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On the morning of 4 November 2019, an unassuming caravan of women
and children was ambushed by masked gunmen on a desolate stretch of
road in northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel.
Firing semi-automatic weapons, the attackers killed nine people and
gravely injured five more. The victims were members of the LeBaron
and La Mora communities—fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears
broke from the LDS Church and settled in Mexico when their religion
outlawed polygamy in the late nineteenth century. The massacre
produced international headlines for weeks and prompted President
Donald Trump to threaten to send in the US Army. In The Colony,
bestselling investigative journalist Sally Denton picks up where
the initial, incomplete reporting on the attacks ended, and delves
into the complex story of the LeBaron clan. Their
homestead—Colonia LeBaron—is a portal into the past, a place
that offers a glimpse of life within a polygamous community on an
arid and dangerous frontier in the mid-1800s, though with
smartphones and machine guns. Rooting her narrative in written
sources as well as interviews with anonymous women from LeBaron
itself, Denton unfolds an epic, disturbing tale that spans the
first polygamist emigrations to Mexico through the LeBarons’
internal blood feud in the 1970s—started by Ervil LeBaron, known
as the “Mormon Manson”—and up to the family’s recent
alliance with the NXIVM sex cult, whose now-imprisoned leader,
Keith Raniere, may have based his practices on the society he
witnessed in Colonia LeBaron. The LeBarons’ tense but peaceful
interactions with Sinaloa deteriorated in the years leading up to
the ambush. LeBaron patriarchs believed they were deliberately
targeted by the cartel. Others suspected that local farmers had
carried out the attacks in response to the LeBarons’ seizure of
water rights for their massive pecan orchards. As Denton approaches
answers to who committed the murders, and why, The Colony
transforms into something more than a crime story. A descendant of
polygamist Mormons herself, Denton explores what drove so many
women over generations to join or remain in a community based on
male supremacy and female servitude. Then and now, these women of
Zion found themselves in an isolated desert, navigating the
often-mysterious complications of plural marriage—and supported,
Denton shows, only by one another. A mesmerising feat of
investigative journalism, The Colony doubles as an unforgettable
account of sisterhood that can flourish in polygamist communities,
against the odds.
A harmless, unassuming caravan of women and children was ambushed
by masked gunmen in northern Mexico on 4 November 2019. In a
massacre that produced international headlines, nine people were
killed and five others gravely injured. The victims were members of
the La Mora and LeBaron communities-fundamentalist Mormons whose
forebears broke from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints and settled in Mexico when polygamy was outlawed. In The
Colony, the best-selling investigative journalist Sally Denton
picks up where initial reporting on the killings left off, and in
the process tells the violent history of the LeBaron clan and their
homestead, from the first polygamist emigration to Mexico in the
1880s to the LeBarons' internal blood feud in the 1970s to the
family's recent alliance with the NXIVM sex cult. Drawing on
sources within Colonia LeBaron itself, Denton creates a mesmerising
work of investigative journalism in the tradition of Under the
Banner of Heaven and Going Clear.
The tale of the Bechtel family dynasty is a classic American
business story. It begins with Warren A. Bechtel, who led a
consortium that constructed the Hoover Dam. From that auspicious
start, the family and its eponymous company would go on to "build
the world," from the construction of airports in Hong Kong and
Doha, to pipelines and tunnels in Alaska and Europe, to mining and
energy operations around the globe. Today Bechtel is one of the
largest privately held corporations in the world, enriched and
empowered by a long history of government contracts and the
privatization of public works, made possible by an unprecedented
revolving door between its San Francisco headquarters and
Washington. Bechtel executives John McCone, Caspar Weinberger, and
George P. Shultz segued from leadership at the company to positions
as Director of the CIA, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of
State, respectively. Like all stories of empire building, the rise
of Bechtel presents a complex and riveting narrative. In The
Profiteers, Sally Denton, exposes Bechtel's secret world and one of
the biggest business and political stories of our time.
Come and see the circus! A combination of artwork and photographs
show children some of the things they might see in a circus, such
as clowns, dancers, the juggler and acrobats. A combination of
illustrations and photographs show them at work. Pink B/ Band 1B
books offer emergent readers simple, predictable text with familiar
objects and actions. Text type - A simple information book. A
poster on pages 14 and 15 advertises when and where the circus can
be seen, and is ideal for children to discuss and recap the text.
This book has been levelled for Reading Recovery
Imagine setting out on a road trip in a 1929 Ford Model A Roadster,
with the stated goal of traveling from Manhattan to Mexico and
Central America, after only a week's worth of preparation. This is
exactly what brothers Arthur Lyon (age 25) and Joe Lyon, Jr, (age
21) did on March 23, 1930. They prepared for the trip by purchasing
camping gear, studying maps, gathering information about the areas
they planned to traverse, mounted in the car's rear seat a
55-gallon oil drum equipped with a gas feed for extra fuel, and
divided up the princely sum of $324 in cash to fund their sojourn.
