Résultats Éditeur "The Atavist" dans Biographies et mémoires

In The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang, Josh Dean reconstructs the gang's glory days and reveals how the real story, pieced together through months of research and reporting - most prominently with Reid himself, as he comes to the end, at age 64, of his final days in the custody of the state - is more remarkable than the myth that has long been told.

The bomb appeared early one morning in an upstairs office of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino near Lake Tahoe, an enigmatic box covered in a bewildering array of switches. A neatly typed letter explained that the box contained 1,000 pounds of dynamite. It was the largest improvised explosive device in American history - and its creator promised to explain how to remove it safely if the casino delivered $3 million by helicopter to a remote landing site in the mountains.

In 1948, a young Australian mining engineer named Ben Carlin set out to do the impossible: circumnavigate the globe, by land and sea, in a single vehicle. The vehicle in question was an amphibious jeep developed by the U.S. Army, which Carlin christened Half-Safe, after a deodorant slogan. It was a mechanical mongrel that was supposed to move with equal ease across land and water but in practice wasn't much good for either one. Undaunted, Carlin and his wife Elinore set off across the Atlantic Ocean with dreams of fame and fortune, and of carving a small notch in history.

It was one of the strangest sights the Coast Guard pilots had ever seen: a tall-masted wooden ship, the kind that sailed centuries ago, capsizing in the wind and towering waves of Hurricane Sandy off the coast of North Carolina. It looked like something out of a movie - and, in a way, it was. The ship was the Bounty, a replica of a British merchant vessel of the same name whose crew famously mutinied in 1789. She had been built for a Marlon Brando film in the 1960s - and now she was sinking, her 16-person crew fleeing into the sea amid the splintered wood and torn canvas.

In 1910, the United States - its population exploding, its frontier all but exhausted - was in the throes of a serious meat shortage. But a small and industrious group of thinkers stepped forward with an answer, a bold idea being endorsed by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and The New York Times. Their plan: to import hippopotamuses to the swamps of Louisiana and convince Americans to eat them.

In the mid-1920s, young children began to vanish from neighborhoods around New York City. It took the police a decade to find their abductor, an unassuming 64-year-old handyman named Albert Fish. Fish had committed crimes of unspeakable horror: He had not only abducted and murdered the children, but also tortured and, in some cases, eaten them. During Fish's trial, some of the country's most prominent psychiatrists debated the exact nature of Fish's crimes. Was he evil or insane? Who had the power to determine where one ended and the other began?

Manny Ansar and Iyad Ag Ghali had little in common - one was a politically connected intellectual, the other a rebel waging war on behalf of his nomadic people in the middle of the Sahara. They did share one thing, though: a passion for Mali's desert blues, a haunting mix of traditional music infused with the influence of Elvis Presley, Bob Marley, and Jimi Hendrix.

Nothing about the romance between Nancy Hatch Dupree and Louis Dupree was what you'd call typical. For starters, there were the lovers themselves. Louis was a foul-mouthed paratrooper turned swashbuckling archaeologist. Nancy was a witty travel writer and the wife of a CIA station chief on the ragged frontier of the Cold War. Then there was the place and time: Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1960s, a heady and short-lived milieu of conniving spies, future mujahideen, and cocktail-swilling cosmopolitans.

It was the most mundane of arguments, teenagers fighting over a stolen bicycle and bruised egos on a hot summer evening in one of the worst neighborhoods in Oakland, California. No one was supposed to get hurt, not seriously. But by the end of the night, a 13-year-old boy was lying dead in the street from a gunshot wound, and Tony Davis, the 18-year-old drug dealer and small-time thug who had fired the gun from the backseat of his friend's car, was on his way to a life in prison.

In 2008, a troubled Vietnam veteran turned struggling actor named Hamilton Meadows became obsessed with a question: What did William Shakespeare's English sound like when the Bard and his actors spoke it? Others had asked the same thing before - the quest to piece together the pronunciation of Elizabethan English, the language as it was spoken during Shakespeare's lifetime, has captivated English scholars, theater directors, and romantic adventurers for two hundred years.

