Eddie Muller

Jerry Thompson

Featuring brand-new stories by: Nick Petrulakis, Kim Addonizio, Keenan Norris, Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder, Katie Gilmartin, Dorothy Lazard, Harry Louis Williams II, Carolyn Alexander, Phil Canalin, Judy Juanita, Jamie DeWolf, Nayomi Munaweera, Mahmud Rahman, Tom McElravey, Joe Loya, and Eddie Muller. Jerry Thompson is an accomplished violinist, playwright, and poet. He is the coauthor of Black Artists in Oakland and owned Black Spring Books, an independent bookstore. Eddie Muller, also known as the "Czar of Noir," has been nominated for several Edgar and Anthony awards, and his novel The Distance won a Shamus Award. He produces the San Francisco Noir City Film Festival, the largest annual film noir retrospective in the world, and is a frequent host on Turner Classic Movies.

Oakland Noir

the earthquake and tsunami that could devastate North America

Cascadia's fault

A full account by the first journalist to infiltrate the KKK and discover the true nature and aims of the secret society and its covert operations

My Life in the Klan

Harwood P. Hinton

For a half century, John Ellis Wool (1784–1869) was one of America’s most illustrious figures—most notably as an officer in the United States Army during the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. At the onset of the Civil War, when he assumed command of the Department of the East, Wool had been a brigadier general for twenty years and, at age seventy-seven, was the oldest general on either side of the conflict. Courage Above All Things marks the first full biography of Wool, who aside from his unparalleled military service, figured prominently in many critical moments in nineteenth-century U.S. history. At the time of his death in 2016, Harwood Hinton, a scholar with an encyclopedic knowledge of western history, had devoted fifty years to this monumental work, which has been completed and edited by the distinguished historian Jerry Thompson. This deeply researched and deftly written volume incorporates the latest scholarship to offer a clear and detailed account of John Ellis Wool’s extraordinary life—his character, his life experiences, and his career, in wartime and during uneasy periods of relative peace. Hinton and Thompson provide a thorough account of all chapters in Wool’s life, including three major wars, the Cherokee Removal, and battles with Native Americans on the West Coast. From his distinguished participation in the War of 1812 to his controversial service on the Pacific coast during the 1850s, and from his mixed success during the Peninsula Campaign to his overseeing of efforts to quell the New York City draft riots of 1863, John Ellis Wool emerges here as a crucial character in the story of nineteenth-century America—complex, contradictory, larger than life—finally fully realized for the first time.

General John Ellis Wool and the U.S. Military, 1812–1863

Courage Above All Things

There is a crack in the earth's crust that runs roughly 31 miles offshore, approximately 683 miles from Northern California up through Vancouver Island off the coast of British Columbia. The Cascadia Subduction Zone has generated massive earthquakes over and over again throughout geologic time—at least thirty–six major events in the last 10,000 years. This fault generates a monster earthquake about every 500 years. And the monster is due to return at any time. It could happen 200 years from now, or it could be tonight. The Cascadia Subduction Zone is virtually identical to the offshore fault that wrecked Sumatra in 2004. It will generate the same earthquake we saw in Sumatra, at magnitude nine or higher, sending crippling shockwaves across a far wider area than any California quake. Slamming into Sacramento, Portland, Seattle, Victoria, and Vancouver, it will send tidal waves to the shores of Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, damaging the economies of the Pacific Rim countries and their trading partners for years to come. In light of recent massive quakes in Haiti, Chile, and Mexico, Cascadia's Fault not only tells the story of this potentially devastating earthquake and the tsunamis it will spawn, it also warns us about an impending crisis almost unprecedented in modern history.

The Coming Earthquake and Tsunami that Could Devastate North America

Cascadia's Fault

Growing up, Jerry Thompson knew only that his grandfather was a gritty, “mixed-blood” Cherokee cowboy named Joe Lynch Davis. That was all anyone cared to say about the man. But after Thompson’s mother died, the award-winning historian discovered a shoebox full of letters that held the key to a long-lost family history of passion, violence, and despair. Wrecked Lives and Lost Souls, the result of Thompson’s sleuthing into his family’s past, uncovers the lawless life and times of a man at the center of systematic cattle rustling, feuding, gun battles, a bloody range war, bank robberies, and train heists in early 1900s Indian Territory and Oklahoma. Through painstaking detective work into archival sources, newspaper accounts, and court proceedings, and via numerous interviews, Thompson pieces together not only the story of his grandfather—and a long-forgotten gang of outlaws to rival the infamous Younger brothers—but also the dark path of a Cherokee diaspora from Georgia to Indian Territory. Davis, born in 1891, grew up on a family ranch on the Canadian River, outside the small community of Porum in the Cherokee Nation. The range was being fenced, and for the Davis family and others, cattle rustling was part of a way of life—a habit that ultimately spilled over into violence and murder. The story “goes way back to the wild & wooly cattle days of the west,” an aunt wrote to Thompson’s mother, “when there was cattle rustling, bank robberies & feuding.” One of these feuds—that Joe Davis was “raised right into”—was the decade-long Porum Range War, which culminated in the murder of Davis’s uncle in 1907. In fleshing out the details of the range war and his grandfather’s life, Thompson brings to light the brutality and far-reaching consequences of an obscure chapter in the history of the American West.

Jerry Thompson

Books

Your next favorite book is out there