Rose McGowan

Several pages marked with highlighted passages 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New Jersey

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the greatest tricks that the patriarchy plays on women is to deliberately destabilize them, then use their instability as a reason to disbelieve them. Much of BRAVE reads like the diary of a woman driven half-mad by abusive men who assume no one will listen to her. In this case, the truth was finally—and, for McGowan, triumphantly—exposed...” —The New York Times Book Review "BRAVE works beautifully as a manifesto. It’s a call to arms—not just against the specific men who mistreated McGowan and the men and women who enabled that mistreatment, but against an industry."—The Boston Globe A revealing memoir and empowering manifesto – A voice for generations Rose McGowan was born in one cult and came of age in another, more visible cult: Hollywood. In a strange world where she was continually on display, stardom soon became a personal nightmare of constant exposure and sexualization. Rose escaped into the world of her mind, something she had done as a child, and into high-profile relationships. Every detail of her personal life became public, and the realities of an inherently sexist industry emerged with every script, role, public appearance, and magazine cover. The Hollywood machine packaged her as a sexualized bombshell, hijacking her image and identity and marketing them for profit. Hollywood expected Rose to be silent and cooperative and to stay the path. Instead, she rebelled and asserted her true identity and voice. She reemerged unscripted, courageous, victorious, angry, smart, fierce, unapologetic, controversial, and real as f*ck. BRAVE is her raw, honest, and poignant memoir/manifesto—a no-holds-barred, pull-no-punches account of the rise of a millennial icon, fearless activist, and unstoppable force for change who is determined to expose the truth about the entertainment industry, dismantle the concept of fame, shine a light on a multibillion-dollar business built on systemic misogyny, and empower people everywhere to wake up and be BRAVE. "My life, as you will read, has taken me from one cult to another. BRAVE is the story of how I fought my way out of these cults and reclaimed my life. I want to help you do the same." -Rose McGowan

Brave

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#hardcover #biography #cult #cults #memoir #polygamy #religion #truecrime 

Maryland

A woman forced into a plural marriage as a teenager with a man thirty-two years her senior describes the years of psychological abuse she suffered, her decision to escape with her eight children, and her successful battle with the church over custody of her children.

Escape

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Cate Quinn

Washington

"I had the right husband--and the wrong wives." --One of Blake Nelson's widowsThe DrymeetsThe Handmaid's Talein this fascinating story of wife and death. Against the wishes of his family and the laws of the elders of the Mormon church, Blake Nelson has adopted the old polygamous ways and lives alone with his three wives, miles from anywhere, in rural Utah. Blake and his wives kept to themselves--and kept most folks out. That is, until his dead body is discovered. Black Widowsis told in the three voices of Blake's very different wives, who hate each other, and who sometimes hated their husband. Blake's dead. Did his wife kill him? And if so, which one?

Black Widows

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Alison Wisdom

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New York

A Novel

The acclaimed author of We Can Only Save Ourselves returns with an urgent and unsettling story that journeys into the heart of religious fanaticism and cult behavior as it probes one woman's struggle to define life on her own terms.

"Here comes trouble," Rosemary's high school English teacher used to say whenever he saw her. Rosemary has often felt like trouble, and now at thirty-two, her marriage to her college sweetheart, Paul, is crumbling. In a last-ditch attempt to restore it, she agrees to give herself over to a newly formed Christian sect in central Texas, run by charismatic young pastor Papa Jake. 

While Paul acclimates quickly to the small town of Dawson and the church's insistence on a strict set of puritanical rules, Rosemary struggles to fit in. She finds purpose only when she's called upon to help Julie, a new mother in the community, who is feeling isolated and lost.

Then the community is rocked by a series of fires which take some church members' homes and nearly take their lives, but which Papa Jake says are holy and a representation of God's will. 

As the fires spread, and Julie is betrayed in a terrible way, Rosemary begins to question the reality of her life, and wonders if trouble will always find her--or if she'll ever be able to outrun it. 

The Burning Season

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#crime #truecrime #cults #pnw #justice#hardcover 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Oregon

Trials of Franz Creffield and George Mitchell

Murdering Holiness explores the story of the "Holy Roller" sect led by Franz Creffield in the early years of the twentieth century. In the opening chapters, the authors introduce us to the community of Corvallis, Oregon, where Creffield, a charismatic, self-styled messiah, taught his followers to forsake their families and worldly possessions and to seek salvation through him. As his teachings became more extreme, the local community reacted: Creffield was tarred and feathered and his followers were incarcerated in the state asylum. Creffield himself was later imprisoned for adultery, but shortly after his release he revived the sect. This proved too much for some of the adherents' families, and in May 1906 George Mitchell, the brother of two women in the sect, pursued Creffield to Seattle and shot him dead.

