Showing results by publisher "The Atavist" in Biographies & Memoirs

At age six, Teddy Weatherford was working in the coal mines of Virginia. By his early 20s he was the toast of Chicago's jazz scene, rivaling Louis Armstrong and wowing Jelly Roll Morton with his piano talent. But when Weatherford left segregated America for the allures of Shanghai and Bombay, he set out on an adventure he hadn't imagined. The man they called "The Seagull" would become the globetrotting jazz king of Asia in the shadow of World War II, and provide the soundtrack for the last gasp of an empire.

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 1928, on a desolate island off the coast of Haiti, the American writer William Seabrook came face-to-face with a zombie. "The eyes were the worst," Seabrook would later write in The Magic Island, his book about Haitian voodoo culture. "They were in truth the eyes of a dead man." The book sold half a million copies, forever changing popular culture by introducing the zombi cadavre - the walking dead - to the American imagination.

In August 1982, a young couple was murdered in a Chicago park. Months away from their wedding, Jerry Hillard and Marilyn Green were shot to death on the bleachers overlooking a pool on the South Side of the city. A year later, Anthony Porter, a local man with a checkered past, was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to death. Fifty hours before his execution, Porter was freed, thanks to an investigation by David Protess and his students at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Before Ian Fleming there was Dennis Wheatley. A best-selling spy novelist at the outset of World War II, Wheatley became a master of deception for Great Britain, turning pulp fiction fantasies into real-life espionage. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tina Rosenberg tells the amazing true story of one man who applied the plots of his own novels to the battlefield - and changed the course of history.

Paralyzed and unable to speak after a stroke, Cathy Hutchinson was trapped inside her mind, only communicating with the outside world through her eyes. Then she heard about an experiment called BrainGate at Brown University that hoped to allow immobilized patients to control robotic limbs with their thoughts. But can what sounds like science fiction eventually transform the lives of quadriplegics? And could it help Cathy take control of her life? Jessica Benko tells the story of a radical new technology, a pioneering group of researchers, and one woman's effort to transcend her condition and the body itself.

It was the spring of 1987, and crack cocaine had turned whole swaths of Detroit into veritable combat zones. The city thought it had seen everything - until one evening that May, when the police arrested a 17-year-old kid named Rick Wershe. They called him White Boy Rick. In a city known for its fraught racial divide, Wershe had somehow joined the ranks of the drug kingpins on the predominantly Black East Side before he was old enough to shave.

The world had never seen a crime wave quite like it. Starting in early 2011, thieves descended upon dozens of natural-history museums across Europe armed with crowbars, sledgehammers, and tear-gas grenades, interested in only one thing: antique rhinoceros horns. By 2013, they had stolen nearly a hundred horns in all, worth millions of dollars on the international black market. The only thing more unusual than the crimes themselves was the law enforcement's theory about who was responsible: a handful of families from rural Ireland known as the Rathkeale Rovers.

It was known as the Living Grave: A remote Hawaiian peninsula called Kalaupapa, housing the largest settlement for leprosy patients in the United States. Once it had been a forbidding place of exile, inhabited by thousands of the disease's victims who had been removed from their families and confined against their will, far away from a society that feared and misunderstood their condition.

Author Cris Beam left her mother's home at age 14, driven out by a suburban household of hidden chaos and mental illness. Her mother, a descendant of William Faulkner, told neighbors and family that her daughter had died. The two never saw each other again. Nearly twenty-five years later, after building her own family and happy home life, a lawyer called to say her mother was dead. In this story about the fragility of memory and the complexity of family, Beam decides to look back at her own dark history, and for the secret to her mother's madness.

Manute Bol was the first African-born player in the NBA and, at seven foot seven inches, the tallest. In the 1980s and 90s he was also among the league's most fearsome shot-blockers and its most beloved figures. Off the basketball court, however, Bol's story was more remarkable than most fans ever knew. Activist, gambler, joker, rebel-Bol was a complex man whose fate was inextricably bound with that of the Sudan, his homeland.

Vanessa Veselka grew up a child in motion. After her parents split, she'd lived in nine states by the age of seven, eventually landing with her mother in 1970s Greenwich Village. Along the way she became enthralled with a distant part of her identity: her father's ceremonial adoption into the Tlingit, an Alaskan native people of legendary martial prowess. As an adult her childhood memories of Tlingit warrior tales would transform into a quest to understand her own connection to a distant people and their history.

They called him the Gold Czar. In the lawless Colombian gold-mining town of Segovia, he was rarely spoken of in more than a whisper. But investigators were convinced he was behind the gangland killing of several local mine owners - a massacre that many believed was responsible for the nightmarish wave of violence that turned the town into one of the world's murder capitals. The question was: Could they prove it?