An Act of Violence by Brendan Mays
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Brendan Mays is a journalist and author, and An Act of Violence is his first novel. It has been written and stylised especially for smartphones and the e-format.
According to Amazon.com, ebooks now outsell print books in the online store, not including free copies which would further separate the market. In the UK, Kindle books outsell hardcover books two to one.
“Ebooks are suited to the modern reader. It’s not always comfortable for me to carry a book through the week, but I like to read on the train and bus. I wanted something quick and easy to read on my phone, which was one of the reasons for writing my current work,” says Brendan Mays. You can read the book on your phone using the free Amazon Kindle app.
There are several other major benefits to the e-format, especially as we approach Christmas. Typically a time where wallets are stretched, ebooks are a cheap alternative to other gifts. Many major titles now retail from only a few dollars, which makes new books more accessible than ever.
Ebooks also save on waste, sparing hundreds of millions of trees across the globe, not including packaging and other emissions involved in production and transportation. This makes ebooks the green alternative, and another reason why conscientious buyers are continuing to warm to the e-format.
“If you look at growth online, it’s clear the e-format will gradually become the dominant force in the publishing industry. I think it is great to be able to pull out your phone or an ebook reader for five minutes here and there, and be able to jump into a story. With a good book, that’s all you need, and it‘s something I‘ve strived to achieve.”
5 Quick Reasons To Try Ebooks
1. They are customisable.
2. They are better for the environment.
3. They are cheap.
4.They are good for readers and authors.
5, They save space and make reading easy.
Ebook Description
Richard Resner recently asked the love of his life to marry him. He was happy, normal – complete. Then she disappeared without a trace.
What followed began a twisted spiral of events that would lead them both down a dark and violent path. Worst of all, they had invited it to happen. With their bodies, minds and souls facing the greatest of peril, the fight of their lives began.
Excerpt
Moving down the alley was a blur as she tripped and stumbled, and the further she walked, the longer away the seat became. Elysia struggled to put one foot after the other, and holding her stomach with her hand, she had the sudden urge to vomit.
In an instant, a renewed clarity dawned upon her as she realised things were far from right. She felt like she had been drugged and fear penetrated her skin like short sharp fangs were injecting it directly into her bloodstream. She pulled out her phone and called Richard, realising she could no longer tell where she was.
The ringtone sounded a few times, but before anyone answered, the phone was snatched from her hand and promptly crushed. Pieces of electronic circuitry twisted and trailed wisps of smoke as they fell down to the street, and horrified, she looked up at a broad, dark silhouette.
There was not much to see except a heavy black trench coat and hat. It was as if a mix of light and dark colours obscured her view. She tried to scream, but the air in her lungs would not push her voice on. Everything was frozen.
Elysia fell to her knees and heard a snarling, slobbering voice whisper her name. She started to sob, but in a flash, the daylight and the world around her lifted away with an uncontrollable pull. It was as if an invisible magnet was sucking her down, and then, all the colours swirled into their simple primary forms before dissolving completely into black and white.
The world disappeared.
John Gilmore’s On the Run with Bonnie & Clyde
Decades in the making, On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde is a fast moving and gut-wrenching, highly original exploration into the personalities of the star-crossed lovers and “public enemies” Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. A thoroughly researched, in-depth study of the true natures of these notorious outlaws, by an acclaimed author well versed in the dark fields of violence, On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde breaks away from the usual police-blotter procedurals on these outlaw lovers. Delving deep into their character in his unique and uncompromising style, Gilmore places the reader squarely inside a stolen 1932 V-8 with the desperadoes on a dusty, two-year, devil-take-the-high-road spree of robberies, shoot-outs and murder. Through the dark windshield of legend, the short lives of these outlaw desperadoes on a relentless ride to an infamous end-in a torrent of blood and bullets-emerges as an essential and compelling narrative of these undying icons of American crime lore. On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde includes a controversial critical perspective of the unlawful ambush murder of Bonnie Parker, who was never officially accused of a violent crime. Heavily illustrated with photos from the author’s collection.
“The most exciting, peeling-away of the human layers of two of the most infamous crime figures in American history . . . For the first time, we are truly taken inside these notorious characters.” – Lawrence Grobel, Biographer
“John Gilmore is one of America’s natural-born gifts to literature.” – Gary Indiana
A Road with No End, From a Forward to John Gilmore’s “On the Run with Bonnie & Clyde” by Marshall Terrill, author of a dozen successful books, most notably Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel.
