Son Of A Gun

I was crazy. Crazy mad. That's how I felt when I turned in my AK-47 rifle. The commanding officer's growl still haunts me: "This gun is your god. You listen to the voice of your god and go where your gun tells you." This powerful and gripping story describes the journey of a brother and sister, eight-year-old Lucky and ten-year- old Nopi, who are kidnapped from school and forced to become child soldiers in Liberia's fourteen-year- long civil war. Lucky and Nopi manage to escape, but must continue fleeing. Even after they are reunited with their parents, they both know the pieces of their lives will never fit together like they used to. When will the war really be over, and when will they get to have the childhood they still dream about? This sensitive and compelling narrative is based on true stories of former child soldiers interviewed by the author. Son of a Gun also includes a section of notes and further information about Liberia.

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 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

Lewis Grizzard always makes us laugh. But this time, when he tells us all about his father—a certified war hero and a shameless passer of bad checks . . . a charmer of men and women and a consummate con artist . . . a man of great courage and an alcoholic destined to drink himself to death—he’s going to make us cry, too. And he’s going to give us a hilarious, moving account of that “tender, spooky territory: that country of the heart inhabited by fathers and sons.”

When an abandoned baby, sporting a tail, is rescued from a South American rubbish bin by a dwarf transvestite prostitute, you know you’re reading a story that only the mad genius of Alejandro Jodorowsky ("The Incal," "The Metabarons") could conceive! The child grows up to become Juan Solo, a vicious gangster and political enforcer, whose savagery sees him quickly rise through the ranks. Until his past catches up to him…

The Searing Portrayal Of War That Has Stunned And Galvanized Generations Of Readers An immediate bestseller upon its original publication in 1939, Dalton Trumbo?s stark, profoundly troubling masterpiece about the horrors of World War I brilliantly crystallized the uncompromising brutality of war and became the most influential protest novel of the Vietnam era. Johnny Got His Gun is an undisputed classic of antiwar literature that?s as timely as ever. ?A terrifying book, of an extraordinary emotional intensity.?--The Washington Post "Powerful. . . an eye-opener." --Michael Moore "Mr. Trumbo sets this story down almost without pause or punctuation and with a fury amounting to eloquence."--The New York Times "A book that can never be forgotten by anyone who reads it."--Saturday Review

"Son of a gun is the story of Jack Smith, a Texas cowboy, Ruby, the beautiful farm girl who gave up her innocence to raise their son, and Leo, the man who discovered the truth about all of them."--Back cover

Amid a freak snowstorm, Texas rancher Damien Lambert made the unlikeliest find on his Bent Pine Ranch--a bloodied woman and her infant daughter in hiding. Though her story was transparent as ice, the heat he saw in her eyes made him offer her refuge. After a ruthless kidnapping and a harrowing escape, Emma Muran needed a hero...and the baby needed a home. She'd found both in Damien--the perfect man with a cowboy's swagger and a lover's touch--until he learned about the incredible danger they faced. After that, Emma knew it would take all the cowboy Damien had to keep her and the child alive.

The story of a gunman who must defend his ranch, as well as his love