Murdering Holiness

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New 2007 first edition book. 
Young girl tries to escape a racist cult. Can she make it?!

Georgia

Bone Lake

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

New Hampshire

The Cult Explosion

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Chelsea Bieker

Utah

“Imagine if Annie Proulx wrote something like White Oleander crossed with Geek Love or Cruddy, and then add cults, God, motherhood, girlhood, class, deserts, witches, the divinity of women . . . Terrifying, resplendent, and profoundly moving, this book will leave you changed." —T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen–year–old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret “assignments,” to bring the rain everybody is praying for. Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances. Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit and humor and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother–loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own. “[A] haunting debut . . . This is a harrowing tale, which Bieker smartly writes through the lens of a teenager on the cusp of understanding the often fraught relationship between religion and sexuality . . . It's a timely and disturbing portrait of how easily men can take advantage of vulnerable women—and the consequences sink in more deeply with each page."—Annabel Gutterman, Time “Drawn in brilliant, bizarre detail—baptism in warm soda, wisdom from romance novels—Lacey's twin crises of faith and femininity tangle powerfully. Fiercely written and endlessly readable, a novel like this is a godsend. A–.”—Mary Sollosi, Entertainment Weekly

Godshot

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Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Arkansas

Five friends are blackmailed into returning to the cult where they were raised to face their shared monstrous secret, by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, the New York Times bestselling author of Bittersweet It's time to come Home. All five of you. Or else." Saskia was a damaged, lonely teenager when she arrived at the lakeside commune called Home. She was entranced by the tang of sourdough starter; the midnight call of the loons; the triumph of foraging wild mushrooms from the forest floor - and Abraham, Home's charismatic leader, the North Star to Saskia and the four other teenagers who lived there, her best and only friends. Two decades later, Saskia is shuttered in her Connecticut estate. She's not scared of the world; it's her own capacity for ruthlessness that's made her lock herself away. In the shadow of Home's stately pines all those years ago, Abraham weaponized this trait, singling her out to do his bidding. The results haunt her daily. Then her worst nightmare comes true: she and her estranged friends receive threatening letters. Unless they return to the land in rural Maine, the terrible thing they did as teenagers - their last ditch attempt to save Home - will be revealed. Returning to Home from vastly different lives to confront their blackmailer, the five must not only face their dark past, but reckon with what they are capable of now that they've been reunited. How far will they go to bury their secret forever? "

Fierce Little Thing

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Amy Suiter Clarke

Florida

A Novel of Suspense

In Amy Suiter Clarke's brilliant sophomore thriller, a small Minnesota town is in turmoil as a devout Christian blogger is on trial for murdering her husband, a radical pastor's warped evangelical beliefs have poisoned the town, and one woman's past comes back to haunt her. It's been a decade since Deja Walker fled her claustrophobic hometown and the cult-like megachurch she grew up in, but now her old life seems to be in the news every day. Her former best friend--and viral Christian relationship blogger--Eve Oback is on trial for killing her husband, the man Deja once thought she herself was going to marry. Deja knows that Eve's holier-than-thou blog persona is a fraud, but as the trial starts, it's clear that the case against Eve is thin. No one in Boyd, Minnesota, is talking--and Deja has had enough. Even though she had sworn she would never again go back to her hometown, she is determined to do whatever it takes to see Eve Oback convicted. Even as Deja becomes more obsessed with digging up dirt in Boyd, her certainty that she knows everything about Eve begins to fray. Her friend made their pastor's Noble Wife philosophy a global phenomenon, becoming an evangelist for the obsessive commitment to purity and devotion to upholding the dreams of men. Deja has always assumed Eve got everything she wanted, but the more time she spends in Boyd, the less sure she is. There is a darkness in Messiah Church and radical pastor Rick Franklin's teachings that has infected the entire town. It may very well hold the answer to what really happened to Lars--the man Deja loved--the man she might not have known at all.