The bogeyman really does exist and his name is John Gilmore. How many writers today can you really say are a bad ass? John Gilmore doesn’t know this, but he’s my favorite writer. He has been ever since I cracked open his book, Laid Bare, which is the best Hollywood memoir I’ve ever read. It’s not one of those “warts and all” type books – John splayed open his soul and put it out there for all to see. He writes about the carnality of Tinseltown; the Boulevard of Broken dreams; those trampled underfoot. Gilmore specializes in imploding Hollywood myths, and that, in my estimation, makes him dangerous. How many writers can you think of who are dangerous? So when John’s published asked me to write a foreword, naturally, I was thrilled. John is, in my humble opinion, the most talented noir/true crime writer on the scene today. No one even comes close. Forget James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, Joseph Wambaugh or Sue Grafton. Oh sure, they write about murder-mystery and blood and guts and gore, but they do it from the confines of their million-dollar mansions and plush home offices. John Gilmore prefers working on his own terms—in the trenches, down and dirty, sleeves rolled up, often moving to locales where the story takes place. In my humble opinion, he’s the most talented noir/true crime writer on the scene today—no one even comes close. He’s my favorite writer and has been ever since I cracked open 1997’s Laid Bare, which is the best Hollywood memoir I’ve ever read. It’s not one of those “warts and all” type books—John splayed open his soul and put it out there for all to see. He writes about the carnality of Tinseltown; the Boulevard of Broken dreams; and those trampled underfoot. He specializes in imploding Hollywood myths, and that, in my estimation, makes him dangerous.
Did I say bad-ass? The man is scary and I’ll tell you why: he has witnessed evil up close. He knows where the bodies are buried; has seen the skeletons in the closet; understands everyone’s strange peccadilloes. Gilmore is a literary surgeon whose pen is like a scalpel. He peers into souls, reads minds and isn’t afraid to crack open the cadaver to find out what’s inside. He divulges the secrets of the rich and famous and cold-blooded killers alike.
What separates Gilmore from the rest of the great noir/true crime writers is that he was there. He befriended them all, the stars, starlets, has-beens, gangsters, pimps, hustlers, murderers, and strips away the glitz and glamour with the stroke of his cynical and merciless pen. He is comfortable in the darkness and writes from a very shadowy place. He is the sum total of his incredible life experiences: the son of an LA cop and a star-struck mom. He’s been an actor, writer, director, teacher, painter, observer, confidant of legends, and myth maker as well as myth buster. He has an angel on his shoulder and a devil in his prose. He has looked evil in the eye many times and never flinched.
He’s from the Mad Men era where adults lived, loved and played hard; his literary voice comes from a life of gut-wrenching hardship, which he’ll admit, sometimes bordered on madness. He has lived an unrepentant life, which included plenty of beautiful women, booze, and dope. Most writers, including yours truly, secretly want to be loved by the public. Gilmore tells them, “Go fuck yourself.” I kind of like that.
He gives a whole new meaning to the word “embeddedness.” He spent four decades gum-shoeing the story of the Black Dahlia, faced off with the likes of Charles Manson and his Family, and was the one scribe to whom murderer Charles Schmid chose to confess his hideous crimes. Gilmore spent several years in the deep south and the “heart of Texas” researching the now mythic outlaws, Bonnie and Clyde. Don’t expect to read a tale of folk heroes who robbed banks to get back at the establishment during the crushing economic times of the Great Depression. Gilmore’s version of the co-dependent, fast-running duo is raw, gritty and authentically American. He gives the readers perhaps the truest and best account of their lives on the run. But that is no surprise. No one does Babylon, noir and crime better than John Gilmore.
BOOK AS OUTLAW, A Note by John Gilmore
Based on hard fact, ON THE RUN WITH BONNIE & CLYDE is by necessity part documentary, part true crime and memoir, part narrative and reportage, plus a personal account that arrives ipso facto as an outlaw. The long haul of exploring the serpentine trail of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, seeking to understand them—to walk in their shoes, so to speak—narrowed my focus keenly in on Bonnie and Clyde themselves, and proved the only way to share their tale was to shed my own shoes, and ride with them.
