Best American screenplays

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Jennifer Woodlief

Journalist Jennifer Woodlief's gripping account of the deadliest ski-area avalanche in North American history and the woman who survived in the face of incalculable odds. The unprecedented avalanche of March 31, 1982, at Alpine Meadows ski resort near Lake Tahoe, California, was a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe. An unforeseeable confluence of natural events created the conditions for an unimaginable disaster--and, in one woman's case, an astonishing ordeal of survival. Woodlief movingly tells the story of the massive slab avalanche that killed seven and left one victim buried alive for five days under the suffocating snow while a ski patrol team and a search-and-rescue dog struggled to save her.--From publisher description.

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Robert P. Sutton

This is the first complete account of the epic tale of the Icarians and their dream of creating a perfect society without money or property. Robert P. Sutton analyzes the origins of Icarianism in the milieu of French politics in the 1840s, discusses its founder Etienne Cabet, and traces the eventual creation of six communal societies in Illinois, Iowa, and California between 1848 and 1898. Les Icariens is a fascinating amalgam of biography, a history of French Socialism, and the story of one of the longest-lived secular communal experiments in America.

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John Newman

How involved was the CIA with Lee Harvey Oswald? Why was Oswald's file tampered with before the assassination of John Kennedy? And why were significant documents from it removed afterward? Finally, we have answers to these questions, answers not from theories, but from the primary sources themselves. John Newman has interviewed dozens of high-placed officials who have never before spoken candidly on these sensitive issues. He has thoroughly examined the vast body of new material forced into release by the JFK Records Act of 1992. Oswald and the CIA is a devastating report based on indisputable evidence. Written by a historian who spent more than twenty years with the U.S. intelligence community, it is an insider's account of the secret record. Bit by bit, document by document, the reader watches Oswald's file build as it was observed through the eyes of the intelligence officers who actually handled those files. The Oswald paper trail inside the CIA is a gripping journey through the darkest corners of the Agency's Clandestine Services.

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Laura Lebow

"In 1786 Vienna, Lorenzo Da Ponte is the court librettist for the Italian Theatre during the height of the enlightened reign of Emperor Joseph II. This exalted position doesn't mean he's particularly well paid, or even out of reach of the endless intrigues of the opera world. In fact, far from it. One morning, Da Ponte stops off at his barber, only to find the man being taken away to debtor's prison. Da Ponte impetuously agrees to carry a message to his barber's fiance;e and try to help her set him free, even though he's facing pressures of his own. He's got one week to finish the libretto for The Marriage of Figaro for Mozart before the opera is premiered for the Emperor himself. Da Ponte visits the house where the barber's fiancee works--the home of a nobleman, high in the Vienna's diplomatic circles--and then returns to his own apartments, only to be dragged from his rooms in the middle of the night. It seems the young prote;ge; of the diplomat was killed right about the time Da Ponte was visiting, and he happens to be their main suspect. Now he's given a choice--go undercover into the household and uncover the murderer, or be hanged for the crime himself. Brilliantly recreating the cultural world of late 18th century Vienna, the epicenter of the Enlightenment, Lebow brings to life some of the most famous figures of music, theatre, and politics"--