The murder of Clem and Caroline Rush's dropout high school friend, Mary Lou, increases their desire to establish a unique school they hope will help prevent dropouts. Clem visits Mary Lou's indicted husband in jail, who claims innocence and tells her that his wife was seeing another man. Mary Lou's mother tells authorities that her daughter was distraught after a phone conversation with someone she believes was the daughter's lover, but the diary she left behind does not name him. Clem and her sister search County records, which reveal the county education committee rejected Caroline's request to lease the old school building for her dropout school in favor of a bar/gambling joint. Martin Rush argues with Georgia State Police Captain Michael Tarnoff, Caroline's fiance, at the Rush home, then both leave without a word to the family. His body is found next day in a creek on the Rush property, his car missing. His death is also determined to be murder, but seems to have no connection to their friend's death. In his home office desk Clem finds a report from a private investigator hired by their father. The report is proof that Caroline's fiance had affairs with several women, and mentions pictures though none are included with the letter. The Sheriff and deputies search the Rush home, he finds the PI report, and accuses Clem of hiding the pictures. The two sisters join their brother at the bar where their friend worked and the bartender who hired her agrees to meet them for lunch next day at a café in town to tell what he knows. At dinner the sisters are bringing Susannah, housekeeper and surrogate mother up to date when their brother arrives with Belt Elliot, the bartender, as well as Nate Simmons, the student Mary Lou dated in high school, who ran into each other at the site of Mary Lou's murder, and leave the impression they have just met. Next day Clem finds the pictures hidden in her father's city office. In the building's parking garage she sees Michael, believes he was waiting for her. Stopping at a fast food restaurant she sees bartender Belt with Nate Simmons, wonders if they actually did know each other before dinner with the family. Arriving home as she shares her discovery of the pictures with Caroline and Chance, Belt and Nate again come to the Rush home. Clem and Chance, having permits, decide to arm themselves. While sharing information the group is shocked when the murderer bursts into the room and attempts to take them hostage.

Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self defense," King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend's Montgomery, Alabama home as "an arsenal." Like King, many ostensibly "nonviolent" civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to selfprotection -- yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb Jr. describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s. In the Deep South, blacks often safeguarded themselves and their loved ones from white supremacist violence by bearing -- and, when necessary, using -- firearms. In much the same way, Cobb shows, nonviolent civil rights workers received critical support from black gun owners in the regions where they worked. Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning their homes, or firing back at attackers, these courageous men and women and the weapons they carried were crucial to the movement's success. Giving voice to the World War II veterans, rural activists, volunteer security guards, and self-defense groups who took up arms to defend their lives and liberties, This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the Second Amendment. Drawing on his firsthand experiences in the civil rights movement and interviews with fellow participants, Cobb provides a controversial examination of the crucial place of firearms in the fight for American freedom.

A New York Times Notable Book; Spitball Award for Best Baseball Book of 1994; Basis for a major Hollywood motion picture. Now in paperback, the biography that baseball fans all across the country have been talking about. Al Stump redefined America's perception of one of its most famous sports heroes with this gripping look at a man who walked the line between greatness and psychosis. Based on Stump's interviews with Ty Cobb while ghostwriting the Hall-of-Famer's 1961 autobiography, this award-winning new account of Cobb's life and times reveals both the darkness and the brilliance of the "Georgia Peach." "The most powerful baseball biography I have read."--Roger Kahn, author of THE BOYS OF SUMMER

Gangs of bloodthirsty and ruthless outlaws terrorized the American Southwest before and after Mexico ceded the land now called Texas. One of these cutthroat packs thought they had an impregnable hideout until a trio of U.S. Marshals was given the mission to bring them to justice.