I Am Raymond Washington

I Am Raymond Washington is the only authorized biography of the undisputed founder of the Crips and provides an unprecedented look into Raymond Washington's life. If you're looking for stories of gang violence and crimes committed by gang members, that's been done before, and this book isn't for you. But if you're looking for a factual and intuitive look into what made Raymond Washington unique in the mean streets of Los Angeles, this is the book you want to read. Filled with stories, many never-before-seen photographs, as well as interviews and eyewitness accounts of those who knew Raymond, what he represented, and how and why the Crips were formed-and why his name is still spoken on the streets of Los Angeles today with hatred, fear, awe, and reverence. Entering the world of Raymond Washington with an open mind was difficult for me; however, the story of who Raymond Washington was as a leader, warrior, tactician, and mentor became clear. Learn why the gang was so successful and how an unremarkable fifteen-year-old kid in the fall of 1969 sat down with his best friend and formed what later became one of the most successful, and yet feared and hated gangs in the world-the Crips.

This is Volume IV of a collection of thirteen on Persia. Originally published in 1905, this text looks at the first part of the SHÁHNÁMA OF FIRDAUSÍ. To the vast majority of English readers the Sháhnáma seems hardly to be known even by name even though it is a great Persian Epic.

Inside the Crips is the memoir of the author Colton Simpson's life as a Crip--beginning at the tender age of ten in the mid-seventies--and his prison turnaround nearly twenty-five years later. Colton ("C-Loc") Simpson calls himself the only gang member ever allowed to quite the Crips--and one of the few to survive into his thirties. Simpson--son of a ballplayer for the California Angels and a mother who was relentlessly rough with her sons after their fathers left her--became a gang member at ten. Inside The Crips tells the remarkable--and at the same time, all too common--story of gang life in the 1980s in immediate and descriptive prose that makes this book a gripping true-life read. Inside The Crips covers the rush that comes from participating in gang violence and the years-long wars between the Bloods and Crips. Simpson's story also puts the reader in the middle of the struggle between the Crips and corrections officers in Calipatria prison. It covers gang life from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties, and introduces characters it's impossible not to care about: Simpson's fellow gangbanger Smile; and Gina, the long-suffering friend and mother of two sons who married Simpson in prison.

From the award-winning and bestselling author of Ghost Wars and Directorate S, an “extraordinary” and “monumental” exposé of Big Oil (The Washington Post) Includes a profile of current Secretary of State and former chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson In this, the first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobil—the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States—Steve Coll reveals the true extent of its power. Private Empire pulls back the curtain, tracking the corporation’s recent history and its central role on the world stage, beginning with the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 and leading to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The action spans the globe—featuring kidnapping cases, civil wars, and high-stakes struggles at the Kremlin—and the narrative is driven by larger-than-life characters, including corporate legend Lee “Iron Ass” Raymond, ExxonMobil’s chief executive until 2005, and current chairman and chief executive Rex Tillerson, President-elect Donald Trump's nomination for Secretary of State. A penetrating, news-breaking study, Private Empire is a defining portrait of Big Oil in American politics and foreign policy.

The first biography of america’s best-known short story writer of the late twentieth century. The London Times called Raymond Carver "the American Chekhov." The beloved, mischievous, but more modest short-story writer and poet thought of himself as "a lucky man" whose renunciation of alcohol allowed him to live "ten years longer than I or anyone expected." In that last decade, Carver became the leading figure in a resurgence of the short story. Readers embraced his precise, sad, often funny and poignant tales of ordinary people and their troubles: poverty, drunkenness, embittered marriages, difficulties brought on by neglect rather than intent. Since Carver died in 1988 at age fifty, his legacy has been mythologized by admirers and tainted by controversy over a zealous editor’s shaping of his first two story collections. Carol Sklenicka penetrates the myths and controversies. Her decade-long search of archives across the United States and her extensive interviews with Carver’s relatives, friends, and colleagues have enabled her to write the definitive story of the iconic literary figure. Laced with the voices of people who knew Carver intimately, her biography offers a fresh appreciation of his work and an unbiased, vivid portrait of the writer.

In this ambitious and wildly original debut -- part social-political satire, part international mystery -- a new virus turns people into something a bit more than human, upending society as we know it. This panoramic fictional oral history begins with one small mystery: the body of a young woman found in an Arizona border town, presumed to be an illegal immigrant, disappears from the town morgue. To the young CDC investigator called in to consult with the local police, it's an impossibility that threatens her understanding of medicine. Then, more bodies, dead from an inexplicable disease that solidified their blood, are brought to the morgue, only to also vanish. Soon, the U.S. government -- and eventually biomedical researchers, disgruntled lawmakers, and even an insurgent faction of the Catholic Church -- must come to terms with what they're too late to stop: an epidemic of vampirism that will sweep first the United States, and then the world. With heightened strength and beauty and a stead diet of fresh blood, these changed people, or "Gloamings," rapidly rise to prominence in all aspects of modern society. Soon people are beginning to be "re-created," willingly accepting the risk of death if their bodies can't handle the transformation. As new communities of Gloamings arise, society is divided, and popular Gloaming sites come under threat from a secret terrorist organization. But when a charismatic and wealthy businessman, recently turned, runs for political office -- well, all hell breaks loose. Told from the perspective of key players, including a cynical FBI agent, an audacious campaign manager, and a war veteran turned nurse turned secret operative, A People's History of the Vampire Uprising is an exhilarating, genre-bending debut that is as addictive as the power it describes.

Raymond Carver’s complete uncollected fiction and nonfiction, including the five posthumously discovered “last” stories, found a decade after Carver’s death and published here in book form for the first time. Call If You Need Me includes all of the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please, four essays from Fires, and those five marvelous stories that range over the period of Carver’s mature writing and give his devoted readers a final glimpse of the great writer at work. The pure pleasure of Carver’s writing is everywhere in his work, here no less than in those stories that have already entered the canon of modern literature.

Booker dreamed of making friends with words, setting free the secrets that lived in books. Born into slavery, young Booker T. Washington could only dream of learning to read and write. After emancipation, Booker began a five-hundred-mile journey, mostly on foot, to Hampton Institute, taking his first of many steps towards a college degree. When he arrived, he had just fifty cents in his pocket and a dream about to come true. The young slave who once waited outside of the schoolhouse would one day become a legendary educator of freedmen. Award-winning artist Bryan Collier captures the hardship and the spirit of one of the most inspiring figures in American history, bringing to life Booker T. Washington's journey to learn, to read, and to realize a dream.