Koresh: The True Story of David Koresh And The Tragedy At Waco (True Crime) by Stephan Talty

About the book: Immense sadness everywhere; immense power. - John Jay Chapman

Koresh (2023) is the first comprehensive account of David Koresh’s life, his road to Waco, and the rise of government mistrust in America, from a master of narrative nonfiction.

No other event in the last fifty years is shrouded in myth like the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. 

Today, we remember this moment for the 76 people, including 20 children, who died in the fire; for its inspiration of the Oklahoma City bombing; and for the wave of anti-government militarism that followed. 

What we understand far less is what motivated the Davidians’ enigmatic leader, David Koresh.

Drawing on first-time, exclusive interviews with Koresh’s family and survivors of the siege, bestselling author Stephan Talty paints a psychological portrait of this infamous icon of the 1990s. Born Vernon Howell into the hyper-masculine world of central Texas in the 1960s, Koresh experienced a childhood riven with abuse and isolation. He found a new version of himself in the halls of his local church, and love in the fundamentalist sect of the Branch Davidians. Later, with a new name and professed prophetic powers, Koresh ushered in a new era for the Davidians that prized his own sexual conquest as much as his followers’ faith. As one survivor has said, “What better way for a worthless child to feel worth than to become God?”

In his signature immersive storytelling, Talty reveals how Koresh’s fixation on holy war, which would deliver the Davidians to their reward and confirm himself as Christ, collided with his paranoid obsession with firearms to destructive effect. Their deadly, 51-day standoff with the embattled FBI and ATF, he shows, embodied an anti-government ethic that continues to resonate today.

Now, thirty years after that unforgettable moment, Koresh presents the tragedy at Waco - and the government mistrust it inspired - in its fullest context yet.

About the author: Stephan Talty is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of The Black Hand, The Good Assassin, Agent Garbo, and A Captain’s Duty. His books have been made into two films, the Oscar-winning Captain Phillips and Only the Brave. He has written for publications including the New York Times Magazine, GQ, and Playboy. He lives outside New York City with his family.

Happiness No 318

The Greatest Passion

The God Seekers: The Life Of The Franciscans Today by Ingrid Henzler

Paperback: The veil lifts up like the curtain on a stage; we are in the middle of the interior life of a Franciscan Order.

Twelve Franciscan Brothers and Sisters talk openly in sensitive interviews about their relationship with God, their hopes and dreams, their joys and temptations in everyday life.

What have they found?

What have they let go?

Why did they follow their calling?

The God Seekers (2012) will help you find your own calling in life.

The God Seekers is translated by Herbert Uhl from the Original Italian Cercatori di Dio La Vita dei Francescani oggi.

About the author: Ingrid Henzler is an author, a poet, a God Seeker, a passionate woman who feels deeply about life and love. She was born in Germany and has travelled extensively in Europe and the USA. At age of 27, she lived one year in India and came to know the teaching of Paramahansa Yogananda and his classic book, The Autobiography of a Yogi, which transformed her life and brought her back to a deeper understanding of Christianity. Ingrid has a degree in Education and speaks German, English and Italian. She wrote meditation exercises, and organized for seventeen years retreats for young people with the theme "The encounter with God."

Since early childhood she has been devoted to the lives and stories of saints. She was powerfully drawn to the homeland of St Francis of Assisi. For many years she has lived in Italy where she writes, studies and offers guided tours. Ingrid leads groups and visits the convents and shrines, the pastoral landscapes, sacred known and unknown places, and the colorful streets of the charming cities of Umbria and Tuscany.

Ingrid can be seen walking the cobblestone streets past flower-covered balconies driven by her own reflections and deep love of God as the Beloved. She stands at the shores of the lakes and oceans and gazes into the mystery of the beauty of the rising sun and the deep midnight of the moon and stars.

Ingrid has created videos of sacred places, and they are sensitive and moving portraits of spiritual charm, often accompanied by classical music and her own narrative and her mystical poetry.

As so many of us Ingrid walked through valleys of sorrow and compassion while caring many years for those in despair. God has turned her mourning into dancing as she finds expression for her creative insight. She shares all of who she is through her guided pilgrimages, her joy, her poetry, her pictures, as well as her love for music and nature.

The Corner: A Year In The Life Of An Inner-City Neighbourhood by David Simon and Edward Burns

Paperback: The notorious corner of West Fayette and Monroe Streets in Baltimore is a 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighbourhood.

Through the eyes of one broken family - two drug-addicted adults and their smart, vulnerable 15-year-old son, DeAndre McCollough - Simon and Burns examine the sinister realities of inner cities across the USA and unflinchingly assess why law enforcement policies, moral crusades, and the welfare system have accomplished so little. 

