Showing results by author "Jeff Guinn" in All Categories

More than 40 years ago Charles Manson and his mostly female commune killed nine people, among them the pregnant actress Sharon Tate. It was the culmination of a criminal career that author Jeff Guinn traces back to Manson’s childhood. Guinn interviewed Manson’s sister and cousin, neither of whom had ever previously cooperated with an author. Childhood friends, cellmates, and even some members of the Manson family have provided new information about Manson’s life. Guinn has made discoveries about the night of the Tate murders, answering unresolved questions.

In the 1950s a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the Gospel and Marxism. His congregation was racially integrated, and he was a much-lauded leader in the contemporary civil rights movement. Eventually Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to Northern California. He became involved in electoral politics and soon was a prominent Bay Area leader.

With dramatic flair, Jeff Guinn delivers the definitive portrait of Bonnie and Clyde. These media-savvy outlaws appealed to America's Depression-era hunger for swashbuckling characters. Glowing radio and newspaper reports transformed these "public enemies" into celebrities - much like the cinema gangsters of the time.

For the first time in thirty years, more than a dozen former ATF agents who participated in the initial February 28, 1993, raid speak on the record about the poor decisions of their commanders that led to this deadly confrontation. Revelations in this book include why the FBI chose to end the siege with the use of CS gas; how both ATF and FBI officials tried and failed to cover up their agencies’ mistakes; where David Koresh plagiarized his infamous prophecies; and direct links between the Branch Davidian tragedy and the modern militia movement in America.

The Vagabonds is “a portrait of America’s burgeoning love affair with the automobile” (NPR) but it also sheds light on the important relationship between the older Edison and the younger Ford, who once worked for the famous inventor. The road trips made the automobile ubiquitous and magnified Ford’s reputation, even as Edison’s diminished. The automobile would transform the American landscape, the American economy, and the American way of life and Guinn brings this seminal moment in history to vivid life.

Cash McLendon, reluctant hero of the epic Indian battle at Adobe Walls, has journeyed to Mountain View in the Arizona Territory with one goal: to convince Gabrielle Tirrito that he's a changed man and win her back from schoolteacher Joe Saint. As they're about to depart by stage for their new life in San Francisco, Gabrielle is kidnapped by enforcer Killer Boots, who is working on orders from crooked St. Louis businessman Rupert Douglass.

Jump on Santa's sleigh for a journey through 17 centuries of Christmas magic!

It all started when Jeff Guinn was assigned to write a piece full of little-known facts about Christmas for his paper, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. A few months later, he received a call from a gentleman who told him that he showed the story to an important friend who didn’t think much of it. And who might that be? asked Jeff. The next thing he knew, he was whisked off to the North Pole to meet with this “very important friend,” and the rest is, well, as they say, history.

Using as its springboard the actual events of a day in 1647 when 10,000 peasants marched through the streets of Canterbury demanding their right to celebrate a beloved holiday, How Mrs. Claus Saved Christmas is rich in historical detail, adventure, and plain ol' Christmas fun. Children, parents, and entire families will enjoy this holiday classic!

Jeff Guinn, chronicler of the Southwestern US and of American undesirables (Bonnie and Clyde, Charles Manson, and Jim Jones) tells the “riveting and supremely entertaining narrative” (S.C. Gwynne, New York Times best-selling author of Empire of the Summer Moon) of Pancho Villa’s bloody raid on a small US border town that sparked a violent conflict with the US.

Cash McLendon has always had an instinct for self-preservation, one that was honed by an impoverished childhood and life with an alcoholic father barely scraping by on the streets of Saint Louis in 1872. He’s always had a knack for finding and capitalizing on the slightest opportunities, choosing the path of financial security over happiness or real friends. He eventually builds himself up from a Saint Louis street urchin to the son-in-law and heir apparent to industrial mogul Rupert Douglass. Though it lacks passion, his life seems securely set: a wife, a career, property, standing.

After barely escaping nemesis Killer Boots in the tiny Arizona Territory town of Glorious, Cash McLendon is in desperate need of a safe haven somewhere - anywhere - on the frontier. Fleeing to Dodge City, he falls in with an intrepid band of buffalo hunters determined to head south to forbidden Indian Territory in the Texas Panhandle. In the company of such colorful Western legends as Bat Masterson and Billy Dixon, Cash helps establish a hunting camp known as Adobe Walls.