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Books > Fiction > True stories
Following on from "Our Story", Ron Kray fills in the gaps and gives his version of the murders of Jack "The Hat" McVitie and George Cornell, describing his bisexuality and his marriage in Broadmoor and clarifying many of the misconceptions about the years when he and Reg ruled the London underworld, shot enemies at will and simultaneously socialized with some of the most glittering politicians, celebrities and hostesses of the time.
This is a collection of positive stories about wartime service
during one of the most negative and controversial periods in
American history. While the stories told here are relatively simple
and straight forward, they are also powerful, with the potential of
changing viewpoints, opinions, and even lives.
Clarence van Buuren is met 'n geheim galg toe. Vyftig jaar later
probeer Chris Marnewick hierdie geheim oplos. Van Buuren is in 1956
skuldig bevind aan die moord op Myrna Joy Aken en tereggestel.
Vroue het buite die hof in lang rye gewag om die verhoor by te woon
en het mekaar vertrap wanneer die deure oopgegaan het. Van Buuren
het met van hulle flirteer tydens die verhoor, en het tot op die
einde skuld ontken. Die saak was opspraakwekkend om verskeie redes:
'n Siener het die lyk na 'n seance opgespoor, Van Buren en Aken was
lovers, maar die lyk is seksueel vermink. Inligting dui daarop dat
Van Buuren 'n narsissistiese psigopaat was en 'n sadis wat veral
vroue geteister en gemartel het. 'n Emosionele vampier. 'n
Sadistiese seksmoordenaar. Maar daar was niks hiervan in die
hofsaak nie. Ook nie in die koerante nie.
In January 1991, when civil war came to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, two-thirds of the city's population fled.
Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother murdered by a militiaman, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swept into the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the world.
Serially betrayed by the people who promised to care for him, Asad lived his childhood at a sceptical remove from the adult world, his relation to others wary and tactical.
By the time he had reached the cusp of adulthood, Asad had honed an array of wily talents. At the age of seventeen, in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, he made good as a street hustler. He also courted the famously beautiful Foosiya and, to the astonishment of his peers, married her.
Buoyed by success in work and in love, Asad put $1 200 into his pocket and made his way down the length of the African continent to Johannesburg, South Africa. And so began a shocking adventure in a country richer and more violent than he could possibly have imagined.
A Man of Good Hope is the story of a person shorn of the things we have come to believe make us human - personal possessions, parents, siblings. And yet Asad's is an intensely human life, one suffused with dreams and desires and a need to leave something of permanence on this earth.
WINNER OF THE WINDHAM-CAMPBELL LITERATURE PRIZE 2013
WASHINGTON POST BOOK OF THE YEAR
At the end of a steep gravel road in one of the remotest corners of South Africa's Eastern Cape lies the village of Ithanga. Home to a few hundred villagers, the majority of them unemployed, it is inconceivably poor. It is to here that award-winning author Jonny Steinberg travels to explore the lives of a community caught up in a battle to survive the ravages of the greatest plague of our times, the African AIDS epidemic.
He befriends Sizwe, a young local man who refuses to be tested for AIDS despite the existence of a well-run testing and anti-retroviral programme. It is Sizwe's deep ambivalence, rooted in his deep sense of the cultural divide, that becomes the key to understanding the dynamics that thread their way through a terrified community.
As Steinberg grapples to get closer to finding answers that remain just out of reach, he realizes that he must look within himself to unlock the paradoxes at the heart of his country.
In 1854, the United States acquired the roughly 30,000-square-mile
region of present-day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico
from Mexico as part of the Gadsden Purchase. This new Southern
Corridor was ideal for train routes from Texas to California, and
soon tracks were laid for the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe rail
lines. Shipping goods by train was more efficient, and for
desperate outlaws and opportunistic lawmen, robbing trains was
high-risk, high-reward. The Southern Corridor was the location of
sixteen train robberies between 1883 and 1922. It was also the
homebase of cowboy-turned-outlaw Black Jack Ketchum's High Five
Gang. Most of these desperadoes rode the rails to Arizona's Cochise
County on the US-Mexico border where locals and lawmen alike hid
them from discovery. Both Wyatt Earp and Texas John Slaughter tried
to clean them out, but it took the Arizona Rangers to finish the
job. It was a time and place where posses were as likely to get
arrested as the bandits. Some of the Rangers and some of
Slaughter's deputies were train robbers. When rewards were offered
there were often so many claimants that only the lawyers came out
ahead. Southwest Train Robberies chronicles the train heists
throughout the region at the turn of the twentieth century, and the
robbers who pulled off these train jobs with daring, deceit, and
plain dumb luck! Many of these blundering outlaws escaped capture
by baffling law enforcement. One outlaw crew had their own caboose,
Number 44, and the railroad shipped them back and forth between
Tucson and El Paso while they scouted locations. Legend says one
gang disappeared into Colossal Cave to split the loot leaving the
posse out front while they divided the cash and escaped out another
entrance. The antics of these outlaws inspired Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid to blow up an express car and to run out guns
blazing into the fire of a company of soldiers.
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