Gone to the Crazies

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Jerry Bledsoe

When North Carolina farmer Stuart Taylor died after a sudden illness, his 46-year-old fiancée Velma Barfield, was overcome with grief. Taylor's family grieved with her―until the autopsy revealed traces of arsenic poisoning. Turned over to the authorities by her own son, Velma stunned her family with more revelations. This wasn't the first time the born-again Christian and devout Sunday school teacher had committed cold-blooded murder. Tried by the "world's deadliest prosecutor," and sentenced to death, Velma turned her life around and gained worldwide attention With chilling precision,New York Times bestselling author Bledsoe probes Velma's stark descent into madness. From her harrowing childhood to the shocking crimes that incited a national debate over the death penalty, to the dark, final moments of her execution―broadcast live on CNN―Velma Barfield's riveting life of crime and punishment, revenge and redemption is true crime reporting at its most gripping and profound.

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Rafe Bartholomew

"A deeply stirring memoir of fathers, sons, and the oldest bar in New York City. Since it opened in 1854, McSorley's Old Ale House has been a New York institution. This is the landmark watering hole where Abraham Lincoln campaigned and Boss Tweed kicked back with the Tammany Hall machine. Where a pair of Houdini's handcuffs found their final resting place. And where soldiers left behind wishbones before departing for the First World War, never to return and collect them. Many of the bar's traditions remain intact, from the newspaper-covered walls to the plates of cheese and raw onions, the sawdust-strewn floors to the tall-tales told by its bartenders. But in addition to the bar's rich history, McSorley's is home to a deeply personal story about two men: Rafe Bartholomew, the writer who grew up in the landmark pub, and his father, Geoffrey "Bart" Bartholomew, a career bartender who has been working the taps for forty-five years. On weekends, Rafe Bartholomew would tag along for the early hours of his dad's shift, polishing brass doorknobs, watching over the bar cats, and handling other odd jobs until he grew old enough to join Bart behind the bar. McSorley's was a place of bizarre rituals, bawdy humor, and tasks as unique as the bar itself: protecting the decades-old dust that had gathered on treasured artifacts; shot-putting thirty-pound grease traps into high-walled Dumpsters; and trying to keep McSorley's open through the worst of Hurricane Sandy. But for Rafe, the bar means home. It's the place where he and his father have worked side by side, serving light and dark ale, always in pairs, the way it's always been done. Where they've celebrated victories, like the publication of his father's first book of poetry, and coped with misfortune, like the death of Rafe's mother. Where Rafe learned to be part of something bigger than himself and also how to be his own man. By turns touching, crude, and wildly funny, Rafe's story reveals universal truths about family, loss, and the bursting history of one of New York's most beloved institutions."--provided by publisher.

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Torey Hayden

Special-education teacher Torey Hayden's first book, One Child, was an international bestseller, thrilling readers on every continent. Their hearts were captured by Sheila, a silent, troubled girl who had been abandoned on a highway by her mother and abused by her alcoholic father, and who refused to speak. As Hayden writes in the prologue to this book, "This little girl had a profound effect on me. Her courage, her resilience, and her inadvertent ability to express that great, gaping need to be loved that we all feel - in short, her humanness - brought me into contact with my own. Since then Hayden has gone on to write books about many of her students, but her fans continue to ask her, "What happened to Sheila?" The Tiger's Child is her response. Here Hayden tells how Sheila, now a young woman, finally came to terms with her nightmare childhood. When Hayden was working on One Child, she showed the manuscript to Sheila, then a teenager, and was astonished to find that Sheila remembered almost nothing of her troubled younger years. She had no recollection of her many clashes with her teacher as Hayden tried to break through her emotional pain. And although Hayden had managed to get Sheila to communicate and become an active and lively child, Sheila's home life was still very troubled. Her father had been sent to prison when she was eight and Sheila had run away from a series of foster homes until finally she was placed in a children's home. But as Hayden continued to renew her relationship with the teenage Sheila, the memories slowly came back, bringing with them feelings of abandonment and hostility. Overwhelmed by the intensity of her awakening emotions, Sheila was driven to suicidal despair. The Tiger's Child is the touching, inspiring story of how a maturing Sheila came to perceive her mother not as a monster who willfully cast off her eldest child, but as a weak, forlorn, ordinary human being. Able to appreciate her own strength and resilience, Sheila at last is free to overcome the haunting legacy of child abuse.

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Antoinette May

A Mexican love song called her "La Peregrina"--The Pilgrim - for Alma Reed's adventures as a journalist and explorer drew her around the globe, to the fabled and mysterious sites of lost civilizations. But her heart remained in the Yucatan, where she would be buried alongside her celebrated murdered lover, the Abraham Lincoln of Mexico. This is the first biography ever to recount Reed's remarkable story - as dramatic and romantic as the chronicles of Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham. Born in the gold-rush boomtown of San Francisco in 1889, Reed shocked her family by determining to become a writer. In an era when most women's vocation was marriage, she got a job at the San Francisco Call. It was a "woman's beat" - writing feature stories on the poor under the byline Mrs. Goodfellow - but Reed used it to jog the public conscience, forcing the state to spare a Mexican boy and to reform its laws on capital punishment. That campaign won her a tour of Mexico, where she would meet a lifelong friend, the famed muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, and a lifelong love, the Yucatan governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto. In Mexico she also found a new passion - archaeology - while breaking the story of the discovery of the Mayan treasures at Chichen Itza for the New York Times. Later, she would cover the excavation of Carthage, the home of Hannibal and Dido, the tragic queen of the Aeneid; the search for the River Styx, the portal of death in classical mythology; and other major expeditions. She lived her stories - even setting a deep-sea diving record on the quest for the lost continent of Atlantis. In 1925, the New York Times documented her adventures in a profile calling her "the only archaeological reporter in the world." In the years between the world wars, Reed's Greenwich Village apartment, nicknamed The Ashram in honor of Mahatma Gandhi, became one of New York's most glittering salons, the gathering place for an international mix of artists and intellectuals devoted to the cause of world peace. But Reed longed to return to Mexico and in 1950 finally realized her dream. There she would join in the exploration of Cozumel, the equivalent of Mecca or Jerusalem, sacred to Ixchel, the Mayan goddess/oracle. Passionate Pilgrim is a biography as vivid and dramatic as fiction, the inspiring account of a life magnificently lived. It should assign Alma Reed her rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century heroines.