Friday, 13 March 2020
Thursday, 12 March 2020
Wednesday, 11 March 2020
Gone At Midnight: The Mysterious Death of Elisa Lam (A True Story) by Jake Anderson
Twenty-one-year-old Vancouver student Elisa Lam was last heard from on 31 January 2013, after she checked into downtown L.A.’s Cecil Hotel - a 600-room building with a nine-decade history of scandal and tragedy. The next day, Elisa vanished. A search of the hotel yielded nothing. More than a week later, complaints by guests of foul-smelling tap water led to a grim discovery: Elisa’s nude body floating in a rooftop water tank, in an area extremely difficult to access without setting off alarms. The only apparent clue was a disturbing surveillance video of Elisa, uploaded to YouTube in hopes of public assistance.
As the eerie elevator video went viral, so did the questions of its tens of millions of viewers.
Was Elisa’s death caused by murder, suicide, or paranormal activity?
Was it connected to the Cecil’s sinister reputation?
And in that video, what accounted for Elisa’s strange behaviour?
With the help of web sleuths and investigators from around the world, journalist Jake Anderson set out to uncover the facts behind a death that had become a macabre internet meme, as well as a magnet for conspiracy theorists.
In poring through Elisa’s revealing online journals and social-media posts, Anderson realized he shared more in common with the young woman than he imagined. His search for justice and truth became a personal journey, a dangerous descent into one of America's quiet epidemics. Along the way, he exposed a botched investigation and previously unreported disclosures from inside sources who suggest there may have been a corporate conspiracy and a police cover-up.
In Gone at Midnight (2020), Anderson chronicles eye-opening discoveries about who Elisa Lam really was and what - or whom - she was running from, and presents shocking new evidence that may re-open one of the most chilling and obsessively followed true crime cases of the century. Gone at Midnight is an excellent and informative read, very well-researched and well-written.
About the author: Jake Anderson is a writer, filmmaker, investigative journalist, activist and web publisher. He runs the popular website The Ghost Diaries and is a contributing journalist for The Anti-Media and multiple alternative media outlets. He has been a featured guest on Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis, Spaced Out, Nocturnal Frequency, West of the Rockies, and Common Ground. Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, he is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz and currently lives in Portland, Oregon and Albuquerque, Mexico.
Find more of his work at Theghostdiaries.com where he analyzes cold cases and unexplained mysteries. Follow him on twitter @OverTheMoonSF.
Tuesday, 10 March 2020
Monday, 9 March 2020
Saturday, 7 March 2020
Friday, 6 March 2020
Forever And Five Days (True Crime) by Lowell Cauffiel
Paperback: Love does not rejoice in what is wrong but rejoices with the truth. - 1 Corinthians 13.
Alpine Manor was the finest nursing home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Clean, efficient, and safe, elderly patients and their loved ones could always rely on the care they received there.
Until 29 November 1988, when the shocking news exploded in the local media. Alpine Manor nurses' aides, Catherine May Wood, a twenty-eight-year-old wife and mother, and Gwendolyn Gail Graham, her lover, were arrested in connection with the horrible suffocation murders of five female patients.
Cunning and evasive, Wood finally confessed to police about her bizarre relationship with Graham and claimed that the killings were part of their eternal love pact to spell M-U-R-D-E-R with the victims' names.
The sensational trial stunned the nation with its lurid details of the obsessive sexual violence and blind jealousy that led to the slaughter of innocent women. Wood and Graham were convicted for murder and sentenced to prison. Graham received five consecutive life sentences; Wood a total of twenty to forty years.
In the bestselling tradition of Small Sacrifices and Fatal Vision, Lowell Cauffiel's account of the Alpine Manor murders - Forever and Five Days (1992) - is a chilling saga of inhuman crimes and insights into the minds of the psychopaths driven to commit them.
About the author: Lowell Joseph Cauffiel (born 1951 in Michigan) is an American true crime author, novelist, screenwriter and film and television producer. An award-winning reporter with the Detroit News and Detroit Monthly Magazine in the 1970s and 1980s, Cauffiel began his bookwriting career in 1988 with Masquerade: A True Story of Seduction, Compulsion and Murder. That title and his 1997 New York Times bestseller House of Secrets have appeared on many critics' lists of the best works in American true crime. As a nonfiction author, he is known for his meticulous research and accuracy, delivered in novel-like, page-turner style. Thematically, Cauffiel's books often explore how people embrace popular trends and exalt American values to hide their dark intentions and destructive acts.
Cauffiel is an avid surfer and motorcyclist. He has also worked in alcohol and drug rehabilitation circles as a volunteer and headed a research grant about alcohol problems among young people for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAA) for the National Institutes of Health.
