"What made Norma Jean special was the quality she discovered when, bored with being a teenage bride with a husband in the Merchant Marine during World War II, she took her first and most enduring lover-the camera." So posits author Ted Schwarz in the first comprehensive look at the life of Marilyn Monroe to appear in years, a biography that benefits from interviews with many of the actress's friends and acquaintances who have remained silent until now. Putting together the pieces of Marilyn's final days, spent in the company of Peter Lawford and his brother-in-law Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Schwarz also speculates on the causes of her death, which he describes as a "Hollywood version of natural causes." An unwanted child who had been passed around among her mother, her mother's friends, foster homes, and orphanages, the long record of rejection prompted Marilyn to lie about her childhood in her autobiography and become pathologically insecure in her relationships with men. Married five times, there was often no line of distinction as she moved from one affair to another: as Schwarz notes almost matter-of-factly, for example, Marilyn celebrated her engagement to baseball great Joe DiMaggio by going to bed with film director Elia Kazan. Upon returning from her honeymoon with DiMaggio, she immediately announced to friends her intention to marry playwright Arthur Miller-much to the surprise of Miller and his wife. "Still," Schwarz writes, "it was only to the camera that she did not look ahead to the next lover...all it asked of her was to allow it to transform Norma Jean Mortenson Dougherty...into a movie star and one of the most desired women in the world."

Born Juanita Slusher in Edna, Texas, in 1935, the entertainer who became Candy Barr was perhaps the last great dancer in burlesque, a stripper who insisted on live, improvisational music and who at one time commanded $2,000 a week in 1950s Las Vegas. But as Juanita she had started life as a prematurely well-developed thirteen-year-old runaway victimized by a Dallas ritual known as "the capture" that enslaved her into prostitution, for a time turning over 4,000 tricks a year before she was able to escape. A lover of Mickey Cohen's and friend to Jack Ruby, Barr's tumultuous life included a period of imprisonment on trumped-up drug charges, an appearance in a crude, 20-minute stag film, and unlikely role in the investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Based on over 100 hours of exclusive interviews with Barr, this book is not just the story of Juanita and Candy, but also paints an unflattering picture of all those who sought to exploit her.

Hollywood Confidential is the first truly in-depth look at the sexy, humorous, violent, and tragic history of the mob in Hollywood from the 1920s, when Joe Kennedy decided to buy a motion picture company, to the 1980s when the last vestiges of mob influence were revealed through investigations of former Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan and his union backers. The revelations continue into the 1980s when the major studios were no longer important, the independents were on the rise, and it was no longer possible to buy, bribe, or blackmail in a meaningful way. There were deals and bad guys, but the mob as it existed was finished in Hollywood.

The biggest, bloodiest battle ever fought on Texas soil took place in a sandy valley in Atascosa County near the Medina River in 1813, twenty-three years before the battles of the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto. Estimates of up to 1,000 American and Mexican republicans were killed or executed in the last major encounter of Spanish forces in Texas. Spaniards called it the battle of "El Encinal de Medina." In American history it is known as the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition or as the "First Texas Revolution." The gruesome battle halted and destroyed the American filibustering expedition that had crossed into Texas from Louisiana a year earlier. Texas independence would wait for another generation. This book was edited and annotated by noted author and historian Robert Thonhoff from a manuscript written by Ted Schwarz just before his death in 1977. A prize-winning author for this and other books, Thonhoff is a Fellow of the Texas State Historical Association, the oldest learned society in Texas

This book is the dramatic psychological study of a brutal killer, whose crimes of rape and murder were gruesome secrets he kept even from himself. Written with exclusive information gleaned from countless conversations with killer Ken Bianchi, his girlfriend, his psychiatrists, as well as policemen and journalists involved with the case.