Nightmare In Hostage Hills

This is the “Go-To” Providers’ Practice manual for ethical, lawful, and clinically sound professional practice in the assessment and treatment of children and families enduring narcissistic abuse where I illustrate the cluster of personality characteristics of abusers and demonstrate their pattern of battering and abuse tactics laying it all out clearly for providers to accurately assess the criminal behavior by a narcissist/batterer before children become absorbed into the hate campaign for their other parent and left in toxic dangerous home environments at risk for death and/or serious psychological injury which lasts a lifetime.

“Sadly, Christina’s journey, and her children’s experience of being collateral damage, is not atypical. Kudos for her strength and bravery in putting her story out there as a cautionary tale for others.” (Dr. Susan Weitzman, author, Not to People like Us: Hidden Abuse in Upscale Marriages). “Christina Mask’s Nightmare is constructed around fragments from a life in agony as one woman attempts to escape abuse, retain her sanity, and regain the custody of three children the family court and her husband have taken from her. It’s all here—the daily records over months, then years; the diary entries; the self-blame; the excuses; the shame; the absurdist dialogues with family therapists; marginalia from readings or lectures or religious texts; letters pleadings with judges and lawyers and evaluators; poems; letters to and from the children, real and imagined; the reports that put her claims of abuse in quotations; and so, so much more. These pieces are loosely joined by a narrative and an interior monologue that I sometimes found too much to bear. But then I realized I was scanning something akin to a Picasso painting, whose underlying truth lay not in what was on the page, not the fragments, but in the hope that put them out here, no more evident than in the endlessly reasonable letters Mask writes to intractable foes. Mask has cast her eye on what Yeats termed ‘the broken, crumbling battlement’ of the self and lived to write it. As one director famously said about the sixty women and children crowded into her six-bedroom shelter, ‘If they can manage this, they can manage anything.’ Christina’s book gives us faith that she is right.” (Evan Stark, PhD, MSW. The writer is professor emeritus at Rutgers University, and author of Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life [Oxford, 2007]).

It is impossible to examine any part of the war on terrorism in the twenty-first century without seeing the hand of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell or one of their loyalists. The Commanders, an account of the use of the military in the first Bush administration, is in many respects their story—the intimate account of the tensions, disagreements and debates on the road to war. It is impossible to examine any part of the war on terrorism in the twenty-first century without seeing the hand of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell or one of their loyalists. The Commanders, an account of the use of the military in the first Bush administration, is in many respects their story—the intimate account of the tensions, disagreements and debates on the road to war.

Drawing on the words of his father and stories from his life, the son of the former president offers a new "Contract with America," outlining a wealth of practical ideas to realize Ronald Reagan's conservative vision of America.

The bestselling author of Demolition Angel and L.A. Requiem returns with his most intense and intricate thriller yet. As the Los Angeles Times said, Robert Crais is “a crime writer operating at the top of his game.” His complex heroes and heroines, his mastery of noir atmosphere, and his brilliant, taut plots have catapulted him into the front rank of a new breed of thriller writers. Hostage proves his earlier success was no fluke. It’s an unstoppable read. An ex-con with delusions of grandeur and his tagalong brother unwittingly team up with a psychopath one wrong word away from meltdown. When their late afternoon joyride turns into a random act of violence, they take a family hostage in the affluent bedroom community of Bristo Camino. Enter Chief of Police Jeff Talley, a stressed-out former LAPD SWAT negotiator who is hiding from his past. Plunged back into the high-pressure world that he desperately wants to forget, Talley soon learns that his nightmare has only begun. The hostages are not who they seem, and the home contains secrets that even L.A.’s most lethal and volatile crime lord, Sonny Benza, fears. As Talley tries to hold himself together and save the people inside, the full weight of Benza’s wrath descends on him, putting the police chief and his own family at risk. Soon, all involved are held hostage by the exigencies of fate and the only one capable of diffusing the standoff is the least stable of them all. Hostage is a blistering stand-alone thriller with superb characters in crisis, multistranded plotting, and pitch-perfect Southern California sensibility.

An illustrated history of the iconic Hollywood neighborhood featured in numerous film noir classics—and the shadowy story of how it disappeared. When postwar movie directors went looking for a gritty location to shoot their psychological crime thrillers, they found Bunker Hill, a neighborhood of fading Victorians, flophouses, tough bars, stairways, and dark alleys in downtown Los Angeles. Novelist Raymond Chandler had already used its real-life mean streets to lend authenticity to his hardboiled detective stories featuring Philip Marlowe. But the biggest crime of all was going on behind the scenes, run by the city’s power elite. And Hollywood just happened to capture it on film. Using nearly eighty photos, writer Jim Dawson sheds new light on Los Angeles history with this grassroots investigation of a vanished place.

When the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) built through the Rockies in 1884 it laid track straight down the west slope of Kicking Horse Pass. Dropping 1,140 feet in 7.1 railway miles, this section of railway was a construction worker’s horror and a railroader’s nightmare that soon became known as the Big Hill. Intended to be temporary, the 4.5 percent grade, more than 3 miles long, saw use for 25 years until completion of the Spiral Tunnels in 1909. The two tunnels – unique in North America – loop over themselves, doubling the length of track and halving the grade. Incorporating more than 100 photographs, The Spiral Tunnels and the Big Hill – An Illustrated Railway History describes the construction of the CPR and recounts the tales of daring, defiance, and disaster on the second-steepest mainline track ever operated in North America. Maps and diagrams reveal how the Spiral Tunnels create a safer grade for trains. The text provides up-to-date descriptions of today’s locomotives and explains the many challenges of operating trains on mountain grades. A Canadian bestseller for three decades, this revised edition will be informative reading for railfans, for travellers in the Rockies, and for those with an interest in Canadian history.