The Fine Cotton Fiasco

The Fine Cotton Fiasco
Author: Peter Hoysted
Publisher: Random House Australia
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0143793713

Brisbane, 1984. It all started with a simple plan to secretly swap a mediocre horse with a faster one, and rake in the cash with a few well-placed bets. What could possibly go wrong? In The Fine Cotton Fiasco, Peter Hoysted and Pat Sheil brilliantly tell the scarcely believable tale of how – through a combination of horrendous mismanagement, terrible judgement and comically bad luck – the scheme gradually unravelled. How did a horse with white painted socks dripping onto the turf come to hold the hopes of punters across Australia and beyond? How was a supposedly secret plan so widely advertised that even the Queensland Commissioner of Police placed a bet? And how much of a cover-up ensued in the aftermath of this absolute debacle? The story of Fine Cotton is the stuff of Australian legend. It features hardcore crims, likeable rogues and a supporting cast that ranged from the hapless to the hopeless – with some entirely innocent bystanders thrown in for good measure. Not every crazy scheme cooked up by a couple of inmates in Boggo Road Gaol would culminate in a story that will be told across the nation for the next hundred years. But this one did.

Fall and Rise

Fall and Rise
Author: Mitchell Zuckoff
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 478
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0062275666

“Better and more comprehensive than any prior account. . . . Those of us who lived through those days will find the book cathartic; those rising generations who were too young to remember 9/11, or who weren’t yet born, will find it revelatory.” — John Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission and author of The Ground Truth “With his rigorous research and moral clarity, Mitchell Zuckoff has provided us with an invaluable service. He has deepened our understanding of what happened on 9/11 and recorded the voices of the victims and the survivors. What’s more, he has ensured that we never forget.” —David Grann, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon Years in the making, this spellbinding, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting narrative is an unforgettable portrait of 9/11. This is a 9/11 book like no other. Masterfully weaving together multiple strands of the events in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Fall and Rise is a mesmerizing, minute-by-minute account of that terrible day. In the days and months after 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff, then a reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote about the attacks, the victims, and their families. After further years of meticulous reporting, Zuckoff has filled Fall and Rise with voices of the lost and the saved. The result is an utterly gripping book, filled with intimate stories of people most affected by the events of that sunny Tuesday in September: an out-of-work actor stuck in an elevator in the North Tower of the World Trade Center; the heroes aboard Flight 93 deciding to take action; a veteran trapped in the inferno in the Pentagon; the fire chief among the first on the scene in sleepy Shanksville; a team of firefighters racing to save an injured woman and themselves; and the men, women, and children flying across country to see loved ones or for work who suddenly faced terrorists bent on murder. Fall and Rise will open new avenues of understanding for everyone who thinks they know the story of 9/11, bringing to life—and in some cases, bringing back to life—the extraordinary ordinary people who experienced the worst day in modern American history. Destined to be a classic, Fall and Rise will move, shock, inspire, and fill hearts with love and admiration for the human spirit as it triumphs in the face of horrifying events.

Bitcoin Widow

Bitcoin Widow
Author: Jennifer Robertson
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2022-01-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1443463914

She met the man of her dreams and suddenly had it all. Then, in one fateful night, she lost everything, and the nightmare began Jennifer Robertson was working hard to build a life for herself from the ashes of her first marriage. Still only twenty-six, she swiped right on a dating app and met Gerry Cotten, a man she would not normally have considered—too young and not her type—but found she’d met her match. Eccentric but funny and kind, Cotten turned out to be a bitcoin wizard who quickly amassed substantial wealth through his company, Quadriga. The couple travelled the world, first class all the way, while Cotten worked on his multitude of encrypted laptops. Then, while the couple was on their honeymoon in India, opening an orphanage in their name, Gerry fell ill and died in a matter of hours. Jennifer was consumed by grief and guilt, but that was only the beginning. It turned out that Gerry owed $250 million to Quadriga customers, and all the passwords to his encrypted virtual vaults, hidden on his many laptops, had died with him. Jennifer was left with more than one hundred thousand investors looking for their money, and questions, suspicions and accusations spiralling dangerously out of control. The Quadriga scandal touched off major investment and criminal investigations, not to mention Internet rumours circulating on dark message boards, including claims that Gerry had faked his own death and that his wife was the real mastermind behind a sophisticated sting operation. While Jennifer waited for a dead man’s switch e-mail that would probably never come, it became clear that Cotten had gambled away about $100 million of the funds entrusted to him for investment in his many schemes, leaving Robertson holding the bag. Bitcoin Widow is Catch Me If You Can meets a widow betrayed, a life of fairy-tale romance and private jets torched by duplicity, as Jennifer Robertson tries to reset her life in the wake of one of the biggest investment scandals of the digital age.

Albion's Seed

Albion's Seed
Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 981
Release: 1991-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 019974369X

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

The Horse Conformation Handbook

The Horse Conformation Handbook
Author: Heather Smith Thomas
Publisher: Storey Publishing
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2005-03-15
Genre: Nature
ISBN:

Horses with good conformation move fluidly, experience less wear and tear on joints, and are more apt to stay fit. Explaining how conformation relates to structure and function, Heather Smith Thomas shows you how to identify a horse’s desirable attributes and potential faults. You’ll learn to train your eye to see past an animal’s physical beauty and recognize proper balance, leg angles, and height as you confidently select horses that have superior durability, trainability, and athletic potential.

The Book of the Damned

The Book of the Damned
Author: Charles Fort
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2020-09-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1613106424

"Time travel, UFOs, mysterious planets, stigmata, rock-throwing poltergeists, huge footprints, bizarre rains of fish and frogs-nearly a century after Charles Fort's Book of the Damned was originally published, the strange phenomenon presented in this book remains largely unexplained by modern science. Through painstaking research and a witty, sarcastic style, Fort captures the imagination while exposing the flaws of popular scientific explanations. Virtually all of his material was compiled and documented from reports published in reputable journals, newspapers and periodicals because he was an avid collector. Charles Fort was somewhat of a recluse who spent most of his spare time researching these strange events and collected these reports from publications sent to him from around the globe. This was the first of a series of books he created on unusual and unexplained events and to this day it remains the most popular. If you agree that truth is often stranger than fiction, then this book is for you"--Taken from Good Reads website.

Fools Rush in

Fools Rush in
Author: Janice A. Thompson
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2011
Genre: Single women
ISBN:

Bella, an Italian from New Jersey whose family moved to Texas, must battle her feelings for a deejay and learn how to run the family's wedding planning business after she books a country and western theme wedding.

Empire of Pain

Empire of Pain
Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 574
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 038554569X

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing. "A real-life version of the HBO series Succession with a lethal sting in its tail…a masterful work of narrative reportage.” – Laura Miller, Slate The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability. A masterpiece of narrative reporting, Empire of Pain is a ferociously compelling portrait of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super-elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed that built one of the world’s great fortunes.

Cobra II

Cobra II
Author: Michael R. Gordon
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 682
Release: 2006-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0375424245

Written by the chief military correspondent of the New York Times and a prominent retired Marine general, this is the definitive account of the invasion of Iraq. A stunning work of investigative journalism, Cobra II describes in riveting detail how the American rush to Baghdad provided the opportunity for the virulent insurgency that followed. As Gordon and Trainor show, the brutal aftermath was not inevitable and was a surprise to the generals on both sides. Based on access to unseen documents and exclusive interviews with the men and women at the heart of the war, Cobra II provides firsthand accounts of the fighting on the ground and the high-level planning behind the scenes. Now with a new afterword that addresses what transpired after the fateful events of the summer of 2003, this is a peerless re-creation and analysis of the central event of our times.