American Violence

A Chinese American assassin sets out to rescue his kidnapped wife and exact revenge on her abductors in this New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice: a twist on the classic western from "an astonishing new voice" (Jonathan Lethem). Orphaned young, Ming Tsu, the son of Chinese immigrants, is...

New York Times bestselling author of The Wordy Shipmates and contributor to NPR’s This American Life Sarah Vowell embarks on a road trip to sites of political violence, from Washington DC to Alaska, to better understand our nation’s ever-evolving political system and history. Sarah Vowell...

Violence of Action is much more than the true, first-person accounts of the 75th Ranger Regiment in the Global War on Terror. Within this audio are the heartfelt, firsthand accounts from and about the men who lived, fought, and died for their country, their regiment, and each other. Objective Rhino, Haditha Dam, recovering Jessica Lynch, the hunt for Zarqawi, the recovery of Extortion 17, and everything in between...

As featured on Fresh Air and the TED stage, a stunning look inside the world of violent hate groups by a onetime white supremacist leader who, shaken by a personal tragedy, abandoned his destructive life to become an anti-hate activist. Raw, inspiring, and heartbreakingly candid, White American...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK “A searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sister’s murderer to justice years after the fact” (The Boston Globe), from “one of Mexico’s greatest living writers” (Jonathan Lethem)...

1919, the Year of Racial Violence recounts African Americans' brave stand against a cascade of mob attacks in the United States after World War I. The emerging New Negro identity, which prized unflinching resistance to second-class citizenship, further inspired veterans and their fellow Black citizens. In city after city, Black men and women took up arms to repel mobs that used lynching, assaults, and other forms of violence to protect white supremacy; yet, authorities blamed Blacks for the violence, leading to mass arrests and misleading news coverage.

The twenty-first novel from New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey, a steamy thriller set in tropical Barbados She is a woman of a thousand faces, an assassin who could be anyone, anywhere. The Trinidad contract was supposed to be simple: to make a living man become a dead man...

"Narrator Katharine Chin nails the dark humor and flat tone of this bizarre and fascinating short story collection."- AudioFile A new creation by the author of Severance, Bliss Montage crashes through our carefully built mirages. What happens when fantasy tears the screen of the everyday to wake...

The true story of two American teenagers turned cartel assassins—and the Mexican American detective who fought to stop them. Wolf Boys is “a hell of a story…undeniably gripping” (The New York Times), a harrowing nonfiction thriller that reads like a crime novel but is rooted in...

The inspiring story of a Black doctor who was deeply affected by the violence that plagued his Brooklyn childhood and later dedicated himself to addressing trauma and violence as public health issues Rob Gore first encountered violence when he was beaten and robbed as a 10-year old; it was...

In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century.

A riveting, "beautifully written" deep dive into the unsolved murder of two free-spirited young women in the wilderness (John Grisham, #1 New York Times bestselling author), a journalist's obsession—and a new theory of who might have done it.​ They must have been followed. That’s the...

One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in innocent sixteen-year-old Bobby being sentenced to prison for thirty-eight years. New Haven native Nicholas Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and what it reveals about the enduring legacies of social and economic disparity. In The Other Side of Prospect, he has produced an immersive portrait of a seminal community in an old American city now beset by division and gun violence.

Black Panther and Cuban exile, Assata Shakur, has inspired multiple generations of radical protest, including our contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing its title from one of America’s foremost revolutionaries, this collection of thought-provoking essays by award-winning Panther scholar Donna Murch explores how social protest is challenging our current system of state violence and mass incarceration. Assata Taught Me offers a fresh and much-needed historical perspective on the fifty years since the founding of the Black Panther Party.

From its origins in the 1750s, the White-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, Black abolitionist leaders accomplished what White nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War.

Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of time; but the paths of ancestors toward her - paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land - lie largely eroded and lost. In this provocative and powerful mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time.

From the one-of-kind mind of Bill James, famous for revolutionizing the way we think about baseball, comes a “thought-provoking meditation” (Seattle Times) and epic tour through American crime—now available in paperback. The man who revolutionized the way we think about baseball examines...

A deeply personal exploration of the generational impact of guns on the Black experience in America. This program is read by the author. A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he...

Growing up in rural Oregon, Brandon Wolf grappled with the devastating loss of his supportive mother and with the embedded racism and homophobia of a community that made him feel like an unwelcome stranger. After the lack of connection and role models led him down a spiral of risky behavior, Wolf escaped to survive. In Orlando, he found what he’d been searching for: belonging—in a community that was a safe space with people he’d come to call his chosen family.

A daring, firsthand, and utterly-unscripted account of crisis in America, from Ferguson to Flint to Cliven Bundy's ranch to Donald Trump's unstoppable campaign for President--at every turn, Pulitzer-prize winner and bestselling author of Detroit: An American Autopsy, Charlie LeDuff was there In...