The Truth Of Houses

Poetry. At once wise and achingly at a loss, Ann Scowcroft's THE TRUTH OF HOUSES is an elegant debut collection. While very intimate--even startlingly intimate at times--the voices of these poems are constantly taking a step backward, wrestling for a measure of distance and perspective. Reading them, we eavesdrop on the uncovering of a personal vernacular that might allow the present to be better lived; we have the sense of overhearing a particular yet eerily familiar inner struggle--a struggle for insight, for an equanimity with which both narrator and fortunate reader might re-enter life anew.

In 1912, a group of ambitious young men, including future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter and future journalistic giant Walter Lippmann, became disillusioned by the sluggish progress of change in the Taft Administration. The individuals started to band together informally, joined initially by their enthusiasm for Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign. They self-mockingly called the 19th Street row house in which they congregated the "House of Truth," playing off the lively dinner discussions with frequent guest (and neighbor) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. about life's verities. Lippmann and Frankfurter were house-mates, and their frequent guests included not merely Holmes but Louis Brandeis, Herbert Hoover, Herbert Croly - founder of the New Republic - and the sculptor (and sometime Klansman) Gutzon Borglum, later the creator of the Mount Rushmore monument. Weaving together the stories and trajectories of these varied, fascinating, combative, and sometimes contradictory figures, Brad Snyder shows how their thinking about government and policy shifted from a firm belief in progressivism - the belief that the government should protect its workers and regulate monopolies - into what we call liberalism - the belief that government can improve citizens' lives without abridging their civil liberties and, eventually, civil rights. Holmes replaced Roosevelt in their affections and aspirations. His famous dissents from 1919 onward showed how the Due Process clause could protect not just business but equality under the law, revealing how a generally conservative and reactionary Supreme Court might embrace, even initiate, political and social reform. Across the years, from 1912 until the start of the New Deal in 1933, the remarkable group of individuals associated with the House of Truth debated the future of America. They fought over Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence; the dangers of Communism; the role the United States should play the world after World War One; and thought dynamically about things like about minimum wage, child-welfare laws, banking insurance, and Social Security, notions they not only envisioned but worked to enact. American liberalism has no single source, but one was without question a row house in Dupont Circle and the lives that intertwined there at a crucial moment in the country's history.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “It’s never quite the book you think it is. It’s better.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times From John Darnielle, the New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling. Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That’s what his mother always told him. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success—and a movie adaptation—to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Chandler finds himself in Milpitas, California, a small town whose name rings a bell––his closest childhood friend lived there, once upon a time. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected—back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is. Devil House is John Darnielle’s most ambitious work yet, a book that blurs the line between fact and fiction, that combines daring formal experimentation with a spellbinding tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession.

Roger and Carolyn Perron purchased the home of their dreams and eventual nightmares in December of 1970. The Arnold Estate, located just beyond the village of Harrisville, Rhode Island seemed the idyllic setting in which to raise a family. The couple unwittingly moved their five young daughters into the ancient and mysterious farmhouse. Secrets were kept and then revealed within a space shared by mortal and immortal alike. Time suddenly became irrelevant; fractured by spirits making their presence known then dispersing into the ether. The house is a portal to the past and a passage to the future. This is a sacred story of spiritual enlightenment, told some thirty years hence. The family is now somewhat less reticent to divulge a closely-guarded experience. Their odyssey is chronicled by the eldest sibling and is an unabridged account of a supernatural excursion. Ed and Lorraine Warren investigated this haunting in a futile attempt to intervene on their behalf. They consider the Perron family saga to be one of the most compelling and significant of a famously ghost-storied career as paranormal researchers. During a seance gone horribly wrong, they unleashed an unholy hostess; the spirit called Bathsheba; a God-forsaken soul. Perceiving herself to be the mistress of the house, she did not appreciate the competition. Carolyn had long been under siege; overt threats issued in the form of fire…a mother's greatest fear. It transformed the woman in unimaginable ways. After nearly a decade the family left a once beloved home behind though it will never leave them, as each remains haunted by a memory. This tale is an inspiring testament to the resilience of the human spirit on a pathway of discovery: an eternal journey for the living and the dead.

