Bestselling author Frank McKinney boldly enters young reader fiction in this deeply imaginative fantasy sure to race and gladden the hearts of all readers. The story was inspired by the more than one thousand walks to school the author has shared with his daughter and her friends in real life. Come along with them into the imaginative world of Dead Fred, Flying Lunchboxes, and the Good Luck Circle! Thirteen-year-old Ppeekk (pronounced 'Peekie') finds a very small, very flat, very dead fish. When he comes to life in her hand, he has an amazing story to tell. In the brilliant underwater world called High Voltage, manatees talk, starfish sing, and practical-joking clownfish encourage children to launch their lunchboxes off the bridge. Now the fiendish Megalodon, a fifty-foot prehistoric shark, has laid siege to High Voltage and dethroned King Frederick the Ninth (whom Ppeekk calls "Dead Fred"). The monster reigns amphibiously under the old drawbridge with his army of crabs and blood-red remora fish, whose suckers drain victims' joy and imagination. Ppeekk hides Dead Fred in the only safe place she can think of: the usher's coat room at church. As she grows to know Fred, she learns to trust and love him. Unlike her parents, he listens to her and counsels her. Dead Fred trusts Ppeekk, too. In fact, he has a big favor to ask. Can she help him save High Voltage from the evil Megalodon? Ppeekk and her friends use everything they've got to lure the evil beast to his demise—exploding coconut bombs, strangler fig lassos, even themselves as human bait—to vanquish Megalodon and his rogue army. In the climactic scene, they fight the battle of their lives in a Category-5 hurricane . . . Will they be able to save Dead Fred and High Voltage? Read Dead Fred, Flying Lunchboxes, and the Good Luck Circle to find out!

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. These scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.

A crime and a six-decade cover-up: the death of a fashion designer in the cesspit of vice and violence that was 1950s London. In 1954, Jean Mary Townsend was strangled with her own scarf and stripped of her underwear but not sexually assaulted. The subsequent police investigation was bungled, leading to a six-decade cover-up, ensuring that this twenty-one-year-old fashion designer was effectively killed twice: first bodily, and then as her significance and her memory were erased. Fred Vermorel's forensic, troubling (and trouble-making) investigation digs deep into Jean Townsend's life and times, and her transgressive bohemian milieu. It disentangles the lies and bluffs that have obscured this puzzling case for over half a century and offers a compelling solution to her murder and the official secrecy surrounding it. More than just a true crime story, Vermorel's investigation deploys Townsend's death as a wild card methodology for probing the 1950s: a cesspit of vice and violence, from coprophiles to bombsite gangs and flick knives in the cinema. Densely illustrated with archival material, Dead Fashion Girl is a heavily researched, darkly curious exposé of London's 1950s society that touches on celebrity, royalty, the postwar establishment, and ultimately, tragedy.

This is a highly entertaining, fast -moving, vibrant account of the life of a man who didn't always take the obvious pathways, but always made the most of the pathways he found himself along. This book offers a great deal of colorful detail about the boy's earliest days as a hardscrabble kid growing up in a big California family, through his high-spirited youth and all through his adult years, including great swaths of thrill-seeking time spent in South and Central America. We meet a great many characters from his life and are privy to the various escapades in which the lot of them engage.

Read the story behind the award-winning film Judas and the Black Messiah On December 4, 1969, attorney Jeff Haas was in a police lockup in Chicago, interviewing Fred Hampton's fiancÉe. Deborah Johnson described how the police pulled her from the room as Fred lay unconscious on their bed. She heard one officer say, "He's still alive." She then heard two shots. A second officer said, "He's good and dead now." She looked at Jeff and asked, "What can you do?" The Assassination of Fred Hampton remains Haas's personal account of how he and People's Law Office partner Flint Taylor pursued Hampton's assassins, ultimately prevailing over unlimited government resources and FBI conspiracy. Fifty years later, Haas writes that there is still an urgent need for the revolutionary systemic changes Hampton was organizing to accomplish. Not only a story of justice delivered, this book spotlights Hampton as a dynamic community leader and an inspiration for those in the ongoing fight against injustice and police brutality.