He is the father of actress Jessica Cauffiel.
Thursday, 5 March 2020
Wednesday, 4 March 2020
The Holy Rosary Through The Visions Of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich edited by Father Mark Higgins
Paperback: The German Mystic born in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, was privileged by Almighty God with sensory visions disclosing the earthly life of God Incarnate, of His Holy Mother, the Virgin Mary and of the progression of salvation history from Genesis to the Apocalypse.
In this short book, the reader will find a carefully collated set of rosary meditations faithfully drawn from the texts of these visions. Meditations taken directly from our saint’s writings are provided for every bead of the rosary, allowing you to ponder at greater depth the secrets revealed to Blessed Anne Catherine and enable you to truly immerse yourself in the marvellous historical events which occurred in the life of Our Divine Redeemer and His Holy Mother.
This work is a work of prayer and was revised multiple times in order to offer golden nuggets of contemplative material in every bead of Our Lady’s Psalter.
For the benefit of the reader, meditations have also been offered, once again, drawn entirely from Our Saint’s writings, for the Mysteries of Light, which are popular among many Catholics, as well as five additional mysteries, entitled “the Hopeful Mysteries”, which cover events in Salvation History and in the life of Our Blessed Mother prior to the Incarnation.
Blessed Anne offers a wealth of detail for each of these mysteries and these details have been collated for you in The Holy Rosary (Catholic Way Publishing, 2019).
The Holy Rosary is compiled and edited by Father Mark Higgins and translated from the German by The Very Reverend K E Schmoger, CSSR.
About the author: Anne Catherine Emmerich was born to poor parents at Westphalia, Germany in 1774. When she was twenty-eight years old, she became an Augustinian nun at Dulmen, and apparently began to experience ecstasies as a result of spiritual favours. She received the Stigmata in 1813, confined to her bed, and reportedly convinced a vicar-general, Overberg, and three physicians of her sanctity. She later reported that she had seen visions of Christ and the souls in purgatory as a child, as well as a circular core with three sections representing the Trinity. She is the author of The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations, and The Bitter Passion and the Life of Mary.
Anne Emmerich died on 9 February 1824 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004.
Monday, 2 March 2020
Life Of The Blessed Virgin Mary by Anne Catherine Emmerich
Paperback: Life Of The Blessed Virgin Mary (2009) is an incredibly revealing and edifying background of Our Lady, her parents and ancestors, St Joseph, plus other people who figured into the coming of Christ. Included are many descriptions about the Nativity and the early life of Our Lord, as well as the final days of the Blessed Mother - all from the visions of this great mystic.
Clemens Brentano was a well-known and well-to-do German poet and writer. After he had met the German nun and mystic, Anna Emmerich, on 24 September 1818, he was so amazed, he decided to be her stenographer. He later wrote, "I feel that I must stay here, that I must not leave this admirable creature before her death. I feel that my mission is here, and that God has heard the prayer I made when I begged him to give me something to do for His glory that would not be above my strength. I shall endeavour to gather and preserve the treasures of grace that I have here before my eyes." So, daily, for six years, this writer sublimated his career to take dictation. Why? Because he could see that this was God's work.
Beginning in 1818, Anna Katharina Emmerich dictated to Clemens Brentano over a period of 6 years various details about the life of Jesus Christ in chronological order. She had additional visions of "celebrated" events such as Christmas, Easter, and Saints Holidays when those feast days occurred in the Catholic Church. Anna's visions, as the reader will see, are quite detailed.
The primary additions to this new edition of Life Of The Blessed Virgin Mary are
1. Woodcut figures that were included in the German 1852 edition have been included.
2. Archaic word usage and all spelling has been revised to modern American English.
3. All place names and proper names have been updated to modern spelling norms.
4. Textual omissions of previous editions have been corrected.
5. German section titles, omitted by the English translator, have been translated and included.
6. Some new footnotes have been added.
About the author: Anne Catherine Emmerich was born to poor parents at Westphalia, Germany in 1774. When she was twenty-eight years old, she became an Augustinian nun at Dulmen, and apparently began to experience ecstasies as a result of spiritual favours. She received the Stigmata in 1813, confined to her bed, and reportedly convinced a vicar-general, Overberg, and three physicians of her sanctity. She later reported that she had seen visions of Christ and the souls in purgatory as a child, as well as a circular core with three sections representing the Trinity. She is the author of The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations, and The Bitter Passion and the Life of Mary.
Anne Emmerich died on 9 February 1824 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004.
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