Already part of a genre known for generating controversy, some true crime and scandal books have wielded a particular power to unsettle readers, provoke authorities and renew interest in a case. The reactions to such literature have been as contentious as the books themselves, clouding the "truth" with myths and inaccuracies. From high-profile publishing sensations such as Ten Rillington Place, Fatal Vision and Mommie Dearest to the wealth of writing on the JFK assassination, the death of Marilyn Monroe and the Black Dahlia murder, this book delves into that hard copy era when crime and scandal books had a cultural impact beyond the genre's film and TV documentaries, fueling outcries that sometimes matched the notoriety of the cases they discussed and leaving legacies that still resonate today.

ANOTHER TRUE CRIME STORY FROM J. NORTH CONWAY—NOW IN PAPERBACK! The riveting story of one of America’s most notorious crimes and the mysterious man behind it “Engrossing. . . . Conway skillfully paints a backdrop of fierce and flamboyant personalities who paraded across the Gilded Age. . . . [H]e capably recounts his story against a background of glitter and greed.” —Publishers Weekly “A page-turning account of one of the most brazen crimes of our time.” —Reader’s Digest “Conway, a college prof and ex-newspaper man, covers this ancient tale in a way that makes it feel like a hot news story.” —New York Post King of Heistsis a spellbinding and unprecedented account of the greatest bank robbery in American history, which took place on October 27, 1878, when thieves broke into the Manhattan Savings Institution and stole nearly $3 million in cash and securities—around $50 million in today’s terms. Bringing the notorious Gilded Age to life in a thrilling narrative, J. North Conway tells the story of those who plotted and carried out this infamous robbery, how they did it, and how they were tracked down and captured. The robbery was planned to the minutest detail by criminal mastermind George Leonidas Leslie—a society architect and ladies’ man whose double life as the nation’s most prolific bank robber led him to be dubbed the “King of the Bank Robbers.” An absorbing tale of greed, sex, crime, betrayal, and murder, King of Heistsblends all the richness of history with the thrills of the best fiction.

A captivating look at the origins of our own tabloid culture in the salacious and titillating media of the Victorian era.

Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America

Sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch—as they were celebrated during the Enlightenment and as they are perceived today. Blindfolding children from birth? Playing a piano made of live cats? Using tobacco to cure drowning? Wearing “flea”-colored clothes? These actions may seem odd to us, but in the eighteenth century, they made perfect sense. As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent on the body alone. Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows that, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way we think about the senses and put them to use has been rather different over the ages. Journeying through the past three hundred years, Purnell explores how people used their senses in ways that might shock us now. And perhaps more surprisingly, she shows how many of our own ways of life are a legacy of this earlier time. The Sensational Past focuses on the ways in which small, peculiar, and seemingly unimportant facts open up new ways of thinking about the past. You will explore the sensory worlds of the Enlightenment, learning how people in the past used their senses, understood their bodies, and experienced the rapidly shifting world around them. In this smart and witty work, Purnell reminds us of the value of daily life and the power of the smallest aspects of existence using culinary history, fashion, medicine, music, and many other aspects of Enlightenment life.

With one call, her daughter’s life is on the line. Laurie Ahmadi has worked as a 911 police dispatcher in her quiet Northern California town for almost two decades, but nothing in her nearly twenty years of experience could prepare her for the worst call of her career—her teenage daughter, Jojo, is on the other end of the line. She is drugged, disoriented, and in pain, and even though the whole police department springs into action, there is nothing Laurie can do to help. Jojo, who has been sexually assaulted, doesn’t remember how she ended up at the home of Kevin Leeds, a pro football player famous for his work with the Citizens Against Police Brutality movement, though she insists he would never hurt her. And she has no idea where her best friend, Harper, who was with her earlier in the evening, could be. As Jojo and Laurie begin digging into Harper’s private messages on social media to look for clues to her whereabouts, they uncover a conspiracy far bigger than they ever could have imagined. With Kevin’s freedom on the line and the chances of finding Harper unharmed slipping away, Laurie and Jojo begin to realize that they can’t trust anyone to find Harper except themselves, not even the police department they’ve long considered family . . . and time is running out.

Between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, British cinema experienced an explosion of X-certificated films. In parallel with an era marked by social, political, and sexual ferment and upheaval, British filmmakers and censors pushed and guarded the permissible limits of violence, horror, revolt, and sexuality on screen. Adult Themes is the first volume entirely devoted to the exploration of British X certificate films across this transformative period, since identified as 'the long 1960s'. How did the British Board of Film Censors, harried on one side by the censorious and moralistic, and beset on the other by demands for greater artistic freedom, oversee and manage this provocative body of films? How did the freedoms and restrictions of the X certificate hasten, determine, and reshape post-war British cinema into an artistic, exploitational, and unapologetically adult medium? Contributors to this collection consider these central questions as they take us to swinging parties, on youthful crime sprees, into local council meetings, on police raids of cinemas, and around Soho strip clubs, and introduce us to mass murderers, lesbian vampires, apoplectic protestors, eroticised middle-aged women, and rebellious working-class men. Adult Themes examines both the workings and negotiations of British film censorship, the limits of artistic expression, and a wider culture of X certificate cinema. This is an important volume for students and scholars of British Film History and censorship, Media Studies, the 1960s, and Cultural and Sexuality Studies, while simultaneously an entertaining read for all connoisseurs of British cinema at its most vivid and scandalous.

When social psychologist Stanley Milgram invited volunteers to take part in an experiment at Yale in the summer of 1961, none of the participants could have foreseen the worldwide sensation that the published results would cause. Milgram reported that fully 65 percent of the volunteers had repeatedly administered electric shocks of increasing strength to a man they believed to be in severe pain, even suffering a life-threatening heart condition, simply because an authority figure had told them to do so. Such behavior was linked to atrocities committed by ordinary people under the Nazi regime and immediately gripped the public imagination. The experiments remain a source of controversy and fascination more than fifty years later. In Behind the Shock Machine, psychologist and author Gina Perry unearths for the first time the full story of this controversial experiment and its startling repercussions. Interviewing the original participants—many of whom remain haunted to this day about what they did—and delving deep into Milgram's personal archive, she pieces together a more complex picture and much more troubling picture of these experiments than was originally presented by Milgram. Uncovering the details of the experiments leads her to question the validity of that 65 percent statistic and the claims that it revealed something essential about human nature. Fleshed out with dramatic transcripts of the tests themselves, the book puts a human face on the unwitting people who faced the moral test of the shock machine and offers a gripping, unforgettable tale of one man's ambition and an experiment that defined a generation.