Consequently, this offering rarely strays from Bonnie and Clyde in reconstructing a run that only narrowly includes situations in which they were not present, or circumstances that lay beyond the windshield of their lives. In offsetting an obsession with their deaths, I have attempted to illuminate their lives: how they birthed emotionally, bonding in their unyielding passion to the violent outcome of that union, and the only way to offer what I’ve learned is to reconstruct it as closely as it was lived.
I journeyed through Texas, Missouri, New Mexico, and Arizona. I spent some time in Oklahoma and four years in Louisiana. It is now over 78 years since Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed on that lonely road in northern Louisiana. Neither left personal records or diaries. Apart from Bonnie’s long poems, Suicide Sal, and End of the Line (the latter title posthumously changed to The Story of Bonnie and Clyde), plus the many personal snapshots from Bonnie’s camera, or scraps of bullet-riddled clothing snipped with scissors from their bodies, or a pair of bloodstained glasses along with hats for each, there is almost nothing. Whatever dreams they possessed went up in gun smoke.
My hunt has been like opening a Chinese puzzle box or filling a jigsaw with missing pieces, seeking something other than a quasi-documentary guess at what might’ve been. I’ve learned that almost everything in books, archives, old newspapers and offerings by so-called authorities or scarce survivors, even relatives and dubious one-time associates, has piled error upon error, camouflaging gaps with moralizing rhetoric or confusing issues with make-believe conviction. Each presentation seems to opinionate the previous—or worse, borrows from a 1967 slapstick melodrama, itself an avalanche of misinformation burying any genuine try for a ‘real story’.
There isn’t a ‘real story’. Answers to real-life questions about Bonnie and Clyde are lost to history, while the deeper one digs, the more discrepancies are unearthed. This has created an alternate reality which most have and will subscribe to.
Two others have pieced together an approximation of what might’ve occurred, and I salute the efforts of James R. Knight and Jonathan Davis for their 21st Century Update. I also thank Winston G. Ramsey for his Bonnie & Clyde, Then and Now, both works offering detailed explorations of that time, of what was and the remains that exist—graves under damaged headstones, pavements over once dangerous dirt roads, rotting bridges spanning empty washes, weathered shacks collapsing in desolate, windy fields. The authors have done well in showing detailed portraits of what might have been, and what’s largely forgotten.
In offering this immediate portrait of their run across a disappeared American landscape, I’ve sought to bridge a gap of irresolute time and distance by bringing them to life through their language. ON THE RUN WITH BONNIE CLYDE is therefore an attempt to reflect the essence of these two beings—bad, good, wildly in-between without grace or blessing. I confess that my goal as a so-called “maverick author” has been to grasp a hoped-for truth in portraying them as their lives revealed, thus breaking the conventional, stereotypical shadows they’ve become. This, as well as an improvised approach to move well beyond the disturbing errors in published or filmed “history”.
Readers who’ve enjoyed my past efforts, please accept this offering as from a servant of that concept—truth before dishonor. Not the truth as with a hand on a Bible, but the truth that remains with “the last man standing.” If this book must be labeled an “outlaw,” it is because I have told the truth of the nature of the outlaw—my blinkered vision on Clyde Barrow, the true loner emerging as the ultimate anti-societal antagonist, with Bonnie devoted to dying at his side. So this disclaimer says: Read this ‘outlaw’ book at your own risk. My understanding of the emotional qualities of Bonnie and Clyde, and their psychological makeup, emerges from my long, relentless search for those whose paths they crossed—now so pitifully few remaining. My thanks to Stuart Swezey, my publisher, for taking on this unconventional book and showing again the faith he has demonstrated for many years in creating a remarkable history in alternative publishing, thus enabling a maverick such as myself to explore the lives and death of two misfits who long-ago broke the status-quo and paid the price with their lives.
To be released May 1, 2012. Pre-order available at: http://www.amazon.com/Run-Bonnie-Clyde-John-Gilmore/dp/1878923226/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325447048&sr=1-2id
For more information please visit: http://www.johngilmore.com
Wikipedia – Popular Outweighs Truth
February 12, 2012
The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia
For the past 10 years I’ve immersed myself in the details of one of the most famous events in American labor history, the Haymarket riot and trial of 1886. Along the way I’ve written two books and a couple of articles about the episode. In some circles that affords me a presumption of expertise on the subject. Not, however, on Wikipedia.
