Journalism Memoir

Today, MS-13 is one of the most infamous street gangs on earth, with an estimated ten thousand members operating in dozens of states and linked to thousands of grisly murders each year in the US and abroad. But it is also misunderstood—less a drug cartel and more a hand-to-mouth organization whose criminal economy is based mostly on small-time extortion schemes and petty drug dealing. Steven Dudley brings listeners inside the nefarious group to tell a larger story of how a flawed US and Central American policy, and exploitative economic systems, helped foster the gang and sustain it.

An inquisitive observer, thoughtful commentator, and assiduous craftsman, Neil Gaiman has long been celebrated for the sharp intellect and startling imagination that informs his fiction. Now The View from the Cheap Seats brings together, for the first time ever, more than 60 works of his outstanding nonfiction on topics and people close to his heart.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 more, most of them teenage members of Norway's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and what led up to it. What made Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become a terrorist?

Here is the private and most intimate correspondence of one of America's most influential and incisive journalists - Hunter S.Thompson. In letters to a who's who of luminaries, from Norman Mailer toCharles Kuralt, Tom Wolfe to Lyndon Johnson, William Styron to Joan Baez - not to mention his mother, the NRA, and a chain of newspaper editors - Thompson vividly catches the tenor of the times in 1960s America and channels it all through hisown razor-sharp perspective.

Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community.

To be a journalist is to tell the truth. I Love Russia is Elena Kostyuchenko’s unrelenting attempt to document her country as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, patients and doctors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, and reporters like herself.

This celebrated classic gives a soldier's-eye-view of the Guadalcanal battles; crucial to World War II, the war that continues to fascinate us all. Unlike some of those on Guadalcanal in the fall of 1942, Richard Tregaskis volunteered to be there. One of only two on-location news correspondents, he lived alongside the soldiers: sleeping on the ground - only to be awoken by air raids - eating meager rations, and braving some of the most dangerous battlefields of World War II.

Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine, and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations.

Steve Coogan was born and raised in Manchester in the 1960s, the fourth of six children. From an early age, he entertained his family with impressions and was often told he should "be on the telly". Failing to get into any of the London-based drama schools, he accepted a place at Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre and before graduating had been given his first break as a voice artist on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image. The late '80s and early '90s saw Coogan developing characters.

The Angel Makers is a true-crime story like no other—a 1920s midwife who may have been the century’s most prolific killer leading a murder ring of women responsible for the deaths of at least 160 men.

Here, against a backdrop of late-night tattoo sessions and soldier-of-fortune trade shows, Dr. Thompson is at his apocalyptic best - covering emblematic events such as the 1987-88 presidential campaign, with Vice President George Bush, Sr., fighting for his life against Republican competitors like Alexander Haig, Pat Buchanan, and Pat Robertson; detailing the GOP's obsession with drugs and drug abuse; while at the same time capturing momentous social phenomena as they occurred, like the rise of cable, satellite TV, and CNN - 24 hours of mainline news.

From her Academy Award-nominated screenplays to her best-selling fiction and essays, Nora Ephron is one of America's most gifted, prolific, and versatile writers. In this classic collection of magazine articles, Ephron does what she does best: embrace American culture with love, cynicism, and unmatched wit. From tracking down the beginnings of the self-help movement to dressing down the fashion world's most powerful publication to capturing a glimpse of a legendary movie in the making, these timeless pieces tap into our enduring obsessions with celebrity, food, romance, clothes, entertainment, and sex.

In 2000, Douglas Preston and his family moved to Florence, Italy, fulfilling a long-held dream. They put their children in Italian schools and settled into a 14th century farmhouse in the green hills of Florence, where they devoted themselves to living la dolce vita while Preston wrote his best-selling suspense novels. All that changed when he discovered that the lovely olive grove in front of their house had been the scene of a double-murder.

Beginning with her solitary childhood in London, it took years for Melanie Phillips to understand her parents' emotional frailties and even longer to escape from them. But Phillips inherited her family's strong Jewish values and a passionate commitment to freedom from oppression. It was this moral foundation that ultimately turned her against the warped and tyrannical attitudes of the Left, requiring her to break away not only from her parents - but also from the people she had seen as her wider political family.

A Lie Too Big to Fail asserts the idea that a government can never investigate itself in a crime of this magnitude. Was the convicted Sirhan Sirhan a willing participant? Or was he a mind-controlled assassin? It has fallen to independent researchers like Pease to lay out the evidence in a clear and concise manner, allowing listeners to form their theories about this event. Pease places the history of this event in the context of the era and provides shocking overlaps between other high-profile murders and attempted murders of the time.

No name is more synonymous with the evils of Wall Street than Bernie Madoff. Arrested for fraud in 2008 - during the depths of the global financial crisis - the 70-year-old market maker, investment advisor, and former chairman of the NASDAQ had orchestrated the largest Ponzi scheme in world history, fleecing thousands of investors across the globe to the tune of $65 billion. To this day, questions remain: Why did he do it? How did he get away with it for so long? What did his family know? Who is the elusive Bernie Madoff?

In this widely acclaimed memoir ("Riveting, moving...a wonderful book" The New York Times Book Review), Katharine Graham tells her story—one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candor, and dignity of its telling.

It takes just seconds for someone to die. Sometimes questions remain: was it an accident, suicide, or something more sinister?

Liz Truss’s journey from schoolgirl revolutionary to Britain’s shortest-serving Prime Minister. Despite being written off and mocked by even her closest colleagues, Liz Truss slowly but determinedly achieved her goal of taking over 10 Downing Street – only to instantly plunge her administration into chaos and announce her resignation after a record-breaking 44 days. How did she do it? And what exactly went so wrong?

For decades, women battered the walls of the male fortress of television journalism. After fierce struggles, three women - Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, and Christiane Amanpour - broke into the newsroom’s once impenetrable “boys’ club”. These women were not simply pathbreakers, but wildly gifted journalists whose unique talents enabled them to climb to the top of the corporate ladder and transform the way Americans received their news.