Lay Your Body Down

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Jon Krakauer

A Story of Violent Faith

Traces the events that surrounded the 1984 murder of a woman and her child by fundamentalist Mormons Ron and Dan Lafferty, exploring the belief systems and traditions, including polygamy, that mark the faith's most extreme factions and what their practices reflect about the nature of religion in America. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 300,000 first printing.

Under the Banner of Heaven

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Brooke Beyfuss

"Not a typical cult novel...Despite Avery's clear trauma and struggle for closure, her voice is strong and clear." - Booklist 

"Avery's voice resonates...Powerful and moving." - New York Journal of Books

An emotionally wrought, psychologically twisty coming-of-age story perfect for book clubs about a girl who escapes from a cult after a deadly fire destroys her family's compound, only to be haunted by That Night as she tries to build a new life for herself.

A fire. Her escape. And the realization her entire life has been a lie.

When nineteen-year-old Avery awakens to flames consuming her family's remote compound, she knows it's her only chance to escape her father's grueling survival training, bizarre rules, and gruesome punishments. She and her brother Cole flee the grounds for the first time in their lives, suddenly homeless in a world they know nothing about. After months of hiding out, they are arrested for shoplifting and a shocking discovery is made, resulting in the pair being separated.

Avery is alone and desperate. She is uncertain if her "parents" survived the fire and is terrified to find out. But when the police investigation reveals there may be more survivors, Avery must uncover the truth about the fire to truly be free.

Suspenseful, emotionally charged, and deeply thought-provoking, After We Were Stolen delves into the idea of family--those we're born into and those we make--resilience, and the lengths a cult survivor will go to finally be free of her painful past. 

Praise for After We Were Stolen:

"Brooke Beyfuss's After We Were Stolenkept me feverishly turning pages, anxious and eager to find out what happened to Avery and Cole as they emerge from a life they never asked for and into one they're totally unprepared to navigate."--Melanie Abrams, author of Meadowlark

"After We Were Stolenis an intelligent and heartrending story of vulnerability, power, resistance, and redemption. An excellent read that is sure to be a favorite book club pick." --Rebecca Taylor, author of The Secret Next Door

After We Were Stolen

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North Carolina

Mississippi

With echoes of The Virgin Suicides and The Fates Will Find Their Way, Alison Wisdom's debut novel is the story of one teenage girl's unlikely indoctrination and the reverberations in the tight-knit community she leaves behind. Alice Lange's neighbors are proud to know her--a high-achieving student, cheerleader, and all-around good citizen, she's a perfect emblem of their sunny neighborhood. The night before she's expected to be crowned Homecoming Queen, though, she commits an act of vandalism, then disappears, following a magnetic stranger named Wesley to a bungalow in another part of the state. There, he promises, Alice can be her true self, shedding the shackles of conformity. At the bungalow, however, she learns that four other young women seeking enlightenment and adventure have already followed him there. Her new lifestyle is intoxicating at first, but as Wesley's demands on all of them increase, the house becomes a pressure cooker--until one day they reach the point of no return. Back home, the story of Alice's disappearance and radicalization is framed by the first-person plural chorus of the mothers who knew her before, who worry about her, but also resent the tear she made in the fabric of their perfect world, one that exposes the question: Isn't suburbia a kind of cult unto itself? Combining the sharp social critique of Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere with the elegiac beauty of Emma Cline's The Girls, this is a fierce literary debut from a writer to watch.

We Can Only Save Ourselves

334777b5-e4ac-419a-9eba-6554170e55cf-1

Ohio

Swirling with secrets and their consequences, exploring how revelation and redemption might be accessed through sin, and driven through twists and turns toward a startling conclusion, The 12th Commandment is a brilliant novel by award-winning author Daniel Torday.

The Dönme sect--a group of Jewish-Islamic adherents with ancient roots--lives in an isolated community on rural land outside of smalltown Mt. Izmir, Ohio. Self-sustaining, deeply-religious, and heavily-armed, they have followed their self-proclaimed prophet, Natan of Flatbush, from Brooklyn to this new land.

But the brutal murder of Natan's teenage son throws their tight community into turmoil.

When Zeke Leger, a thirty-year-old writer at a national magazine, arrives from New York for the funeral of a friend, he becomes intrigued by the case, and begins to report on the murder. His college girlfriend Johanna Franklin prosecuted the case, and believes it is closed. Before he knows it, Zeke becomes entangled in the conflict between the Dönme, suspicious local citizens, Johanna, and the law--with dangerous implications for his body and his soul.

