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“In my world, you are either the hunter or the prey, and I am the hunter. Vegas was my prey. I tell my crew: Vegas makes it, Vigoa takes it.”
–Jose Vigoa[pg. 37]

When it comes to violent crime, the Las Vegas cops and casino owners thought they had seen it all. But they had never witnessed anything like Jose Vigoa.

Born in Cuba, a child of Fidel Castro’s revolution, Vigoa used his quick wits and quicker fists to trade a life of poverty and desperation for one of danger and adventure as a Soviet-trained special forces officer. Battle hardened in the killing fields of Afghanistan and Angola, Vigoa won a reputation for toughness, bravery, and coolness under fire. A brilliant military career lay ahead of him.

Then, in 1980, Castro opened Cuba’s floodgates in the Mariel boatlift, and Vigoa, like so many of his countrymen and -women, braved chaos and hardship to start a new life in America’s promised land. But involvement with the drug trade brought his dreams crashing down. Years of prison followed.

On his release, Vigoa was determined to take revenge on what he perceived as the corrupt power structure of Las Vegas. On September 20, 1998, the former Spetsnaz lieutenant launched what would be the most audacious and ruthless series of high-profile casino and armored car robberies that Las Vegas had ever seen. In a brazen sixteen-month-long reign of terror, he and his tightly disciplined crew would hit the crème de la crème of Vegas hotels: the MGM, the Desert Inn, the New York-New York, the Mandalay Bay, and the Bellagio. They struck hard and fast, then vanished without a trace. Millions of dollars were stolen. Two brave men were gunned down in cold blood; others were wounded. And yet the robberies were so well planned and executed that the police–“the stupids,” as Vigoa contemptuously referred to them–were all but helpless.

Not Lt. John Alamshaw. The twenty-three-year veteran, in charge of robbery detectives, was not giving up so easily. For him, Vigoa’s rampage was a personal affront. And he would do whatever it took, even risk his badge, to bring Vigao down.

With exclusive access to all the major players, including Vigoa and Alamshaw, veteran journalist and network producer John Huddy is the perfect man to tell the gripping never-before-told story of this harrowing true-crime drama that will leave readers breathless..
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A friend's father is trapped in the dungeon of a medieval castle. To rescue him, readers must travel through secret passages, navigate a siege, scramble across a battlement, and scale the keep in a series of ever more challenging mazes that reveal fascinating details about life in the age of chivalry.

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Price: $4.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Annadel, West Virginia, was a small town rich in coal, farms, and close-knit families, all destroyed when the coal company came in. It stole everything it hadn't bothered to buy -- land deeds, private homes, and ultimately, the souls of its men and women.
Four people tell this powerful, deeply moving tale: Activist Mayor C.J. Marcum. Fierce, loveless union man Rondal Lloyd. Gutsy nurse Carrie Bishop, who loved Rondal. And lonely, Sicilian immigrant Rose Angelelli, who lost four sons to the deadly mines.
They all bear witness to nearly forgotten events of history, culminating in the final, tragic Battle of Blair Mountain -- when the United States Army greeted 10,000 unemployed pro-union miners with airplanes, bombs, and poison gas. It was the first crucial battle of a war that has yet to be won.
"Brilliant, diamond-hard fiction, heartwrenching, tough and tender." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Price: $3.26 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Rebecca Solnit has made a vocation of journeying into difficult territory and reporting back, as an environmentalist, antiglobalization activist, and public intellectual Storming the Gates of Paradise, an anthology of her essential essays from the past ten years, takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.S.-Mexican border, from San Francisco to London, from open sky to the deepest mines, and from the antislavery struggles of two hundred years ago to today's street protests. The nearly forty essays collected here comprise a unique guidebook to the American landscape after the millennium--not just the deserts, skies, gardens, and wilderness areas that have long made up Solnit's subject matter, but the social landscape of democracy and repression, of borders, ruins, and protests. She ventures into territories as dark as prison and as sublime as a broad vista, revealing beauty in the harshest landscape and political struggle in the most apparently serene view. Her introduction sets the tone and the book's overarching themes as she describes Thoreau, leaving the jail cell where he had been confined for refusing to pay war taxes and proceeding directly to his favorite huckleberry patch. In this way she links pleasure to politics, brilliantly demonstrating that the path to paradise has often run through prison.
These startling insights on current affairs, politics, culture, and history, always expressed in Solnit's pellucid and graceful prose, constantly revise our views of the otherwise ordinary and familiar. Illustrated throughout, Storming the Gates of Paradise represents recent developments in Solnit's thinking and offers the reader a panoramic world view enriched by her characteristically provocative, inspiring, and hopeful observations..
Price: $11.53 [Notify me when price goes down.]

