Between 1910 and 1920, the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) inaugurated a massive organizing drive in the city’s meatpacking and steel industries. Although the CFL sought legitimately progressive goals, worked earnestly to organize an interracial union, and made major inroads among both black and white workers, their efforts resulted in a bitter defeat. David Bates provides a clear picture of how even the most progressive of intentions can be ground to a halt. By organizing workers into neighborhood locals, which connected workplace struggles to ethnic and religious identities, the CFL facilitated a surge in the organization’s membership, particularly among African American workers, and afforded the federation the opportunity to aggressively confront employers. The CFL’s innovative structure, however, was ultimately its demise. Linking union locals to neighborhoods proved to be a form of de facto segregation. Over time union structures, rank-and-file conflicts, and employer resistance combined to turn the union’s hopeful calls for solidarity into animosity and estrangement. Tensions were exacerbated by violent shop floor confrontations and exploded in the bloody 1919 Chicago Race Riot. By the early 1920s, the CFL had collapsed. The Ordeal of the Jungle explores the choices of a variety of people while showing a complex, overarching interplay of black and white workers and their employers. In addition to analyzing union structures and on-the-ground relations between workers, Bates synthesizes and challenges previous scholarship on interracial organizing to explain the failure of progressive unionism in Chicago.

"Betancourt's riveting account...is an unforgettable epic of moral courage and human endurance." -Los Angeles Times In the midst of her campaign for the Colombian presidency in 2002, Ingrid Betancourt traveled into a military-controlled region, where she was abducted by the FARC, a brutal terrorist guerrilla organization in conflict with the government. She would spend the next six and a half years captive in the depths of the Colombian jungle. Even Silence Has an End is her deeply moving and personal account of that time. The facts of her story are astounding, but it is Betancourt's indomitable spirit that drives this very special narrative-an intensely intelligent, thoughtful, and compassionate reflection on what it really means to be human.

Lost and alone in the jungle, one boy will have to let go of his assumptions and anger, or be dragged down with them. Dylan Barstow has finally crossed the line. After getting caught on a late-night joyride in a stolen car, Dylan is shipped off to live with his ex-Marine uncle for the summer. But Uncle Todd has bigger plans for Dylan than push-ups and early-morning jogs. Deep in the steamy jungles of Papua New Guinea, there's a WWII fighter plane named SECOND ACE that's been lost for years, a plane that Dylan's own grandfather barely escaped from with his life. In all this time, no one has ever been able to track down SECOND ACE -- but now Dylan and his uncle are going to try.Lush and haunted, vital and deadly, these alien jungles half a world away could mean Dylan's salvation, or they could swallow him whole.

In "Out of Captivity, " Gonsalves, Stansell, and Howes recount for the first time their amazing tale of survival, friendship, and, ultimately, rescue, tracing their five and a half years as hostages of the FARC--a Colombian terrorist and Marxist rebel organization.

On February 13, 2003, a plane carrying three American military contractors crash-landed in the jungle-covered mountains of Colombia. Within minutes, FARC guerrillas swarmed the wreckage and killed the American pilot and a Colombian crew member, then marched the survivors—Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell, and Thomas Howes—at gunpoint into the rain forest. The Colombian government sent 147 soldiers to rescue the Americans. The troops spent weeks subsisting on monkey meat and Amazon rodents as they chased the guerrillas deeper into the jungle. But then a soldier on a bathroom break stuck his machete into the ground and pulled out 20 million pesos—part of a buried rebel cache of $20 million—and the game suddenly changed. Veteran journalist John Otis places the Colombian hostage story in its full context, exploring the inner workings of the FARC, the U.S.-backed war on drugs, and Colombia's efforts to free the rebel-held prisoners. Law of the Jungle is an edge-of-your-seat adventure and a shocking cautionary tale about the pursuit of fortune in one of the world's most dangerous places.

On a fateful day in February 2002, campaign manager Clara Rojas accompanied longtime friend and presidential hopeful Ingrid Betancourt into an area controlled by the powerful leftist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Armed with machine guns and grenades, the FARC took them hostage and kept them in the jungle for the next six years. After more than two years of captivity deep in the Colombian jungle, surrounded by jaguars, snakes, and tarantulas, miles from any town or hospital, Clara Rojas prepared to give birth in a muddy tent surrounded by heavily armed guerrillas. Her captors promised that a doctor would be brought to the camp to help her. But when Rojas went into labor and began to suffer complications, the only person on hand was a guerrilla wielding a kitchen knife. The guerrillas drugged Rojas with anesthetic while one of them slit open her abdomen. Her son, Emmanuel, was born by amateur cesarean section in April 2004. His survival was miraculous, but her joy was soon cut short when the FARC took him from her when he was only eight months old. For the next three years, Clara was given no information about him, but her desire to one day see him again kept her alive. In early 2008, Clara was finally liberated and reunited with her son—to whom this book is dedicated.

In the spring of 1974, Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda of the Japanese army made world headlines when he emerged from the Philippine jungle after a thirty-year ordeal. Hunted in turn by American troops, the Philippine police, hostile islanders, and successive Japanese search parties, Onoda had skillfully outmaneuvered all his pursuers, convinced that World War II was still being fought and that one day his fellow soldiers would return victorious. This account of those years is an epic tale of the will to survive that offers a rare glimpse of man's invincible spirit, resourcefulness, and ingenuity. A hero to his people, Onoda wrote down his experiences soon after his return to civilization. This book was translated into English the following year and has enjoyed an approving audience ever since.