“[H]aunting and harrowing.” —Booklist (starred review) “Vivid, distressing, and all too real.” —Kirkus Reviews In this 20th anniversary edition of Todd Strasser’s gut-wrenching and critically acclaimed Give a Boy a Gun, two boys bring guns to school in search of revenge against their classmates. For as long as they can remember, Brendan and Gary have been mercilessly teased and harassed by the jocks who rule Middletown High. But not anymore. Stealing a small arsenal of guns from a neighbor, they take their classmates hostage at a school dance. In the panic of this desperate situation, it soon becomes clear that only one thing matters to Brendan and Gary: revenge. This special 20th anniversary edition includes updated backmatter and statistics on school shootings—a topic that is now more relevant than ever.

The war between society and the antisocial personality has long been a subject of fascination, and few have explored it as thoroughly as award-winning author Jack Olsen. In his national best seller Son: A Psychopath and His Victims, Olsen studied a psychopathic rapist who found the perfect protective coloration in jogging shoes and sweats. In this book, the story of Claude Lafayette Dallas, Jr., Olsen takes on perhaps his most challenging assignment -- explicating the curious relationship between a homicidal young "mountain man" and those who saw in his colorful ways the embodiment of the cowboy mystique of the West. On a snow-blown day, Dallas killed two game wardens who entered his trapping and poaching camp in ldaho's Owyhee Desert. The cold-bloodedness of Dallas's crime shocked the West. Stained with his victim's blood. he confessed to a companion, "This is Murder One for me." Then Claude Dallas vanished into the wild and rugged mountains that had sheltered him for so long. For fifteen long months he was the subject of an international manhunt until the FBI and a drawling country sheriff joined forces to run him to earth in a rain of bullets. Only then did lawmen learn about the network of friends who had helped him elude capture. To some of Dallas's rustic neighbors the deadly progression from cowboy to poacher to killer seemed justifiable, even admirable. Clanking around the bars and barrancas of the high desert country in his hand-filed spurs and well-oiled guns, Claude Dallas had brought a strange new madness to the mythology of the West, a madness that even a jury of his peers found nostalgically seductive in a sensational trial. Claude Dallas came within a whisker of going free. Only Jack Olsen, through painstaking research into Dallas's background and exhaustive on-the-scene interviewing, could unravel such a rat's nest of contradictions and confusions and create so compelling a portrait of the killer whose bloody deeds might have been foreordained from childhood. From Publishers Weekly Claude Dallas Jr. was raised in Upper Michigan and Ohio by a father whose philosophy was "give a boy a gun and you're makin' a man." After high school, the young man went to the rugged border area of Idaho, Oregon and Nevada and worked as a cow-puncher and handyman on several ranches. But his dream was evidently to become a 19th centurystyle mountain man and so he turned to poaching, often killing animals even though he had no need for the meat. In 1981, he killed two game wardens in front of a witness. On the run for 15 months, he was eventually captured in a shootout and found guilty of manslaughter in a singularly bizarre trial. From Library Journal ``Give a boy a gun and you're makin' a man,'' Claude Dallas, Sr., is quoted as saying in this book about his son, Claude Jr., a self-made cowboy, trapper, and ``mountain man'' who was convicted of manslaughter in the shooting deaths of two Idaho game wardens. Claude Jr. was well-liked by many, including a sympathetic jury which rejected possible first or second degree murder verdicts. Was it a case of self-defense or outright murder? Olsen, who last wrote the popular `` Son'': a psychopath and his victims ( LJ 11/15/83), skillfully presents his viewpoint in a readable tale more reminiscent of Old West traditions than of the 1980s. Recommended.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after. Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop? Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be. Praise for Son of a Gun “[A] spectacular memoir . . . calls to mind two others of the past decade: J. R. Moehringer’s Tender Bar and Nick Flynn’s Another Bull____ Night in Suck City. All three are about boys becoming men in a broken world. . . . [What] might have been . . . in the hands of a lesser writer, the book’s main point . . . [is] amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation. . . . If the brilliance of Son of a Gun lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author’s insights.”—Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review “[A] gritty, enthralling new memoir . . . St. Germain has created a work of austere, luminous beauty. . . . In his understated, eloquent way, St. Germain makes you feel the heat, taste the dust, see those shimmering streets. By the end of the book, you know his mother, even though you never met her. And like the author, you will mourn her forever.”—NPR “If St. Germain had stopped at examining his mother’s psycho-social risk factors and how her murder affected him, this would still be a fine, moving memoir. But it’s his further probing—into the culture of guns, violence, and manhood that informed their lives in his hometown, Tombstone, Ariz.—that transforms the book, elevating the stakes from personal pain to larger, important questions of what ails our society.”—The Boston Globe “A visceral, compelling portrait of [St. Germain’s] mother and the violent culture that claimed her.”—Entertainment Weekly