The Corner: A Year In The Life Of An Inner-City Neighbourhood (2009, 2022 Canons edition) is a crucial look at the price of the drug culture and the poignant scenes of hope, caring, and love that astonishingly rise in the midst of a place America has abandoned.

About the authors: David Simon is an author, journalist, producer and script writer and is best known as the creator of HBO’s Peabody Award-winning series The Wire. His first book, the international bestseller Homicide, won the Edgar Award and the Anthony Award and became the basis for the NBC award-winning drama. His second book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of An Inner-City Neighbourhood, co-authored with Edward Burns, was made into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries. Simon also co-created the HBO series Generation Kill with Ed Burns, Treme with Eric Overmyer and We Own This City with Ed Burns and George Pelecanos. He lives in Baltimore.

Edward Burns served twenty years in the city police department. For much of that time, he worked as a detective in the homicide unit. He has collaborated with David Simon on The Corner, The Wire, Generation Kill, The Plot Against America and We Own This City.

Acknowledged

Reykjavík by Ragnar Jónasson and Katrín Jakobsdottír

Hardback: What happened to Lara Marteinsdóttir?

Iceland, 1956. Fifteen-year-old Lára spends the summer working for a couple on the small island of Videy, just off the coast of Reykjavík.

In early August, the girl disappears without a trace.

The mystery becomes Iceland's greatest unsolved case. What happened to the young girl? Is she still alive? Did she leave the island, or did something happen to her there?

Thirty years later in August, 1986, as the city of Reykjavík celebrates its 200th anniversary, journalist Valur Robertsson begins his own investigation into Lara's case. But as he draws closer to discovering the secret, and with the eyes of Reykjavík upon him, it soon becomes clear that Lara's disappearance is a mystery that someone will stop at nothing to keep buried.

This ice-cold mystery asks how far a city will go to keep its darkest secrets locked away forever. 

Reykjavík (2023) is dedicated to Agatha Christie who inspired our love of detective stories and is translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb. 

About the authors: Ragnar Jónasson is an international number one bestselling author who has sold over three million books in thirty-four countries worldwide. He was born in Reykjavík, Iceland, where he also works as an investment banker and teaches copyright law at Reykjavík University. He has previously worked on radio and television, including as a TV news reporter for the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, and, from the age of seventeen, has translated fourteen of Agatha Christie's novels. He is currently writing a novel with the Icelandic Prime Minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir. His critically acclaimed international bestseller The Darkness is soon to be a major TV series, and Ridley Scott will be producing Outside as a feature film.

Katrín Jakobsdottír has been Prime Minster of Iceland since 2017. Katrín has been a member of the Icelandic Parliament since 2007 but before that she worked in publishing and education. She served as the minister for education, research and culture from 2009 to 2013. She lives with her husband and three sons in Reykjavík. Hailing from a family of prominent Icelandic poets and academics, she wrote her Master's dissertation on Icelandic crime writing. She and Jónasson are long-time friends, who first worked together nearly ten years ago as part of the jury for an award for best crime fiction in translation in Iceland.

About the translator: Victoria Cribb is a freelance translator of Icelandic literature. Her translations of Icelandic authors published in English include crime novels by Arnaldur Indriðason, The Blue Fox and From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón, and Stone Tree by Gyrðir Elíasson. She has an MA in Icelandic and Scandinavian Studies from UCL and a BPhil in Icelandic from the University of Iceland, and lived and worked in Reykjavík for a number of years as a publisher, journalist, and translator. She is currently completing a PhD in Old Icelandic at the University of Cambridge.

Rating: 5/5

Up At The Villa (Vintage Classics) by William Somerset Maugham

Paperback novella: Mary Panton walls up her desires in a beautiful villa high up in the hills above Florence, as she calmly contemplates her disastrous marriage. 

But a single act of compassion begins a nightmare of violence that shatters her serenity. 

She turns for help to the notorious Rowley Flint, and through him comes to realise that to deny love, with all its passions and risks, is to deny life itself.

A fast-paced story, Up at the Villa (1941, 2004) incorporates elements of the crime and suspense novel. Somerset Maugham donated the manuscript of Up at the Villa to Rupert Hart-Davis to sell in 1960 to raise money for the London Library; it sold for £1,100.

The novella was adapted as the 2000 film Up at the Villa, directed by Philip Haas. The movie starred Kristin Scott Thomas, Anne Bancroft, James Fox, Derek Jacobi, and Sean Penn. In the film, subplots were added to expand the material to feature film length, which reviewers and cinema goers criticised.