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

Ideas and the presidency flirt with each other, but can they really get along? President Clinton had a romance with big ideas. He intently cultivated intellectuals, seducing them with his characteristic charm and with the promise of real influence on the political stage. Yet most often he disappointed the big thinkers whose advice he sought. Benjamin Barber was first invited to Camp David in 1994, along with other prominent members of the academic community, to participate in a "seminar" with President Clinton on the future of Democratic ideas and ideals. Afterwards, he became a steady informal adviser to the White House. For a politically committed professor like Barber, the opportunity was exhilarating—here was an opportunity to put ideas into action, to link ideas to power. The result was enlightening, if unexpected. The most unpredictable factor was the president himself: a man of astonishing intellectual gifts, a consummate listener and synthesizer of ideas, who nonetheless failed to present a stirring progressive vision or even to craft a memorable speech. With great perceptiveness, wit, and élan, Barber provides a startling meditation on truth and power—and the truth of power, which is the responsibility of the elected not to an idea but to the electorate. He identifies the fault lines that future progressive candidates must straddle if they are to win—and the gift they must have, if they are to be great, of calling forth the best in their fellow citizens. In the end, Barber give us a unique portrait of our compelling and maddening ex-president, and the hopes and disillusionments he represents.

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER A critically acclaimed, intimate and no-holds-barred memoir by Canada’s top defence lawyer, Nothing But the Truth weaves Marie Henein’s personal story with her strongly held views on society’s most pressing issues. Marie Henein, arguably the most prominent lawyer in the country, has written a memoir that is at once raw, beautiful, and altogether unforgettable. Her story, as an immigrant from a tight-knit Egyptian-Lebanese family, demonstrates the value of strong role models—from her mother and grandmother, to her brilliant uncle Sami who died of AIDS. She learned the value of hard work, being true to herself and others, and unapologetically owning it all. Marie Henein shares here her unvarnished view on the ethical and practical implications of being a criminal lawyer, and how the job is misunderstood and even demonized. Ironically, her most successful cases made her a “lightning rod” in some circles, confirming her belief that much of the public’s understanding of democracy and the justice system is based on popular culture and social media, and decidedly not the rule of law. As she turns fifty and struggles with the corrosive effect becoming invisible has on women, Marie doubles down on being even more highly visible and opinionated as she deconstructs, among other things, the otherness of the immigrant experience (Where are you really from?), the pros and cons of being a household name in this country, opening her own boutique law firm, and the commoditization of women’s previously unpaid labour popularized by the likes of Martha Stewart. Nothing But the Truth is refreshingly unconstrained and surprising—an account by a woman at the top of her game in a male-dominated world.

New York Times Bestseller — #1 True Crime Bestseller The inspiration for the major motion picture, THE IRISHMAN. “The best Mafia book I ever read, and believe me, I read them all.” — Steven Van Zandt “Charles Brandt has solved the Hoffa mystery.” — Professor Arthur Sloane, author of Hoffa “Sheeran’s confession that he killed Hoffa in the manner described in the book is supported by the forensic evidence, is entirely credible, and solves the Hoffa mystery.” — Michael Baden M.D., former Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York “It’s all true.” — New York Police Department organized crime homicide detective Joe Coffey “Gives new meaning to the term ‘guilty pleasure.’’’ — The New York Times Book Review **Includes an Epilogue and a Conclusion that detail substantial post-publication corroboration of Frank Sheeran's confessions to the killings of Jimmy Hoffa and Joey Gallo. "I heard you paint houses" are the first words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran. To paint a house is to kill a man. The paint is the blood that splatters on the walls and floors. In the course of nearly five years of recorded interviews, Frank Sheeran confessed to Charles Brandt that he handled more than twenty-five hits for the mob, and for his friend Hoffa. He also provided intriguing information about the Mafia's role in the murder of JFK. Sheeran learned to kill in the US Army, where he saw an astonishing 411 days of active combat duty in Italy during World War II. After returning home he became a hustler and hit man, working for legendary crime boss Russell Bufalino. Eventually Sheeran would rise to a position of such prominence that in a RICO suit the US government would name him as one of only two non-Italians in conspiracy with the Commission of La Cosa Nostra, alongside the likes of Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano and Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno. When Bufalino ordered Sheeran to kill Hoffa, the Irishman did the deed, knowing that if he had refused he would have been killed himself. Charles Brandt's page-turner has become a true crime classic.