The 12th Commandment

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Timothy Keller

Massachusetts

The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters

New York Times bestselling author of The Prodigal Prophet and nationally renowned minister Timothy Keller exposes the error of making good things "ultimate" in this book, and shows readers a new path toward a hope that lasts. 

Success, true love, and the life you've always wanted. Many of us placed our faith in these things, believing they held the key to happiness, but with a sneaking suspicion they might not deliver. No wonder we feel lost, alone, disenchanted, and resentful. There is only one God who can wholly satisfy our cravings--and now is the perfect time to meet Him again, or for the first time.

In Counterfeit Gods, Timothy Keller shows how a proper understanding of the Bible reveals the unvarnished truth about societal ideals and our own hearts. This powerful message cements Keller's reputation as a critical thinker and pastor, and comes at a crucial time--for both the faithful and the skeptical.




Counterfeit Gods

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Courtney Summers

California

"A powerful, suspenseful, and heartbreaking thriller about identity, sisterhood, and belonging." - Kirkus (Starred Review) "Masterfully written and pulling no punches...Summers creates and sustains almost unbearable tension, exploring sacrifice, loss, forgiveness, miracles, surrender, grief, and lies. A gripping, flawless psychological thriller ready to leave readers shattered." - School Library Journal (Starred Review) "In this compelling and absorbing YA novel, two sisters make the most painful of choices based on their love for one another." - Shelf Awareness From Courtney Summers, the New York Times bestselling author of the 2019 Edgar Award Winner and breakout hit, Sadie, comes a sensational follow-up—another pulls-no-punches thriller about an aspiring young journalist determined to save her sister from a cult. "The Unity Project saved my life." Lo Denham is used to being on her own. After her parents died, Lo's sister, Bea, joined The Unity Project, leaving Lo in the care of their great aunt. Thanks to its extensive charitable work and community outreach, The Unity Project has won the hearts and minds of most in the Upstate New York region, but Lo knows there's more to the group than meets the eye. She's spent the last six years of her life trying—and failing—to prove it. "The Unity Project murdered my son." When a man shows up at the magazine Lo works for claiming The Unity Project killed his son, Lo sees the perfect opportunity to expose the group and reunite with Bea once and for all. When her investigation puts her in the direct path of its charismatic and mysterious leader, Lev Warren, he proposes a deal: if she can prove the worst of her suspicions about The Unity Project, she may expose them. If she can't, she must finally leave them alone. But as Lo delves deeper into The Project, the lives of its members, and spends more time with Lev, it upends everything she thought she knew about her sister, herself, cults, and the world around her—to the point she can no longer tell what's real or true. Lo never thought she could afford to believe in Lev Warren . . . but now she doesn't know if she can afford not to. Welcome to The Unity Project. "This book is brave and raw and exciting and wise--wise about girls and women, weakness and strength, and the bittersweet beauty of being human."--Melissa Albert, New York Times bestselling author of The Hazel Wood Series

The Project

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Emily Temple

Brand new, never read. This is a perfect read for the fall season. A teen thriller in the vein of the 90s horror cult film The Craft! 

"A teen thriller in the vein of the '90s horror movie The Craft . . . A beautiful meditation on meditation . . . Frequently hilarious, and thoughtful throughout." --The New York Times Book Review "The Lightness could be the love child of Donna Tartt and Tana French, but its savage, glittering magic is all Emily Temple's own." --Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists A Belletrist Book Club Pick! A Most Anticipated Novel by Entertainment Weekly * USA Today * Marie Claire * Elle * WSJ. Magazine * Glamour * Vulture * Bustle * Buzzfeed * The Millions * The Philadelphia Inquirer * Minneapolis Star Tribune * The Daily Beast * Refinery 29 * Publishers Weekly * Literary Hub * Electric Literature * and more! A stylish, stunningly precise, and suspenseful meditation on adolescent desire, female friendship, and the female body that shimmers with rage, wit, and fierce longing--an audacious, darkly observant, and mordantly funny literary debut for fans of Emma Cline, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Jenny Offill. One year ago, the person Olivia adores most in the world, her father, left home for a meditation retreat in the mountains and never returned. Yearning to make sense of his shocking departure and to escape her overbearing mother--a woman as grounded as her father is mercurial--Olivia runs away from home and retraces his path to a place known as the Levitation Center. Once there, she enrolls in their summer program for troubled teens, which Olivia refers to as "Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls". Soon, she finds herself drawn into the company of a close-knit trio of girls determined to transcend their circumstances, by any means necessary. Led by the elusive and beautiful Serena, and her aloof, secretive acolytes, Janet and Laurel, the girls decide this is the summer they will finally achieve enlightenment--and learn to levitate, to defy the weight of their bodies, to experience ultimate lightness. But as desire and danger intertwine, and Olivia comes ever closer to discovering what a body--and a girl--is capable of, it becomes increasingly clear that this is an advanced and perilous practice, and there's a chance not all of them will survive. Set over the course of one fateful summer that unfolds like a fever dream, The Lightness juxtaposes fairy tales with quantum physics, cognitive science with religious fervor, and the passions and obsessions of youth with all of these, to explore concepts as complex as faith and as simple as loving people--even though you don't, and can't, know them at all. "A suspenseful debut." -People Pick

