To effect just outcomes the justice system requires that law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges be committed—above all—to doing justice. Those whose allegiance is to winning, regardless of evidence, do the opposite of justice: they corrupt the system. This is the jaw-dropping story of one such corruption and its surprise ending. On Labor Day 2007, a forest fire broke out in California’s eastern Sierra Nevada and eventually burned about 65,000 acres. Investigators from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the United States Forest Service took a mere two days to conclude that the liable party was the successful forest-products company Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI), founded as a tiny sawmill nearly sixty years earlier by Red Emmerson. The investigative report on the fire declared that SPI’s independent logging contractor had started the conflagration by driving a bulldozer over a rock, creating a spark that flew into a pile of brush. No fire had ever been proven to start that way, but based on the report the U.S. Department of Justice and California’s attorney general filed nearly identical suits against Emmerson’s company. The amount sought was nearly a billion dollars, enough to bankrupt or severely damage it. Emmerson, of course, fought back. Week by week, month by month, year by year, his lawyers discovered that the investigators had falsified evidence, lied under oath, fabricated science, invented a narrative, and intentionally ignored a mountain of exculpatory evidence. They never pursued a known arsonist who was in the area that day, nor a young man who repeatedly volunteered alibis contradicted by facts. Though the government lawyers had not known at the start that the investigation was tainted, they nonetheless refused to drop the suits as the discovery process continued and dozens of revelations made clear that any verdict against Emmerson’s company would be unjust. Scorched Worth is a riveting tale that dramatizes how fragile and arbitrary justice can be when those empowered to act in the name of the people are more loyal to the bureaucracies that employ them than to the people they’re supposed to serve. It’s also the story of a man who refused to let the government take from him what he’d spent a lifetime earning.

This Scorched Earth is an amazing tour de force depicting a family’s journey from near-devastation in the Civil War to their rebirth in the American West, from New York Times bestselling author William Gear. The Civil War tore at the very roots of our nation and destroyed most of a generation. In rural Arkansas, the Hancocks were devastated by that war. They not only lost everything, but experienced an unimaginable hell. How does a traumatized human being put themselves back together? Where does a person begin to heal his or her broken mind...and does one choose damnation or redemption? For the Hancock siblings: Doc, Sarah, Butler, and Billy, the American frontier becomes a metaphor for the wilderness within—raw, and capable of being shaped. Self-salvation, however, always comes with a price. Their journey is a testament to the power of love...and the American spirit. This is their story. And ours. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In this striking novel-in-stories, a series of strange apocalypses have hit America. Entire neighborhoods drown in mud, glass rains from the sky, birds speak gibberish, and parents of young children disappear. Millions starve while others grow coats of mold. But a few are able to survive and find a light in the aftermath, illuminating what we've become. In ''the Disappeared,''a father is arrested for missing free throws, leaving his son to search alone for his lost mother. A boy swells to fill his parents' ransacked attic in ''the Ruined Child.'' Rendered in a variety of narrative forms, from a psychedelic fable to a skewed insurance claim questionnaire, Blake Butler's full-length fiction debut paints a gorgeously grotesque version of America, bringing to mind both Kelly Link and William H. Gass, yet imbued with Butler's own vision of the apocalyptic and bizarre.

Selected as one of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022 Finalist for the 2022 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our 'digital age' is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialization of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support. This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be instruments of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.

Though Korea remains the biggest, bloodiest, most brutal war fought by British troops since World War II, the story of their central role in the conflict's most terrible months has never been fully told. Far more than mere battlefield history, Andrew Salmon's book draws on interviews with some 90 veterans and survivors to pain an unforgettable portrait of an immense human tragedy.

Sixteen-year-old Lex Bartleby is a teenage grim reaper with the bizarre ability to Damn souls. That makes her pretty scary, even to fellow Grims. But after inadvertently transferring her ability to Zara, a murderous outlaw, Lex is a pariah in Croak, the little town she calls home. To escape the townspeople’s wrath, she and her friends embark on a wild road trip to DeMyse. Though this sparkling desert oasis is full of luxuries and amusements, it feels like a prison to Lex. Her best chance at escape would be to stop Zara once and for all—but how can she do that from DeMyse, where the Grims seem mysteriously oblivious to Zara’s killing spree?

Sometimes bad things happen to good people and sometimes dumb things happen to smart people! How could a business man, savvy investor, someone as astute and knowledgeable about finance and all the ins and outs fall prey to the cons and scams you'll read about in this book?

When Hitler ordered the north of Nazi-occupied Norway to be destroyed in a scorched earth retreat in 1944, everything of potential use to the Soviet enemy was destroyed. Harbours, bridges and towns were dynamited and every building torched. Fifty thousand people were forcibly evacuated – thousands more fled to hide in caves in sub-zero temperatures. High above the Arctic Circle, the author crosses the region gathering scorched earth stories: of refugees starving on remote islands, fathers shot dead just days before the war ended, grandparents driven mad by relentless bombing, towns burned to the ground. He explores what remains of the Lyngen Line mountain bunkers in the Norwegian Alps, where the Allies feared a last stand by fanatical Nazis – and where starved Soviet prisoners of war too weak to work were dumped in death camps, some driven to cannibalism.With extracts from the Nuremberg trials of the generals who devastated northern Norway and modern reflections on the mental scars that have passed down generations, this is a journey into the heart of a brutal conflict set in a landscape of intense natural beauty.

My parents were brutally murdered when I was five years old. Their killer has spent the last twenty five years in prison for his terrible crimes - but I still have unanswered questions. After all, I am the phoenix. When I die, I am reborn in fire and brimstone. It happens again and again and again. I have no idea where my strange ability came from and nobody to ask. Now another shocking murder has been committed in the small village where my parents died and there is evidence which suggests the killer is supernatural. The crime gives me the perfect reason to return to my childhood home. I can offer my expertise as a Supe Squad detective - and seek the truth behind what I really am. The trouble is that I might not like what I find. Scorched Heart is the fourth book in the action-packed urban fantasy Firebrand series. Events occur at the same time as The Noose Of A New Moon in the Wolfbrand series, although the books do not have to be read together to be enjoyed. The Firebrand Series Brimstone Bound Infernal Enchantment Midnight Smoke Scorched Heart The Wolfbrand Series The Noose Of A New Moon

[This book] depict[s] a family's journey from devastation to rebirth following the American Civil War"--Amazon.com.