The Kidnapping Club

Author: Jonathan Daniel Wells
Publisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN: 1645037118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
Winner of a 2020-2021 New York City Book Award In a rapidly changing New York, two forces battled for the city's soul: the pro-slavery New Yorkers who kept the illegal slave trade alive and well, and the abolitionists fighting for freedom. We often think of slavery as a southern phenomenon, far removed from the booming cities of the North. But even though slavery had been outlawed in Gotham by the 1830s, Black New Yorkers were not safe. Not only was the city built on the backs of slaves; it was essential in keeping slavery and the slave trade alive. In The Kidnapping Club, historian Jonathan Daniel Wells tells the story of the powerful network of judges, lawyers, and police officers who circumvented anti-slavery laws by sanctioning the kidnapping of free and fugitive African Americans. Nicknamed "The New York Kidnapping Club," the group had the tacit support of institutions from Wall Street to Tammany Hall whose wealth depended on the Southern slave and cotton trade. But a small cohort of abolitionists, including Black journalist David Ruggles, organized tirelessly for the rights of Black New Yorkers, often risking their lives in the process. Taking readers into the bustling streets and ports of America's great Northern metropolis, The Kidnapping Club is a dramatic account of the ties between slavery and capitalism, the deeply corrupt roots of policing, and the strength of Black activism.

A Rope and a Prayer

Author: David Rohde
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143120050
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
The compelling and insightful account of a New York Times reporter's abduction by the Taliban, and his wife's struggle to free him. In November 2008, David Rohde, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times, was kidnapped by the Taliban and held captive for seven months in the tribal areas of Pakistan. In the process, Rohde became the first American to witness how Pakistan's powerful military turns a blind eye toward a Taliban ministate thriving inside its borders. In New York, David's wife Kristen Mulvihill, together with his family, kept the kidnapping secret for David's safety and struggled to navigate a labyrinth of conflicting agendas, misinformation, and lies. Part memoir, part work of journalism, A Rope and a Prayer is a story of duplicity, faith, resilience, and love.

News of a Kidnapping

Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101911220
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN eBOOK! In 1990, fearing extradition to the United States, Pablo Escobar – head of the Medellín drug cartel – kidnapped ten notable Colombians to use as bargaining chips. With the eye of a poet, García Márquez describes the survivors’ perilous ordeal and the bizarre drama of the negotiations for their release. He also depicts the keening ache of Colombia after nearly forty years of rebel uprisings, right-wing death squads, currency collapse and narco-democracy. With cinematic intensity, breathtaking language and journalistic rigor, García Márquez evokes the sickness that inflicts his beloved country and how it penetrates every strata of society, from the lowliest peasant to the President himself.

The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

Author: David I. Kertzer
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307486710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg. A National Book Award Finalist The extraordinary story of how the vatican's imprisonment of a six-year-old Jewish boy in 1858 helped to bring about the collapse of the popes' worldly power in Italy. Bologna: nightfall, June 1858. A knock sounds at the door of the Jewish merchant Momolo Mortara. Two officers of the Inquisition bust inside and seize Mortara's six-year-old son, Edgardo. As the boy is wrenched from his father's arms, his mother collapses. The reason for his abduction: the boy had been secretly "baptized" by a family servant. According to papal law, the child is therefore a Catholic who can be taken from his family and delivered to a special monastery where his conversion will be completed. With this terrifying scene, prize-winning historian David I. Kertzer begins the true story of how one boy's kidnapping became a pivotal event in the collapse of the Vatican as a secular power. The book evokes the anguish of a modest merchant's family, the rhythms of daily life in a Jewish ghetto, and also explores, through the revolutionary campaigns of Mazzini and Garibaldi and such personages as Napoleon III, the emergence of Italy as a modern national state. Moving and informative, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara reads as both a historical thriller and an authoritative analysis of how a single human tragedy changed the course of history.

A Study Guide for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "News of a Kidnapping"

Author: Gale, Cengage Learning
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
ISBN: 1410353869
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Book Description
A Study Guide for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "News of a Kidnapping," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Nonfiction Classics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Nonfiction Classics for Students for all of your research needs.

Kidnapped

Author: Paula S. Fass
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195311419
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
A look at the history of child kidnappings and abductions in the United States, the motives of the perpetrators, the activities of the media, and the results in the law and in public opinions.

Held Captive

Author: Maggie Haberman
Publisher: Avon Books
ISBN: 9780739436073
Category : Abduction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
On a June night in 2002, Salt Lake City teenager Elizabeth Smart was abducted at knifepoint from her own bedroom. for months afterward her distraught family prayed for her safe return while a massive manhunt was undertaken. Then, in March of the following year, Elizabeth Smart was discovered alive just a few miles from home, the prisoner of a man who believed himself the messiah and his loyal, complacent wife. What happened to Elizabeth during her nine months of captivity is shocking; how she finally gained her freedom is remarkable. And now the story can be told -- including startling information about the controversial investigation. -- book jacket.

Operation Jacknap

Author: Jack Teich
Publisher: Bombardier Books
ISBN: 1642935247
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description
The New York Times described what happened to New York businessman Jack Teich as a “front page horror.” Two hundred FBI agents and Nassau County police officers combined forces to form a dragnet, hunt for his kidnappers, and rescue him. Teich lay handcuffed and chained to the walls of a closet in the Bronx with a medical bandage wrapped around his head to cover his eyes. His captors demanded that his wife, Janet, drop a bag with $750,000 (the equivalent of four million dollars in today’s currency) in a locker at Penn Station, making the Jack Teich ransom one of the highest in U.S. history at the time. FBI and Nassau County police detectives spent over a year before finally uncovering the meticulously planned kidnapping ploy hatched by radical mastermind Richard Warren Williams. The FBI internally dubbed the Jack Teich kidnapping operation “Jacknap.” The real-life crime drama that followed proved stranger than fiction, involving a tense across-the-country manhunt, a trailer in California stuffed with tens of thousands of ransom dollars hidden inside, a contentious jury trial that dominated NYC headlines for months; a guilty verdict that was overturned twenty-one years later on a controversial technicality; a retrial stymied by a mysterious fire that incinerated court records; and a civil verdict ruling that the kidnapper pay Jack Teich back the ransom money, plus interest. Operation Jacknap tells the incredible true crime story that continues even now. Indeed, as of this writing, no one knows where the majority of the ransom money is located. Inside, Teich also details his offer of a reward to anyone helping track down the still missing money and kidnappers.

Impossible Odds

Author: Jessica Buchanan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476725160
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
An account of the aid worker co-author's dramatic January 2012 rescue from kidnappers in Somalia by members of a Navy SEAL Team Six unit offers insight into the effective use of targeted U.S. military missions.

Deep in the Woods

Author: Bryan Johnston
Publisher: Post Hill Press
ISBN: 1642939048
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
In 1935, nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser, heir to one of the wealthiest families in America, is snatched off the streets two blocks from his home. The boy is kept manacled in a pit, chained to a tree, and locked in a closet. The perps—a career bank robber, a petty thief, and his nineteen-year-old never-been-in-trouble Mormon wife—quickly become the targets of the biggest manhunt in Northwest history. The caper plays out like a Hollywood thriller with countless twists and improbable developments. Perhaps the most astonishing thing of all, though, is how it all ends.