The bomb thrown during an anarchist rally in Chicago sparked America’s first Red Scare, a high-profile show trial, and a worldwide clemency movement for the seven condemned men. Today the martyrs’ graves are a national historic site, the location of the bombing is marked by a public sculpture, and the event is recounted in most American history textbooks. Its Wikipedia entry is detailed and elaborate.
A couple of years ago, on a slow day at the office, I decided to experiment with editing one particularly misleading assertion chiseled into the Wikipedia article. The description of the trial stated, “The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing. … “
Coincidentally, that is the claim that initially hooked me on the topic. In 2001 I was teaching a labor-history course, and our textbook contained nearly the same wording that appeared on Wikipedia. One of my students raised her hand: “If the trial went on for six weeks and no evidence was presented, what did they talk about all those days?” I’ve been working to answer her question ever since.
I have not resolved all the mysteries that surround the bombing, but I have dug deeply enough to be sure that the claim that the trial was bereft of evidence is flatly wrong. One hundred and eighteen witnesses were called to testify, many of them unindicted co-conspirators who detailed secret meetings where plans to attack police stations were mapped out, coded messages were placed in radical newspapers, and bombs were assembled in one of the defendants’ rooms.
In what was one of the first uses of forensic chemistry in an American courtroom, the city’s foremost chemists showed that the metallurgical profile of a bomb found in one of the anarchists’ homes was unlike any commercial metal but was similar in composition to a piece of shrapnel cut from the body of a slain police officer. So overwhelming was the evidence against one of the defendants that his lawyers even admitted that their client spent the afternoon before the Haymarket rally building bombs, arguing that he was acting in self-defense.
So I removed the line about there being “no evidence” and provided a full explanation in Wikipedia’s behind-the-scenes editing log. Within minutes my changes were reversed. The explanation: “You must provide reliable sources for your assertions to make changes along these lines to the article.”
That was curious, as I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress. I also noted one of my own peer-reviewed articles. One of the people who had assumed the role of keeper of this bit of history for Wikipedia quoted the Web site’s “undue weight” policy, which states that “articles should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views.” He then scolded me. “You should not delete information supported by the majority of sources to replace it with a minority view.”
The “undue weight” policy posed a problem. Scholars have been publishing the same ideas about the Haymarket case for more than a century. The last published bibliography of titles on the subject has 1,530 entries.
“Explain to me, then, how a ‘minority’ source with facts on its side would ever appear against a wrong ‘majority’ one?” I asked the Wiki-gatekeeper. He responded, “You’re more than welcome to discuss reliable sources here, that’s what the talk page is for. However, you might want to have a quick look at Wikipedia’s civility policy.”
I tried to edit the page again. Within 10 seconds I was informed that my citations to the primary documents were insufficient, as Wikipedia requires its contributors to rely on secondary sources, or, as my critic informed me, “published books.” Another editor cheerfully tutored me in what this means: “Wikipedia is not ‘truth,’ Wikipedia is ‘verifiability’ of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that.”
Tempted to win simply through sheer tenacity, I edited the page again. My triumph was even more fleeting than before. Within seconds the page was changed back. The reason: “reverting possible vandalism.” Fearing that I would forever have to wear the scarlet letter of Wikipedia vandal, I relented but noted with some consolation that in the wake of my protest, the editors made a slight gesture of reconciliation—they added the word “credible” so that it now read, “The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer credible evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing. … ” Though that was still inaccurate, I decided not to attempt to correct the entry again until I could clear the hurdles my anonymous interlocutors had set before me.
So I waited two years, until my book on the trial was published. “Now, at last, I have a proper Wikipedia leg to stand on,” I thought as I opened the page and found at least a dozen statements that were factual errors, including some that contradicted their own cited sources. I found myself hesitant to write, eerily aware that the self-deputized protectors of the page were reading over my shoulder, itching to revert my edits and tutor me in Wiki-decorum. I made a small edit, testing the waters.
My improvement lasted five minutes before a Wiki-cop scolded me, “I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia’s policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write ‘Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.’ … As individual editors, we’re not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write.”
I guess this gives me a glimmer of hope that someday, perhaps before another century goes by, enough of my fellow scholars will adopt my views that I can change that Wikipedia entry. Until then I will have to continue to shout that the sky was blue.
See the original article here:
The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
