Hellbound

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Mark Danner

"Drawing on rich narratives of politics and violence and war from around the world and written by one of the world's leading writers, Stripping Bare the Body is a moral history of American power during the last quarter century. From bloody battleground to dark prison cell to air-conditioned office, it tells the grim and compelling tale of the true final years of the American Century, as the United States passed from the violent certainties of the late Cold War, to the ideological confusions of the post-Cold War world, to the pumped up and ongoing evangelism of the War on Terror and the Iraq War, and the ruins they have left behind. Stripping Bare the Body is a book of stories telling how politics--and its handmaidens: violence and war--is practiced in the brutal worlds of Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti, the 'black sites' and Washington, D.C. It shows at close hand how terrorism works and how war looks and smells and feels. As a newly installed Haitian president told Mark Danner, then on assignment for The New Yorker in riot-torn Port-au-Prince, 'Violence strips bare a society's body, the better to place the stethoscope and track the life beneath the skin.' Moving from mass murder on election day in Port-au-Prince, to massacre by mortar bomb on the streets of Sarajevo to suicide bombing in the suburban neighborhoods of Baghdad, to torture in the secret 'black site' prisons of Thailand and Afghanistan, to the political deal making, personal rivalries and bureaucratic infighting in Washington and New York and Langley, Stripping Bare the Body shows the considerations of a wide range of policymakers, and the minute effects their decisions, and their mistakes, have on people in distant places and on Americans as they live and work in 'the indispensable nation.' Here is the history of what Mark Danner calls a 'grim age, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams.'"--Jacket

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Max Brooks

“The end was near.” —Voices from the Zombie War The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years. Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War. Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

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Arlette Lees

"It's the dark days of the Great Depression, and former Boston P.D. detective Jack Dunning is starting over after losing both his wife and his job to the bottle. Fresh off the Greyhound, he slips into The Blue Rose Dance Hall - and falls hard for a beautiful dime-a-dance girl, Angel Doll. But then Angel shoots gangster Axel Teague and blows town on the midnight train to Los Angeles..." --Publisher description.

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Joseph Hansen

Book #1 in the Nathan Reed series. Joseph Hansen has been praised by The New York Times as "one of the best we have" and by the Boston Globe as among "our finest writers". Known for his bestselling Dave Brandstetter series, Hansen here tells a richly atmospheric story of a young homosexual man's coming of age.