Stripping bare the body

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Philip Dray

It is easy to shrink from our country's brutal history of lynching. Lynching is called the last great skeleton in our nation's closet: It terrorized all of black America, claimed thousands upon thousands of victims in the decades between the 1880s and the Second World War, and leaves invisible but deep scars to this day. The cost of pushing lynching into the shadows, however--misremembering it as isolated acts perpetrated by bigots on society's fringes--is insupportably high: Until we understand how pervasive and socially accepted the practice was--and, more important, why this was so--it will haunt all efforts at racial reconciliation."I could not suppress the thought," James Baldwin once recalled of seeing the red clay hills of Georgia on his first trip to the South, "that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees." Throughout America, not just in the South, blacks accused of a crime--or merely of violating social or racial customs--were hunted by mobs, abducted from jails, and given summary "justice" in blatant defiance of all guarantees of due process under law. Men and women were shot, hanged, tortured, and burned, often in sadistic, picnic-like "spectacle lynchings" involving thousands of witnesses. "At the hands of persons unknown" was the official verdict rendered on most of these atrocities.The celebrated historian Philip Dray shines a clear, bright light on this dark history--its causes, perpetrators, apologists, and victims. He also tells the story of the men and women who led the long and difficult fight to expose and eradicate lynching, including Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W.E.B. Du Bois. If lynching is emblematic of what is worst about America, their fight may stand for what is best: the love of justice and fairness and the conviction that one individual's sense of right can suffice to defy the gravest of wrongs. This landmark book follows the trajectory of both forces over American history--and makes the history of lynching belong to us all.From the Hardcover edition.

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Joseph Bruchac

The time is ten thousand years ago and the place is the shores of Lake Champlain, a land inhabited by Abenaki communities who hunt, gather, and follow the cycles of their unspoiled natural world in relative harmony. Joseph Bruchac uses this setting not just to spin a compelling adventure yarn but also to re-create the cultural, social, and spiritual systems of these pre-contact Native Americans. In this third novel of his trilogy about the "people of the dawnland," the lake they call Petonbowk - "the waters between" Vermont's Green Mountains and New York's Adirondacks - holds both sustenance and danger, and Young Hunter is called upon to confront a dual menace. A "deepseer" or shaman, he must use his full powers first to comprehend the threats and then to defeat them. The lake, it seems, holds a huge water-snake monster that makes it impossible to reap the waters' bountiful harvest of fish and game. And, worse, a tortured outcast, Watches Darkness, has turned against his tribe and is using his deepseer's knowledge to perpetrate horrible acts of senseless evil: he destroys whole villages out of sheer malevolence; he literally eats his victims' hearts to absorb their powers; he kills his own grandmother without remorse.

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Katie Jaros

"New York City, 1975 Chez Monique, New York City's premiere destination for French cuisine takes center stage as Alden Murphy, a young Irish immigrant, seeks to build a new life for himself amongst his eclectic (and eccentric) coworkers. However, his pursuit of the American Dream takes a dark turn when powerful forces author horrific tragedy to shape Alden into the man he is destined to become. Los Angeles, Present Day Still reeling from saving her mother's soul, Christa Nicols has a lot on her mind. A homeless guardian angel. A demon with a score to settle. A science fair presentation ... oh, and a divine prophecy that says she'll forever change the afterlife. Her questions are in abundance, but with a civil war in Hell brewing; and the demonic feast day of King Herod looming, Christa doesn't have much time to find answers. Sins of the past and troubles of the present collide in Hellbound, book 2 of the Lost Souls Trilogy"--Page 4 of cover

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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’?”