The Lightness

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South Carolina

Retired Detective Sunderson must get past his troubles with alcohol if he and an unlikely 16-year-old sidekick are ever going to expose an elusive cult leader called The Great Leader. By the best-selling author of Legends of the Fall and The Farmer's Daughter.

The Great Leader

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Arthur Goldwag

Nevada

The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, the Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, the New World Order, and Many, Many More

Did you know?

. Freemasonry's first American lodge included a young Benjamin Franklin among its members.

. The Knights Templar began as impoverished warrior monks then evolved into bankers.

. Groom Lake, Dreamland, Homey Airport, Paradise Ranch, The Farm, Watertown Strip, Red Square, "The Box," are all names for Area 51.

An indispensable guide, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies connects the dots and sets the record straight on a host of greedy gurus and murderous messiahs, crepuscular cabals and suspicious coincidences. Some topics are familiar-the Kennedy assassinations, the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, the People's Temple and Heaven's Gate-and some surprising, like Oulipo, a select group of intellectuals who created wild formulas for creating literary masterpieces, and the Chauffeurs, an eighteenth-century society of French home invaders, who set fire to their victims' feet.

Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies

1237109b-d16e-4149-b7ea-0235ddac1a42-1

Linda Crew

Previously owned library book.  Minimal wear 

Pennsylvania

A True Story Imagined

I felt a tingling going through me and I fell to the floor with the others. Such a crying and a wailing, and all our private anguishes emptying from us, rushing forth, like a creek into a river, and all the rivers to the ocean. The window glass vibrated with the stomping of the floor and the pounding of the benches, like breakers on the shore, and the holy power of Joshua filled that room to where it seemed the very walls would crash into splinters at his command. Corvallis, Oregon, is a sleepy town in 1903. An ordinary town. Then Joshua arrives, and nothing will ever be the same again. A young and charismatic preacher, Joshua wins converts to his fiery brand of Christianity and casts his spell over the town's young women. Insisting on simplicity, he commands them to burn their worldly possessions. Demanding devotion to Christ, he tells them to abandon their domestic duties. But strange rumors begin to surface, and the smoldering suspicions of the fathers and sweethearts of Joshua's devoted followers soon explode into rage. Before it's all over, families will be torn apart and lives will be lost. In this true, stranger-than-fiction tale, sixteen-year-old Eva Mae tells of the excitement and horror of being swept up in a group bearing an uncanny resemblance to contemporary "End Time" cults. Her gripping story remindsus that no one is entirely immune to the power of a single charismatic voice heard at a vulnerable time.

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Rose McGowan

Brave

Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer

Escape

Cate Quinn

Black Widows

Alison Wisdom

The Burning Season

Jim Phillips; Rosemary Gartner

Murdering Holiness

Drusilla Campbell

Bone Lake

Dave Hunt

The Cult Explosion

Chelsea Bieker

Godshot

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Fierce Little Thing

Amy Suiter Clarke

Lay Your Body Down

Jon Krakauer

Under the Banner of Heaven

Brooke Beyfuss

After We Were Stolen

Alison Wisdom

The Burning Season

Alison Wisdom

We Can Only Save Ourselves

Daniel Torday

The 12th Commandment

Timothy Keller

Counterfeit Gods

Courtney Summers

The Project

Emily Temple

The Lightness

Jon Krakauer

Under the Banner of Heaven

Jim Harrison

The Great Leader

Arthur Goldwag

Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies

Linda Crew

Brides of Eden

Jon Krakauer

Under the Banner of Heaven

Jon Krakauer

Under the Banner of Heaven