This is True®
by Randy Cassingham

Randy Cassingham's Bonzer Web Sites of the Week: Recognizing Interesting Sites that are Beyond the Microsoft/AOL-Time Warner/Media Megalith

Post Secret

An art project gone mainstream, Post Secret is a collection of postcards. Not just any postcards, but "secrets" -- confessions, really -- sent by anonymous readers. "I work for the Director of a religious charity. He is robbing them blind and thinks nobody knows ... but I KNOW." Or: "At my best friend's graduation today I heard a fire engine and could only think of a bomb going off, the F.D. responding. Firecrackers went off and I heard machine gun fire. When I drive in my car, as I look for oncoming traffic I also check local buildings and houses for snipers. I have been out of the military for 2 years and was only in Iraq for 4 months. I am so f**king scared of everything." Amazing, powerful stuff.

From This is True for 28 May 2006

Suggestions for further reading:

Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside the Lines: Patterns, Stories, Pictures, True Con...
By: Kay GardinerAnn Meador Shayne
List Price: $29.95
Amazon Price: $19.77
Editorial Review:
Dear Fellow Knitter,

Welcome! Come on in. Have a seat—we’ve been waiting for you.

Ever since our first book, Mason-Dixon Knitting: The Curious Knitters’ Guide, we’ve been exploring techniques and ideas that we once thought were the sort of thing that only brilliant knitters could do.

Our conclusion: We are all brilliant knitters!

None of this is rocket science! If you can knit a garter stitch scarf, you’ve figured out the hard part. Now it’s time for the fun to start. You hold in your hands the result of our odyssey. It’s a new collection of 30 delicious projects that we hope will take you on your own knitting adventures.

Decorating Yourself: A collection of beautiful things to make for your most demanding (and forgiving) client.

The Fairest Isle of All: A simple, quick introduction to a sort of knitting you may not have considered, with surprising, modern projects.

Covering the Small Human: Pint-sized knits, including baby hats, dreamy dresses, and a cool pullover for the ultimate challenge: the Older Child.

Occasional Knitting: Projects for the special occasions in life—holidays, housewarmings, picnics.

The Sophisticated Kitchen: New uses for one of our favorite yarns: kitchen cotton.

We have filled this book with luscious photographs, stories, tips, rules, and hints. You’ll read how we arrived at these projects and the discoveries we have made along the way, and you will discover shocking things about us.

At all times, we have kept in mind Mason-Dixon Knitting Rule Number 1 : Knitting is spoze to be fun. Fasten your seatbelt—it’s going to be a fabulous ride!

Love,
Kay and Ann
 
Gaspipe: Confessions of a Mafia Boss
By: Philip Carlo
List Price: $25.95
Amazon Price: $17.13
Editorial Review:

Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso is currently serving thirteen consecutive life sentences plus 455 years at a federal prison in Colorado. Now, for the first time, the head of a mob family has granted complete and total access to a journalist. Casso has given New York Times bestselling author Philip Carlo the most intimate, personal look into the world of La Cosa Nostra ever seen. This is his shocking story.

From birth, Anthony Casso's mob life was preordained. Michael Casso introduced his young son around South Brooklyn's social clubs, where "men of honor" did business by shaking pinkie-ringed hands—hands equally at home pilfering stolen goods from the Brooklyn docks or gripping the cold steel of a silenced pistol. Young Anthony watched and listened and decided that he would devote his life to crime.

Casso would prove his talent for "earning," concocting ingenious schemes to hijack trucks, rob banks, and bring into New York vast quantities of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin. Casso also had an uncanny ability to work with the other Mafia families, and he forged unusually strong ties with the Russian mob. By the time Casso took the reins of the Lucchese family, he was a seasoned boss, a very dangerous man.

It was a great life—Casso and his beautiful wife, Lillian, had money to burn; Casso and his crew brought in so much cash that he had dozens of large safe-deposit boxes filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. But the law finally caught up with him in his New Jersey safe house in 1994. Rather than stoically face the music like the old-time mafiosi he revered, Casso became the thing he most hated—a rat. It broke his family's heart and made the once feared and revered mobster an object of scorn and disgust among his former friends. For it turned out that a lifetime of street smarts completely failed him in dealing with a group even more cunning and ruthless than the Mafia—the U.S. government.

Detailing Casso's feud with John Gotti and their attempts to kill each other, the "Windows Case" that led to the beginning of the end for the mob in New York, and Casso's dealings with decorated NYPD officers Lou Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa—the "Mafia cops"—Gaspipe is the inside story of one man's rise and fall, mirroring the rise and fall of a way of life, a roller-coaster ride into a netherworld few outsiders have ever dared to enter.


 
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (rpkg) (HarperClassics)
By: Avi
List Price: $5.99
Amazon Price: $5.99
Editorial Review:

A vicious captain, a mutinous crew --
and a young girl caught in the middle

Not every thirteen-year-old girl is accused of murder, brought to trial, and found guilty. But I was just such a girl, and my story is worth relating even if it did happen years ago. Be warned, however: If strong ideas and action offend you, read no more. Find another companion to share your idle hours. For my part I intend to tell the truth as I lived it.


 
If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer
By: The Goldman Family
List Price: $24.95
Amazon Price: $16.47
Editorial Review:
In 1994, Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson were brutally murdered at her home in Brentwood, California. O.J. Simpson was tried for the crime in a case that captured the attention of the American people, but was ultimately found not guilty of criminal charges. The victims' families brought civil cases against Simpson, and he was found liable for willfully and wrongfully causing the deaths of Ron and Nicole by committing battery with malice and oppression.

In 2006, HarperCollins announced the publication of a book in which O.J. Simpson told how he hypothetically would have committed the murders. In response to public outrage that Simpson stood to profit from these crimes, HarperCollins canceled the book. A Florida bankruptcy court awarded the rights to the Goldmans in August 2007 to partially satisfy the unpaid civil judgment, which has risen, with interest, to over $38 million.

The Goldman family views this book as his confession, and has worked hard to ensure that the public will read this book and learn the truth. This is the original manuscript approved by O.J. Simpson, with up to 14,000 words of key additional commentary.

A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice.


 
The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer
By: Philip Carlo
List Price: $14.95
Amazon Price: $10.17
Editorial Review:
Over six weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Top Mob Hitman. Devoted Family Man. Doting Father. For thirty years, Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski led a shocking double life, becoming the most notorious professional assassin in American history while happily hosting neighborhood barbecues in suburban New Jersey.



Richard Kuklinski was Sammy the Bull Gravano’s partner in the killing of Paul Castellano at Sparks Steakhouse. John Gotti hired him to torture and kill the neighbor who accidentally ran over his child. For an additional price, Kuklinski would make his victims suffer; he conducted this sadistic business with coldhearted intensity and shocking efficiency, never disappointing his customers. By his own estimate, he killed over two hundred men, taking enormous pride in his variety and ferocity of technique.



This trail of murder lasted over thirty years and took Kuklinski all over America and to the far corners of the earth, Brazil, Africa, and Europe. Along the way, he married, had three children, and put them through Catholic school. His daughter’s medical condition meant regular stays in children’s hospitals, where Kuklinski was remembered as an affectionate father, extremely kind to children. Each Christmas found the Kuklinski home festooned in colorful lights; each summer was a succession of block parties.



His family never suspected a thing.


 
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