My Brother S Gun

When the eldest son of an attractive family kills a security guard and promptly takes flight, the brother and mother he leaves behind are not ostracized. They become media darlings and when the second murder occurs they are fully-fledged stars.

It is a true story of identical twin boys who are now deceased. This story takes place solely in the city of St. Louis, Missouri. It is a story about brothers who grew up out of the tense and racially segregated times of the fifties through the seventies. They were born in a time when great changes were taking place. It was the year 1945, and the closing of that great and awful war. For some, it was a time of great joy. "Victory!" the headlines read, but for whom? It was a time of great abundance and plenty for some, but for others, there was a severe scarcity of even the basics such as jobs, food, clothing, housing, and healthcare. It was a time of "do or die." It was a time of "have and have-nots" and "by any means necessary." These were the times in which the twins came through. It is a story of their audacious boldness to survive in a time of scarcity. These are my recollections and reminiscence of the history of my brothers Leo and Leon Wright. It is also the reminiscing of their mother Olivia Boyd, their brother Ezell Wright, a host of relatives, and those few who considered them friends. All dates and instances are true to the best of our knowledge and of the people herein""all who had the pleasure or the horror of knowing "Twin."

Buford Lance fought for every inch of his B-L connected ranch, so he'd be damned if he was going to hand over a large portion of his Cottonwood Creek range to homesteaders. Instead, he decides to fight again. This time, he hires two of the best guns in the business. Lucas Kane: The Gun King. They said he was invincible, that there was nobody faster. Jordan Kane: The Prince. Next in line for the throne. He'd take on any job. It was said that he'd shoot his own mother if the price was right. One, an out and out killer, the other, his polar opposite who could never commit murder no matter the price. When Lucas Kane refuses the job, Lance has him bushwhacked. It begins an infamous blood-letting talked about for years to come and leads to the change of a town's name in an effort to forget. Ultimately, it draws two brothers into a showdown where only one can walk away. Will the 'Gun King' keep his throne? Or can the 'Prince' finally get to wear the crown he desperately covets?

A bracingly immediate memoir by a young man coming of age during the Syrian war, an intimate lens on the century’s bloodiest conflict, and a profound meditation on kinship, home, and freedom. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • “This powerful memoir, illuminated with Molly Crabapple’s extraordinary art, provides a rare lens through which we can see a region in deadly conflict.”—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy In 2011, Marwan Hisham and his two friends—fellow working-class college students Nael and Tareq—joined the first protests of the Arab Spring in Syria, in response to a recent massacre. Arm-in-arm they marched, poured Coca-Cola into one another’s eyes to blunt the effects of tear gas, ran from the security forces, and cursed the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad. It was ecstasy. A long-bottled revolution was finally erupting, and freedom from a brutal dictator seemed, at last, imminent. Five years later, the three young friends were scattered: one now an Islamist revolutionary, another dead at the hands of government soldiers, and the last, Marwan, now a journalist in Turkish exile, trying to find a way back to a homeland reduced to rubble. Marwan was there to witness and document firsthand the Syrian war, from its inception to the present. He watched from the rooftops as regime warplanes bombed soldiers; as revolutionary activist groups, for a few dreamy days, spray-painted hope on Raqqa; as his friends died or threw in their lot with Islamist fighters. He became a journalist by courageously tweeting out news from a city under siege by ISIS, the Russians, and the Americans all at once. He saw the country that ran through his veins—the country that held his hopes, dreams, and fears—be destroyed in front of him, and eventually joined the relentless stream of refugees risking their lives to escape. Illustrated with more than eighty ink drawings by Molly Crabapple that bring to life the beauty and chaos, Brothers of the Gun offers a ground-level reflection on the Syrian revolution—and how it bled into international catastrophe and global war. This is a story of pragmatism and idealism, impossible violence and repression, and, even in the midst of war, profound acts of courage, creativity, and hope. “A book of startling emotional power and intellectual depth.”—Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger and From the Ruins of Empire “A revelatory and necessary read on one of the most destructive wars of our time.”—Angela Davis

Despite the heated competition for colonial possessions in Papua New Guinea during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the personnel required to run an effective administration were scarce. As a result, the Australian colonial regime opted for a quick solution: it engaged Papua New Guineans—often to perform the most hazardous and most unpopular responsibilities. Based on extensive interviews with former policemen, written records of the time, and reminiscences of colonial officials, this book links events involving police, villagers, and government officers (kiaps) over a forty-year period to wider issues in the colonial history of Papua New Guinea and, by extension, of the Pacific Islands and beyond.

MEET SNAKESKIN BLAKE, PIRATE, ADVENTURER AND SOLDIER OF FORTUNE In his novel Brothers of the Gun, David Alexander has redefined the technothriller. What is more, he has succeeded in writing a novel that is not only a fast-moving adventure tale that stands on its own merits, but which has unearthed the story of an incredible array of pre-20th century military technology that has, in its totality, never before seen publication in fiction or nonfiction. The way he tells the story, these weapons might well give anything in today's 21st century arsenals a run for the money. APPLAUSE FOR DAVID ALEXANDER'S EXCEPTIONAL THRILLERS "Nobody, and I mean nobody, knows as much about future military technology and the impact on past and present strategic issues on tomorrow's conflicts as does David Alexander. And nobody has the proven ability and unique flair necessary to put that knowledge and insight into the pages of some of the best thriller fiction going. David Alexander ranks among the most original, bold and thought-provoking authors ever to make a bid for recognition in the challenging arena of thriller fiction." -- Brian Condon, Book Reviewer "Alexander is so far ahead of the pack that they must be howling like wolves running at his back, hungry for even just a taste of his immense writing talent. There's no doubt that in the action wolf pack Alexander is top dog, and the canine whose scent the others follow." -- F. C. Dubrow, Book Reviewer "David Alexander has written the ultimate contemporary thriller novel. Some boast of stories torn from today's headlines ... well, what of it? David Alexander may reasonably claim to have written novels whose plots and characters seem torn from searing accounts of tomorrow's pivotal events..." -- Ken Rice, Book Reviewer

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath Includes an exclusive conversation between Alexandra Fuller and Justin St. Germain Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after. Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop? Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be. Praise for Son of a Gun “[A] spectacular memoir . . . calls to mind two others of the past decade: J. R. Moehringer’s Tender Bar and Nick Flynn’s Another Bull____ Night in Suck City. All three are about boys becoming men in a broken world. . . . [What] might have been . . . in the hands of a lesser writer, the book’s main point . . . [is] amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation. . . . If the brilliance of Son of a Gun lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author’s insights.”—Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review “[A] gritty, enthralling new memoir . . . St. Germain has created a work of austere, luminous beauty. . . . In his understated, eloquent way, St. Germain makes you feel the heat, taste the dust, see those shimmering streets. By the end of the book, you know his mother, even though you never met her. And like the author, you will mourn her forever.”—NPR “If St. Germain had stopped at examining his mother’s psycho-social risk factors and how her murder affected him, this would still be a fine, moving memoir. But it’s his further probing—into the culture of guns, violence, and manhood that informed their lives in his hometown, Tombstone, Ariz.—that transforms the book, elevating the stakes from personal pain to larger, important questions of what ails our society.”—The Boston Globe “A visceral, compelling portrait of [St. Germain’s] mother and the violent culture that claimed her.”—Entertainment Weekly