Obsession Memoir

June 26, 2010. A Pennsylvania state trooper witnesses a car speeding and crashing into trees. Stopping to help, he finds that the driver, Michael Ballard, is alive - and drenched in blood. When asked what happened, the man answers, "I just killed everybody." Not far from the accident, police make a gruesome discovery. In the home of Michael's ex-girlfriend, Denise Mehri, they find four bodies that had been stabbed repeatedly with a knife.

Problems had always followed Susan White, but when she remarried and moved to Houston's posh suburbs, she thought the past was behind her—until she met a deputy sheriff named Kent McGowen who would soon become her worst nightmare.

Mothers & Murderers: A True Story of Love, Lies, Obsession...and Second Chances takes listeners on a wild tragicomic ride from the criminal courtrooms of California’s Silicon Valley to the Himalayan mountains of Pakistan to the deserts of Ethiopia. In delightful, insightful prose, Ellison reflects on her mistakes and her triumphs as she weaves together the stories of how her Pulitzer Prize-winning career almost ended before it began, how she nearly missed marrying the love of her life, and how she unwittingly got drawn into a stranger-than-fiction murder case.

In the summer of 1985, in his exclusive Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, Robert Bierenbaum, a prominent surgeon and certified genius, strangled his wife Gail to death. He then drove her body to an airstrip in Caldwell, N.J., and dumped it into the Atlantic Ocean from a single-engine private plane. The next day he reported her missing.

Crimes fueled by emotions. When it comes to the emotions, people can react in strange and unexpected ways. Whether it's a heart hurt by unrequited love, or a lover so passionate they'll stop at nothing to get their way - even the most mild-mannered soul can suddenly flip, becoming a vengeful spirit with dark intentions. From the ancient Greek myth of Jason and Medea to Shakespeare's Othello, themes dealing with deeply felt emotions have persisted. But unlike mythology or fiction, The Best New True Crime Stories contains stories from real life.

Author Leslie Lehr wants to talk about boobs. She’s gone from size AA to DDD and everything between, from puberty to motherhood, enhancement to cancer, and beyond. And she’s not alone - these are classic life stages for women today. At turns funny and heartbreaking, A Boob’s Life explores both the joys and hazards inherent to living in a woman’s body. Lehr deftly blends her personal narrative with national history, starting in the 1960s with the women’s liberation movement and moving to the current feminist dialogue and what it means to be a woman.

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks.

A Hollywood starlet on a smash-hit sitcom enjoys rising fame, unaware that her greatest fan is hell-bent on meeting his crush. A gameshow winner turns to writing books. When one is given a scathing review, he tracks down the reviewer with bloody results. Men keep turning up at a newlywed's home convinced that she has placed a Craigslist ad for a rough fantasy roleplay. Stalkers takes you into the twisted world of cyberstalking, catfishing, rejected suitors, jealous exes, and celebrity stalkers, and the devastating impact their obsessions can have on their victims.

Shortly before his father's death, Lennard Davis received a cryptic call from his uncle Abie, who said he had a secret he wanted to tell him one day. When finally revealed, the secret - that Abie himself was Davis's father, via donor insemination - seemed too preposterous to be true. Born in 1949, Davis wasn't even sure that artificial insemination had existed at that time. Moreover, his uncle was mentally unstable, an unreliable witness to the past. Davis tried to erase the whole episode from his mind.

Pioneering oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer unravels the mystery of marine currents, uncovers the astonishing story of flotsam, and changes the world's view of trash, the ocean, and our global environment. Curtis Ebbesmeyer is no ordinary scientist. He's been a consulting oceanographer for multinational firms and a lead scientist on international research expeditions, but he's never held a conventional academic appointment.

Across America and around the world, people wander through flea markets to search for lost treasures. For decades, no such market was more renowned than the legendary Chelsea flea market, which sprawled over several blocks and within an old garage on the west side of Manhattan. Visitors would trawl through booths crammed with vintage dresses, rare books, ancient swords, glass eyeballs, Afghan rugs, West African fetish dolls, Old Master paintings, and much more.

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.

Toby Lester, author of the award-winning The Fourth Part of the World, masterfully crafts yet another century-spanning saga of people and ideas in this epic story of Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic drawing of a man inscribed in a circle and a square. Over time, the nearly 550-year-old ink-on-paper sketch has transformed into a collective symbol of the nature of genius, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human spirit.

What makes a serial killer? There is a huge difference between killers who kill once in the heat of the moment, mass murderers who slaughter many people at once, and serial killers who follow a specific pattern to kill carefully selected victims.

President Thug is a serious yet satirical comparison of Donald Trump's presidency and the depths of Dante's Inferno. The book leads Dante, Virgil, and Trump into each Circle of Hell, illustrating the sacrilege of Trump’s sins, shortcomings, and scandals. Given the moniker “President Thug”, Trump sees what he has done during his presidency, walking the imbalanced and nearly impossible terrain of damnation in the circles of Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery.

For some of the world's most powerful people, the Empire State Building is the ultimate prize. In a riveting chronicle of betrayal, revenge, family rivalry, and raw greed, Wall Street Journal columnist Pacelle tells the compelling tale of the Empire State Building ownership battle of the 1980s and '90s, bringing to life a colorful cast of characters that includes Donald Trump, Leona Helmsley, and the eccentric Japanese billionaire Hideki Yokoi.

Saint Louis: A King's Obsession with Relics, Magic, and Spells is a richly detailed exploration of the life and reign of King Louis IX of France, a monarch whose legacy is steeped in both sanctity and the supernatural. This book delves into the hidden aspects of Louis IX’s life, revealing a ruler driven not only by his devout Christian faith but also by an insatiable hunger for mystical knowledge. King Louis IX, canonized as Saint Louis after his death, is often remembered for his piety.