No times are more difficult for the survival of a company than recessions They are defining moments for managers Yet there are few books on recession strategy out there. This book aims to fill that gap. This book is different. Recession-proofing articles talk about keeping your head down and focusing on costs and cashflow. We say you cannot cut your way to greatness: this is a book for managers who have a handle on their costs and ask what now? If you want to thrive you need to storm through recessions and downturns. That is why the book is called Recession Storming. Recession Storming covers 5 main areas: understanding the business environment, retaining existing customers, maintaining margins through pricing, moving ahead with new product-offerings, and winning new customers. There are over 100 strategies in this book, pulled from over eighty companies from some 5 economic recessions. Just one idea will repay the purchase price of the book many times over..
Price: $27.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In Storming Caesars Palace, historian Annelise Orleck tells the compelling story of how a group of welfare mothers built one of this country's most successful antipoverty programs Declaring "We can do it and do it better," these women proved that poor mothers are the real experts on poverty. In 1972 they founded Operation Life, which was responsible for many firsts for the poor in Las Vegas—the first library, medical center, daycare center, job training, and senior citizen housing. By the late 1970s, Operation Life was bringing millions of dollars into the community. These women became influential in Washington, DC—respected and listened to by political heavyweights such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ted Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter. Though they lost their funding with the country's move toward conservatism in the 1980s, their struggles and phenomenal triumphs still stand as a critical lesson about what can be achieved when those on welfare chart their own course.

"An up-close and personal account of nine strong-minded African-American women who became welfare-rights activists in Las Vegas . . . A worthy history of the country's changing attitudes toward welfare and the various attempts to eradicate poverty." —Kirkus Reviews

Annelise Orleck is associate professor of history and women's and gender studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Common Sense and a Little Fire and Soviet Jewish Americans and coeditor of The Politics of Motherhood. Orleck lives in Thetford Center, Vermont, with her partner and their two children..
Price: $18.38 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The term “cyberpunk” entered the literary landscape in 1984 to describe William Gibson’s pathbreaking novel Neuromancer. Cyberpunks are now among the shock troops of postmodernism, Larry McCaffery argues in Storming the Reality Studio, marshalling the resources of a fragmentary culture to create a startling new form. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, multinational machinations, frenetic bursts of prose, collisions of style, celebrations of texture: although emerging largely from science fiction, these features of cyberpunk writing are, as this volume makes clear, integrally related to the aims and innovations of the literary avant-garde.

By bringing together original fiction by well-known contemporary writers (William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany), critical commentary by some of the major theorists of postmodern art and culture (Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard), and work by major practitioners of cyberpunk (William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling), Storming the Reality Studio reveals a fascinating ongoing dialog in contemporary culture.
What emerges most strikingly from the colloquy is a shared preoccupation with the force of technology in shaping modern life. It is precisely this concern, according to McCaffery, that has put science fiction, typically the province of technological art, at the forefront of creative explorations of our unique age.
A rich opporunity for reading across genres, this anthology offers a new perspective on the evolution of postmodern culture and ultimately shows how deeply technological developments have influenced our vision and our art.

Selected Fiction contributors: Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Pat Cadigan, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Harold Jaffe, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Leyner, Joseph McElroy, Misha, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, William Vollman

Selected Non-Fiction contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard, Larry McCaffery, Brian McHale, Dave Porush, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Takayuki Tatsumi.
Price: $10.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

War has been declared on America-and it begins with a cargo of explosives at a major U.S. airport.

"The best military adventure writer in the country today." (Clive Cussler)

"Brown is a superb storyteller." (W.E.B. Griffin)

"Brown puts readers right into the middle of the inferno." (Larry Bond).
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