of being Gary's brother, gracefully and painfully relates a murder tale "from inside the house where murder is born... a house that, in some ways, [he has] never been able to leave." Shot in the Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence, and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long lineage of ruin.

In 2003, Adam Shand naively set out to unravel Melbourne's bloody gangland wars. A few months' research, a guaranteed cover story. But his foray into the underworld took him deeper than that. He became embroiled in a complex world where feuds raged between rival families, and where a new generation was clashing with the criminal Establishment. Before long, he found himself counted as a friend by those who sometimes ended friendships with a hail of bullets. In this fully updated edition, taking in the events of 2010, including the murder of Carl Williams, Big Shots takes the reader into the heart of the city's multibillion-dollar 'disorganised crime' scene, as Shand meets the key figures and suspects, including Carl and Roberta Williams, Mick Gatto and many others. He discovers the human drama behind the brutal slayings that were splashed across the front pages, and in the process comes to questions his objectivity.

A harrowing story of blue on black violence, of black lives that seemingly did not matter. On September 4, 2005, six days after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans, two groups of people intersected on the Danziger Bridge, a low-rising expanse over the Industrial Canal. One was the police who had stayed behind as Katrina roared near, desperate to maintain control as their city spun into chaos. The other was the residents forced to stay behind with them during the storm and, on that fateful Sunday, searching for the basics of survival: food, medicine, security. They collided that morning in a frenzy of gunfire. When the shooting stopped, a gentle forty-year-old man with the mind of a child lay slumped on the ground, seven bullet wounds in his back, his white shirt turned red. A seventeen-year-old was riddled with gunfire from his heel to his head. A mother’s arm was blown off; her daughter’s stomach gouged by a bullet. Her husband’s head was pierced by shrapnel. Her nephew was shot in the neck, jaw, stomach, and hand. Like all the other victims, he was black—and unarmed. Before the blood had dried on the pavement, the shooters, each a member of the New Orleans Police Department, and their supervisors hatched a cover-up. They planted a gun, invented witnesses, and charged two of their victims with attempted murder. At the NOPD, they were hailed as heroes. Shots on the Bridge explores one of the most dramatic cases of police violence seen in our country in the last decade—the massacre of innocent people, carried out by members of the NOPD, in the brutal, disorderly days following Hurricane Katrina. It reveals the fear that gripped the police of a city slid into anarchy, the circumstances that drove desperate survivors to the bridge, and the horror that erupted when the police opened fire. It carefully unearths the cover-up that nearly buried the truth. And finally, it traces the legal maze that, a decade later, leaves the victims and their loved ones still searching for justice. This is the story of how the people meant to protect and serve citizens can do violence, hide their tracks, and work the legal system as the nation awaits justice. Named one of the top books of 2015 by NewsOne Now, and named one of the best books of August 2015 by Apple Winner of the 2015 Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award