"The Gilded Leaf" is the riveting, dramatic saga of the R. J. Reynolds tobacco family, one of America's richest and most intensely private clans. R.J. was the original founder of the company that became part of RJR Nabisco, which in 1988 was involved in the largest business takeover in history. Spanning three generations, the Reynolds's story moves from the triumphs of founder and corporate genius R. J. to the dissipation, scandal, and tragedy that plagued his children and grandchildren. There is a redemptive close, with grandson Patrick Reynolds founding Smokefree America and becoming a leading anti-smoking advocate.

"The Gilded Leaf" presents, for the first time, a "complete" account of the family who captured, spent and redeemed the American dream.

Face-to-face with some of America's most terrifying killers, FBI veteran and ex-Army CID colonel Robert Ressler learned form then how to identify the unknown monsters who walk among us--and put them behind bars. Now the man who coined the phrase "serial killer" and advised Thomas Harris on The Silence of the Lambs shows how is able to track down some of today's most brutal murderers.

Just as it happened in The Silence of the Lambs, Ressler used the evidence at a crime scene to put together a psychological profile of the killers. From the victims they choose, to the way they kill, to the often grotesque souvenirs they take with them--Ressler unlocks the identities of these vicious killers of the police to capture.

And with his discovery that serial killers share certain violent behaviors, Ressler's gone behind prison walls to hear the bizarre first-hand stories countless convicted murderers. Getting inside the mind of a killer to understand how and why he kills, is one of the FBI's most effective ways of helping police bring in killers who are still at large.

Join Ressler as he takes you on the hunt for toady's most dangerous psychopaths. It is a terrifying journey you will not forget.

In this biography, historian and social analyst Tom Shachtman offers the clearest and most detailed examination to date of one of America's most influential thinkers. Known as the "longshoreman philosopher," Eric Hoffer was a beloved and controversial figure with veiled origins. Using Hoffer's never-before-seen archives, Shachtman uncovers the steps by which this unschooled migrant field hand and dockworker created himself as an artist and thinker, and how his background and occupations were reflected in his published books.

This is the long-hidden saga of how a handful of Americans and East Africans fought the British colonial government, the U.S. State Department, and segregation to transport to, or support at, U.S. and Canadian universities, between 1959 and 1963, nearly 800 young East African men and women who would go on to change their world and ours. The students supported included Barack Obama Sr., future father of a U.S. president, Wangari Maathai, future Nobel Peace Prize laureate, as well as the nation-builders of post-colonial East Africa -- cabinet ministers, ambassadors, university chancellors, clinic and school founders.
The airlift was conceived by the unusual partnership of the charismatic, later-assassinated Kenyan Tom Mboya and William X. Scheinman, a young American entrepreneur, with supporting roles played by Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The airlift even had an impact on the 1960 presidential race, as Vice-President Richard Nixon tried to muscle the State Department into funding the project to prevent Senator Jack Kennedy from using his family foundation to do so and reaping the political benefit.
The book is based on the files of the airlift's sponsor, the African American Students Foundation, untouched for almost fifty years.

Thomas Schachtman, author of Skyscraper Dreams, approaches the muddy, intolerant world of political conversation through the belief that Americans have lost the ability to respond and argue differing points of view without coming swiftly to blows. Considering the rising tide of political violence in America and the hateful and intolerant speech that appears to incite it, Thomas Schachtman argues that political debates are in danger of moving from the Senate chamber to the streets, taking the social stability needed for a working democracy with it. Blaming this decline on the jargon used by specialists in the professions and academia in order to distinguish superiority over common citizens, Schachtman proposes a concrete, multifaceted program for rehabilitating eloquence through the constructive use of media in combination with political and educational reform.

"Rumspringa "is Tom Shachtman's celebrated look at a littleknown Amish coming-of-age ritual, the "rumspringa--"the period of "running around" that begins for their youth at age sixteen. During this time, Amish youth are allowed to live outside the bounds of their faith, experimenting with alcohol, premarital sex, revealing clothes, telephones, drugs, and wild parties. By allowing such broad freedoms, their parents hope they will learn enough to help them make the most important decision of their lives--whether to be baptized as Christians, join the church, and forever give up worldly ways, or to remain in the world.
In this searching book, Shachtman draws on his skills as a documentarian to capture young people on the cusp of a fateful decision, and to give us "one of the most absorbing books ever written about the Plain People" ("Publishers Weekly").

"The Gilded Leaf" is the riveting, dramatic saga of the R. J. Reynolds tobacco family, one of America's richest and most intensely private clans. R.J. was the original founder of the company that became part of RJR Nabisco, which in 1988 was involved in the largest business takeover in history. Spanning three generations, the Reynolds's story moves from the triumphs of founder and corporate genius R. J. to the dissipation, scandal, and tragedy that plagued his children and grandchildren. There is a redemptive close, with grandson Patrick Reynolds founding Smokefree America and becoming a leading anti-smoking advocate.

"The Gilded Leaf" presents, for the first time, a "complete" account of the family who captured, spent and redeemed the American dream.

The dreadful global conflagration known as the Second World War was more than the clashing of great armies on bloody battlefields. A different kind of war was being waged in the secret laboratories on both sides of the conflict -- a war that would alter the course and determine the outcome of the bitter hostilities, forever changing our world and our future.

While it is a widely accepted fact that America's development and employment of the atomic bomb ended the Pacific struggle -- and that the failure of Hitler's scientists to develop their own A-bomb helped to doom Germany -- little has been made of the other remarkable scientific accomplishments of this dark and terrible epoch. Edifying, enthralling, startling, and sobering, Laboratory Warriors is a masterful work that sheds light on the technological achievements that swung the pendulum of victory in the Allies' direction.

In a sweeping yet concise scientific adventure story, Tom Shachtman takes us on a journey in which the extraordinary secrets of cold are teased apart and mastered, bringing advances in civilization and comfort. Starting in the 1600s with an alchemist's attempt to air-condition Westminster Abbey, the incredible story includes the invention of thermometers and scales, the sale of Walden Pond ice to tropical countries by nineteenth-century merchants, and the pursuit of absolute zero by scientists who competed with as much fervor as those racing to the poles.

The names, we sometimes say, have been changed "to protect the innocent". As regards those agents in KGB networks in the U.S. during and following World War II, their presence and their deeds (or misdeeds) were known, but their names were not. The FBI-KGB War is the exciting, true (which often really is stranger than fiction), and authentic story of how those names became known and how the not-so-innocent persons to whom those names belonged were finally called to account. Following World War II, FBI Special Agent Robert J. Lamphere set out to uncover the extensive American networks of the KGB. Lamphere used a large file of secret Russian messages intercepted during the war. The FBI-KGB War is the detailed (but never boring) story of how those messages were finally decoded and made to reveal their secrets, secrets that led to persons with such now-infamous names as Judith Coplon, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.