Hijacking The Runway

A fascinating chronicle of how celebrity has inundated the world of fashion, realigning the forces that drive both the styles we covet and the bottom lines of the biggest names in luxury apparel. From Coco Chanel’s iconic tweed suits to the miniskirt’s surprising comeback in the late 1980s, fashion houses reigned for decades as the arbiters of style and dictators of trends. Hollywood stars have always furthered fashion’s cause of seducing the masses into buying designers’ clothes, acting as living billboards. Now, forced by the explosion of social media and the accelerating worship of fame, red carpet celebrities are no longer content to just advertise and are putting their names on labels that reflect the image they—or their stylists—created. Jessica Simpson, Jennifer Lopez, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sean Combs, and a host of pop, sports, and reality-show stars of the moment are leveraging the power of their celebrity to become the face of their own fashion brands, embracing lucrative contracts that keep their images on our screens and their hands on the wheel of a multi-billion dollar industry. And a few celebrities—like the Olsen Twins and Victoria Beckham—have gone all the way and reinvented themselves as bonafide designers. Not all celebrities succeed, but in an ever more crowded and clamorous marketplace, it’s increasingly unlikely that any fashion brand will succeed without celebrity involvement—even if designers, like Michael Kors, have to become celebrities themselves. Agins charts this strange new terrain with wit and insight and an insider’s access to the fascinating struggles of the bold-type names and their jealousies, insecurities, and triumphs. Everyone from industry insiders to fans of Project Runway and America's Next Top Model will want to read Agins’s take on the glitter and stardust transforming the fashion industry, and where it is likely to take us next.

In 1971, "D. B. Cooper" pulled off what some call the crime of the century, skyjacking a Boeing 727 and parachuting into history and legend. Here's a book that offers a gripping account of that still-unsolved case, based on never-before-published interviews, showing how it launched one of the most extraordinary eras in American aviation history. In November 1971, an unidentified man later anointed by the media as "D.B. Cooper" pulled off one of the most audacious crimes in aviation history, hijacking a Northwest Airlines flight over the Pacific Northwest and parachuting from the Boeing 727 with $200,000 in ransom. "D. B. Cooper" was never to be seen again and the FBI, which kept his case open for forty years, finally determined it would never be solved. Unsolved, perhaps, but much admired. Over the next seven months, a number of air pirates imitated Cooper's crime. None were more daring than the hijacker of American Airlines Flight 119. After commandeering the flight from St. Louis with a machine gun and collecting $502,500 in ransom, the Flight 119 hijacker parachuted into the night over Indiana. Unlike Cooper, he was found. These two crimes were part of a wave of hijackings that occurred between 1961 and 1972, "D. B. Cooper" may have been the most famous, but he was far from alone. One hijacker ran across the tarmac in Reno, Nevada with a pillowcase over his head, gun in hand, to seize a United Airlines flight. Another collected a large ransom in Washington, D.C. before jumping over Honduras. Motivations in many cases remain murky, an admixture of politics, greed, derring-do, and boredom. What they had in common was how they transfixed the nation's attention, bringing about a transformation in the ways that commercial airlines were run and how the laws of the skies were enforced. With its focus on the parachute hijackers, beginning with "D. B. Cooper," John Wigger's book gathers together the stories of this period of daring criminality and recounts them in gripping fashion, showing their effect on the public, the media, and law enforcement. Using never-before published interviews and first-hand accounts, he brings one of the most chaotic periods in U.S. commercial aviation to life.

The UNSOLVED HIJACKING OF FLIGHT 305/ How Justice Was Denied is a work of fiction wrapped around an actual event: the hijacking of Flight 305 between Portland, OR, and Sea-Tac Airport near Seattle, WA, November 24, 1971, by a man who came to be known as D. B. Cooper. This is the only unsolved case of air piracy in United States history. This is the story of a love so strong as to cause the compromise of principles and morals and to overcome the fear of death by jumping from an airplane into the freezing darkness. Our character, Dan Wilson, is backed into a corner when he discovers that Melita, the love of his life, will die without a costly liver transplant. He decides the only way to get a large sum of money fast is to hijack an airliner and demand a $200K ransom. After collecting the ransom money and surviving the jump, he struggles through the wilderness to his means of escape and makes it to Mexico only to lose all the money in a fiery crash. Still in a corner, he makes a deal with the devil. Will Melita, the love of Dannys life, be saved? Can Danny find redemption for his deeds? Will the drug lord, Luis Esperanza, be brought to justice? Who was this Dan Cooper? What really caused him to risk his life for $200K? Did he die in the wilderness, as many in the F.B.I. believe? If he did survive, where did he go? What happened to the bulk of the money? Many questions.few answers. If you like a tale of love and adventure, this book is for you. This is a plausible story and I hope for you, an enjoyable read! Burt H. Slaughter

Roger examines how developments in new media technologies, such as the internet, blogs, camera/video phones, have fundamentally altered the way in which governments, militaries, terrorists, NGOs, and citizens engage with images. He argues that there has been a paradigm shift from techno-war to image warfare, which emerged on 9/11.