About the author: William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St Thomas' Hospital with the idea of practising medicine but the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, won him over to letters. Of Human Bondage, the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915, and with the publication in 1919 of The Moon and Sixpence, his reputation as a novelist was established.

At the same time his fame as a successful playwright and short story writer was being consolidated with acclaimed productions of various plays and the publication of The Trembling of a Leaf, subtitled Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, in 1921, which was followed by seven more collections. His other works include travel books, essays, criticism and the autobiographical The Summing Up and A Writer's Notebook.

In 1927, Somerset Maugham settled in the South of France and lived there until his death in 1965.

A Time To Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Hardback: To every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven...a time to keep silence and a time to speak. Ecclesiastes: III, 1 & 7.

From the French Abbey of St Wandrille to the abandoned and awesome Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey, the celebrated travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor studies the rigorous contemplative lives of the monks and the timeless beauty of their monastic surroundings. 

In his occasional retreats, the peaceful solitude and the calm enchantment of the monasteries was passed on as a kind of 'supernatural windfall' which ​A Time to Keep Silence (2021) so effortlessly records.

 ​A Time to Keep Silence was first published in Great Britain in 1957 by John Murray Publishers.

About the author: Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was born of English and Irish descent. He was only eighteen when he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, a now famous journey described many years later in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. He enlisted in the Irish Guards in 1939 and fought in Greece and Crete, where, disguised as a shepherd, he lived for over two years in the mountains organizing the resistance. In 1944, he led the party that captured the German Commander General Kreipe, an event immortalised in the film Ill Met by Moonlight, starring Dirk Bogarde. He was awarded the OBE in 1943 and the DSO in 1944. 

Patrick Leigh Fermor's books have won many awards including the W H Smith Literary Award, the Thomas Cook Travel Award and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. He lived partly in Greece in the house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire. 

Life Of The Blessed Virgin Mary by Anne Catherine Emmerich

Paperback: Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary (2009 Benediction Classics) 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 in chronological order. There are additional visions of celebrated events such as Christmas, Easter, and Saints Holidays when those feast days occurred in the Catholic Church. 

Many other facts were made known, for example, regarding the Nativity and the early life of Our Lord, as well as the final days of the Blessed Mother. These visions occurred daily for six years beginning on 24 September 1818. 

Anne Catherine Emmerich's stenographer, Clemens Brentano, believed it to be God's work. He was so amazed by "this admirable creature" (Anne Catherine Emmerich, 1774-1824) that he sublimated his career as a well-known and well-to-do German poet and writer to take dictation of the German nun and mystic's visions, what Brentano called "the treasures of grace that I have before my eyes". 

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." 

In 2003, actor and director Mel Gibson used Brentano's book The Dolorous Passion as a key source for his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. Gibson stated that Scripture and "accepted visions" were the only sources he drew on, and a careful reading of Brentano's book shows the film's high level of dependence on it.

About the author: Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824) was a Roman Catholic Augustinian Canoness Regular of Windesheim, mystic, Marian visionary, ecstatic and stigmatist. Pope John Paul II beatified Emmerich on 3 October 2004. 

The Family Next Door: The Heartbreaking Imprisonment Of The Thirteen Turpin Siblings And Their Extraordinary Rescue by John Glatt

Paperback: From New York Times bestselling true crime author John Glatt comes the devastating story of the Turpins: a seemingly normal family where thirteen siblings were held captive in their own home and lived to tell their story.

On 14 January 2018, a seventeen-year-old girl climbed out of the window of her Perris, California home and dialed 911 on a borrowed cell phone. Struggling to stay calm, she told the operator that she and her 12 siblings - ranging in age from 2 to 29 - were being abused by their parents. When the dispatcher asked for her address, the girl hesitated. “I’ve never been out,” she stammered. She was not even sure how to spell her own last name.

Louise and David Turpin presented themselves as loving, faithful parents. On social media, they shared snapshots of family outings and vacations, often with their children in matching outfits. But what police discovered when they entered the Turpin home would eclipse the most shocking child abuse cases in history. 

For years, Louise and David had kept their children in increasing isolation, trapping them in a sinister world of torture, fear and near starvation. This is the definitive, devastating, and unforgettable account of the Turpins: a family whose dark secrets would shock and captivate the world.

The Family Next Door (2019) includes 8 pages of dramatic photos.

About the author: English-born John Glatt is the author of more than thirty books including The Lost Girls and My Sweet Angel, and has over thirty years of experience as an investigative journalist in England and America. He has appeared on television and radio programs all over the world, including Dateline NBC, Fox News, ABC’s 20/20, BBC World News, and A&E Biography.

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