Nobody would've figured the kids from the sleepy beach town of Coronado, California, for criminal masterminds. They were just some hippie surfers, high school friends who'd come up with the idea of swimming bundles of marijuana across the border from Tijuana during the summer of 1969. Within a decade, however, the Coronado Company had become the largest pot-smuggling operation on the West Coast, a $100 million empire with outposts from Mexico to Morocco to Thailand.

When André Bamberski's daughter died 30 years ago, he was helpless to save her. Suspicions of murder began to surround her stepfather, a German doctor named Dieter Krombach, but Bamberski could only hope the truth would prevail. But when the authorities gave up their pursuit, he knew he had to act. So against the odds, Bamberski embarked on an obsessive quest to capture and punish his daughter's killer. In this riveting true story by Joshua Hammer, a father travels to the limits of law in search of justice.

What would you do if you were given the opportunity to become another person - one whose life promised to be more glamorous and prosperous than your own? That was the question posed to Judith Patterson when, at age 33, she met the birth mother who had given her up for adoption as a child, who now revealed to her an extraordinary secret. Patterson, her mother told her, was the illegitimate daughter of a Texas oil mogul, one of the most powerful businessmen in the country in his day.

Who would be the first aviator to singlehandedly fly all the way around the globe? That was all anyone wanted to know in the summer of 1933, when Wiley Post and Jimmie Mattern set out from New York in a pair of wood-and-canvas propeller planes. Post, a one-eyed Oklahoma farm boy with a desperate past, was as comfortable in the cockpit as he was socially awkward back on the ground.

Yasith Chhun was just a 42-year-old accountant living a comfortable life in California. Then he tried to overthrow the Cambodian government from his humble office in Long Beach. Inspired by films like Braveheart, Chhun planned "Operation Volcano," a scheme replete with espionage, jungle guerrillas, and East German rocket launchers. Could Chhun's quixotic, incredibly risky and potentially bloody coup possibly succeed?

When Jennifer Sky was 15, she was offered the chance to spend a summer working as a model in Japan. For a girl from rural Florida who spent hours poring over fashion magazines, it seemed like a dream come true. But soon she found herself all but abandoned in an unfamiliar city, attempting to navigate a ruthless industry on her own and waving goodbye to childhood on the boozy margins of Tokyo's expatriate scene.

Mark Moffett doesn't just study ants, he travels among them. Moffet holds a Harvard Ph.D. in entomology and is an accomplished scientist, an award-winning author and journalist, and one of the best nature photographers of his generation. Years ago, this free-spirited naturalist left academia behind to plunge into the deepest jungles and observe insect societies up close. Now author Nicholas Griffin takes us inside Moffett's own world, to explore his death-cheating quest for discovery.

On an afternoon in February 2011, two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were driving on a highway in central Mexico when they were ambushed by drug cartel gunmen. In the firefight that followed, one of the agents, Jaime Zapata, was killed - the first U.S. law enforcement agent to die in the line of duty in Mexico in more than a quarter of a century. Mexican authorities quickly apprehended members of the Zetas, Mexico's most notorious criminal organization, who confessed to the murder. It looked like an open-and-shut case - until it was discovered that the guns used to kill Zapata had come from the United States....

Anni and Shrien Dewani's life together was the stuff of romance novels: Love at first sight, a whirlwind courtship, a wedding proposal in Paris after a flight on Shrien's private plane. Young, wealthy, and attractive, the Dewanis were the kind of couple that seemed immune to misfortune - until they arrived in Cape Town, South Africa on their honeymoon. Barely a day later, a brutal carjacking left Anni dead and Shrien wandering alone through one of South Africa's most dangerous neighborhoods. At first, Anni Dewani's death seemed to be a random tragedy. But the police investigating the killing soon began to suspect that something more nefarious had happened.

On her deathbed, David Dobbs's mother Evelyn Jane revealed a secret she'd kept for 60 years about the man she had truly loved, and lost. His name was Norman "Angus" Zahrt, a married World War II flight surgeon with whom she'd engaged in a secret love affair, just before he deployed to the Pacific and disappeared. Intrigued by his mother's hidden longing, Dobbs embarked on a reporter's quest to uncover Zahrt's fate, and that of his family. The story he returned with is an extraordinary tale of love, war, and how we confront the lost chances in our lives.