The story is replete with their accounts of the challenges the
young men faced on their epic journey, including encounters with
government officials and other interesting characters. In Mexico,
where they faced nearly impassible roads, they finally had the car
fitted with extra railroad wheels so they could literally ride the
rails. The brothers' trip ended on May 17, 1930, after the car
suffered mechanical problems and the brothers and car nearly met
their fate in the form of an oncoming freight train. Arthur and Joe
returned to the U.S. separately, in part by tramp steamer. The
amazing 1930 journey of the young Lyon brothers can be seen as the
centerpiece of a larger story, of a pair of lives lived out not
just as brothers but as partners in an emerging Automobile Age. To
help understand the forces that shaped those lives, the brothers'
nephew, Larry Lyon, provides an introduction that chronicles the
family's rich history from a family-owned grist mill in southern
Missouri to the small mining towns of Pearl, Idaho and National,
Nevada, through their father's innovative auto-repair business in
McDermott, Nevada, the brothers' founding of Nevada's first bus
company, their investment in oil and gas exploration, and many
other business ventures.
Laurie Brown has long been fascinated with what happens at the edge
of cities. In her pioneering, photographic work on Los Angeles, her
focus was on the terraforming activities in that quintessential
modern metropolis, where nature is literally scraped away and
terraced to accommodate the most recent version of the American
Dream: more roads and highways, more residential and commercial
developments, more golf courses and city services, more pressure on
the natural systems that undergird the city and region. It was only
natural that Brown would turn her artistic attention to the eastern
end of the Los Angeles corridor--Las Vegas--and she does so in
full, living color. Few other places engender such a common image
of excess and extravagance as does Las Vegas. But Brown reminds us
that what makes Las Vegas such an alluring place to live and to
visit is its location in the austere but beautiful landscapes of
North America's driest and sunniest region: the magnificent Mojave
Desert. As Las Vegas has expanded, the contrast between the native
desert and recent human terrain is a palpable fact that Brown
captures brilliantly in her panoramic format. In each photograph we
see the impact of our newest designs and constructions on the land,
raising questions about the availability of scarce natural
resources and, ultimately, the wisdom of our vision for the place.
By finding the interface between nature and culture that exists in
these so-called paradisal environments, Laurie Brown takes us on a
modern journey on a well-worn path in Western civilization: the
pushing out of the city that emerged in ancient Greece and Rome and
extended beyond the city walls of medieval Europe to today's
political boundaries nestled beside nature's undeveloped frontier.
But at what cost? Like the ruins of Pompeii, Brown's hauntingly
beautiful photographs reveal how well (or not) we have created a
modern American Eden: Las Vegas. (See the publishers website for a
slide show and further information about the book:
http://gftbooks.com/books_BrownLaurie.html ).
John Charles Fremont was the illegitimate child of a Virginia
aristocrat and a working-class French immigrant; Jessie Benton was
the daughter of the most powerful pre-Civil War U.S. senator,
Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, and, her gender notwithstanding,
had been groomed as much as any young man to be president. Senator
Benton unwittingly brought the two together, never imagining that
his daughter would fall in love with Fremont. Despite their
disparate backgrounds, however, John and Jessie's marriage was one
of the most storied events of the nineteenth century.
And indeed, Jessie and John made a formidable couple. Both together
and apart they contributed significantly to shaping the United
States. He was a key figure in western expansion and the first
presidential candidate for the Republican Party. She was a savvy
political operator who played confidante and adviser to the highest
political powers in the country. Despite their great efforts on
behalf of their country, however, their reputations did not survive
a Washington smear campaign led by none other than Jessie's
father.
Written with an investigative journalist's eye for detail and a
novelist's flair, this biography of explorer, politician, and
gold-mine owner John C. Fremont and his intellectual wife, Jessie
Benton Fremont, also casts light on the tumultuous period that
forms the backdrop for their lives, from the abolition of slavery
to the building of the railroad.
The richly told story of a nineteenth-century woman-the author's
great-great-grandmother-whose religious faith was betrayed and
regained on a journey across the American West.
In the 1850s, Jean Rio was a recently widowed English mother of
seven. Rich, well educated, musically gifted, deeply spiritual, and
increasingly dismayed by the social injustices she saw around her,
she was moved by the promises of Mormon missionaries and set out
from England for Utah. On her fifty-six-day Atlantic crossing, she
began keeping a diary, and this extraordinary chronicle is the
basis of Sally Denton's book.
We follow Jean Rio from New Orleans, where she disembarks, up the
Mississippi by riverboat, and, finally, westward by wagon train. We
see her family transformed by necessity-mastering frontier skills,
surviving storms, finding their own food, overcoming illness and
injury-during the five months it takes them to reach Zion.
We see her initial enthusiasm turn to disillusionment: She is
forced to surrender her money to the church. She realizes she has
been lied to about polygamy-Mormons do practice it-which she
detests. Acts of Mormon violence against nonbelievers repel her.
Her musical skills are buried beneath the daily rigors of farming.
Two of her sons flee to California. We witness her seventeen-year
struggle to make peace with her situation before she, too, escapes
to California-to freedom, a career as a midwife, and a new religion
that fulfills her.
Dramatic and powerful, "Faith and Betrayal is the moving account of
one woman's gamble in an emerging America, and a valuable addition
to the history of both the Mormon experience and the long saga of
immigrant pioneer women.
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