In the early hours of an August 2007 morning a gunfight broke out in an Italian restaurant in Duisburg, Germany; in less than five minutes over seventy shots were fired into the bodies of six men. Both the victims and the assassins were members of the 'Ndrangheta crime organization. Calabria's Mafia had brazenly shown its savage influence outside Italy for the first time. In The Honored Society award-winning investigative reporter Petra Reski reveals the Mafia menace lurking throughout the world-- from espresso bars in Palermo to European halls of parliament to the corporate headquarters of enormous agricultural firms. In haunting and exquisite prose she explores the Byzantine structure of the 'Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra and other mafia clans throughout Italy -- the code they live by, the destruction they wreak, how they operate within the country and how they operate internationally. She shows how these syndicates dominate everything from nuclear waste disposal to hotel chains to the marijuana trade in Australia and cocaine trafficked throughout the world. Reski shows how figures such as Silvio Berlusconi were made by the Mafia, and how those who dared to defy its codes were broken. A searing portrait of the criminals who have come to control not only Italy but vast swathes of the globe, The Honored Society is a journalistic tour de force.

With this blistering and revelatory crime epic, Michael Gambino, grandson of the original "Godfather, " aims for the gut and catapults readers straight into the heart of the Mafia--a world he knows better than anybody.

Traces the journalist author's investigation into the murder of a night watchman by a member of Morocco's new security task force, a mystery set against a backdrop of Western liberation efforts and Eastern jihad activities that are dividing Casablanca's Islamic metropolis.

“How can women wear diamonds when babies cry for bread?” Kate Barnard demanded in one of the incendiary stump speeches for which she was well known. In A Life on Fire, Connie Cronley tells the story of Catherine Ann “Kate” Barnard (1875–1930), a fiery political reformer and the first woman elected to state office in Oklahoma, as commissioner of charities and corrections in 1907—almost fifteen years before women won the right to vote in the United States. Born to hardscrabble settlers on the Nebraska prairie, Barnard committed her energy, courage, and charismatic oratory to the cause of Progressive reform and became a political powerhouse and national celebrity. As a champion of the poor, workers, children, the imprisoned, and the mentally ill, Barnard advocated for compulsory education, prison reform, improved mental health treatment, and laws against child labor. Before statehood, she stumped across the Twin Territories to unite farmers and miners into a powerful political alliance. She also helped write Oklahoma’s Progressive constitution, creating what some heralded as “a new kind of state.” But then she took on the so-called “Indian Question.” Defending Native orphans against a conspiracy of graft that reached from Oklahoma to Washington, D.C., she uncovered corrupt authorities and legal guardians stealing oil, gas, and timber rights from Native Americans’ federal allotments. In retaliation, legislators and grafters closed ranks and defunded her state office. Broken in health and heart, she left public office and died a recluse. She remains, however, a riveting figure in Oklahoma history, a fearless activist on behalf of the weak and helpless.

The year is 2031. A new drug has hit the black market, one more potent and powerful than any other. The men behind it will stop at nothing to get what they want, the American underworld and everything in it. While being investigated by top-level law enforcement officials, a criminal mastermind unleashes a devious plot that will shake the very foundations of justice. After orchestrating a violent massacre that takes place in multiple cities across the continent, over one hundred criminal’s deaths will give rise to a new generation. This new generation is more ruthless and intelligent than any other before them. After murdering their way to the top of the New York underworld, they flood the streets with the new drug, Orion. Santo Luciano, as new Boss of Bosses in the American Mafia, strikes deals and bargains with notorious illegal organizations in order to supply Orion on a worldwide scale. Using information given to him by a mole in Federal law enforcement, Santo implements a plan that will distract his enemies while he achieves his true goals. After transforming the Mafia into an international narcotics consortium, he reveals a hidden motivation, revenge.

Summary: In this first-person account, Todd Ramón Ochoa explores Palo, a poorly-understood Kongo-inspired 'society of afflication' at the margins of Cuban popular religion. Narrated as an encounter with two teachers of Palo, the book unfolds on the outskirts of Havana.

In Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay, historian Shawn Michael Austin traces the history of conquest and colonization in Paraguay during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emphasizing the social and cultural agency of Guaraní—one of the primary indigenous peoples of Paraguay—not only in Jesuit missions but also in colonial settlements and Indian pueblos scattered in and around the Spanish city of Asunción, Austin argues that interethnic relations and cultural change in Paraguay can only be properly understood through the Guaraní logic of kinship. In the colonial backwater of Paraguay, conquistadors were forced to marry into Guaraní families in order to acquire indigenous tributaries, thereby becoming “brothers-in-law” (tovajá) to Guaraní chieftains. This pattern of interethnic exchange infused colonial relations and institutions with Guaraní social meanings and expectations of reciprocity that forever changed Spaniards, African slaves, and their descendants. Austin demonstrates that Guaraní of diverse social and political positions actively shaped colonial society along indigenous lines.