The Searing Portrayal Of War That Has Stunned And Galvanized Generations Of Readers An immediate bestseller upon its original publication in 1939, Dalton Trumbo?s stark, profoundly troubling masterpiece about the horrors of World War I brilliantly crystallized the uncompromising brutality of war and became the most influential protest novel of the Vietnam era. Johnny Got His Gun is an undisputed classic of antiwar literature that?s as timely as ever. ?A terrifying book, of an extraordinary emotional intensity.?--The Washington Post "Powerful. . . an eye-opener." --Michael Moore "Mr. Trumbo sets this story down almost without pause or punctuation and with a fury amounting to eloquence."--The New York Times "A book that can never be forgotten by anyone who reads it."--Saturday Review

David Carr was an addict for more than twenty years -- first dope, then coke, then finally crack -- before the prospect of losing his newborn twins made him sober up in a bid to win custody from their crack-dealer mother. Once recovered, he found that his recollection of his 'lost' years differed -- sometimes radically -- from that of his family and friends. The night, for example, his best friend pulled a gun on him. 'No,' said the friend (to David's horror, as a lifelong pacifist), 'It was you that had the gun.' Using all his skills as an investigative reporter, he set out to research his own life, interviewing everyone from his parents and his ex-partners to the policemen who arrested him, the doctors who treated him and the lawyers who fought to prove he was fit to have custody of his kids. Unflinchingly honest and beautifully written, the result is both a shocking account of the depths of addiction and a fascinating examination of how -- and why -- our memories deceive us. As David says, we remember the stories we can live with, not the ones that happened.

When Brad asks someone else to the senior prom, Nicole resorts to a desperate measure--she decides to make her next-door neighbor over into a dream date.

The stirring conclusion to The Soldier Son Trilogy—the acclaimed epic tale of duty, destiny, and magic by New York Times bestselling master fantasist Robin Hobb Loyal, privileged, and brave, Nevare Burvelle proudly embraced his preordained role as soldier in the service of the King of Gernia—unaware of the strange turns his life would ultimately take. Exposed to a plague of enemy sorcery that felled many of his compatriots, he prevailed, but at a terrible cost to his soul, body, and heart. Now he stands wrongly accused of unspeakable crimes—including murder, the most heinous of them all. Condemned by his brother soldiers and sentenced to death, Nevare has no option but to escape. Suddenly he is an outcast and a fugitive—a hostage to the Speck magic that shackles him to a savage alter ego who would destroy everything Nevare holds dear. With nowhere to turn—except, perhaps, to the Speck woman Lisana, the enemy whom he loves—he is mired in soul-rending despair. But from out of the darkness comes a bright spark of hope. Perhaps, somehow, the hated magic that has long abused Nevare can be used by him instead. Could he not learn to wield this mighty weapon for his own purposes rather than be enslaved by it? But down what perilous road will this desperate new quest lead him? And what will be the outcome and the ultimate new incarnation of Nevare Burvelle?