The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Author: Ron Hansen
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1480423882

A powerful novel of the infamous Western outlaw and his killer: “The best blend of fiction and history I’ve read in a long while” (John Irving). By age thirty-four, Jesse James was already one of the most notorious and admired men in America. Bank robber, train bandit, gang leader, killer, and beloved son of Missouri— James’s many epithets live on in newspapers and novels alike. As his celebrity was reaching its apex, James met Robert Ford, the brother of a James gang member—an awkward, antihero-worshipping twenty-year-old with stars in his eyes. The young man’s fascination with the legend borders on jealous obsession: While Ford wants to ride alongside James as his most-trusted confidant, sharing his spotlight is not enough. As a bond forms between the two men, Ford realizes that the only way he’ll ever be as powerful as his idol is to become him; he must kill James and take his mantle. In the striking novel that inspired the film of the same name starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, bestselling author Ron Hansen retells a classic Wild West story that has long captured the nation’s imagination, and breathes new life into the final days and ignoble death of an iconic American man.

Jesse James and the Movies

Jesse James and the Movies
Author: Johnny D. Boggs
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2014-01-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786484969

This illustrated filmography analyzes the plots and players of the more than forty motion pictures about the legendary Missouri outlaw Jesse James (1847-1882), from the silent era to the 21st century. Among the films and actors covered are Jesse James (1939) with Tyrone Power, Kansas Raiders (1950) with Audie Murphy, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) with Robert Duvall, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) with Brad Pitt. Each evaluation compares Hollywood's version of history to the hard facts. A brief biography of the outlaw provides an overview of his life and career. Also examined are European films, made-for-television movies and continuing TV series that have featured episodes involving Jesse James.

Desperadoes

Desperadoes
Author: Ron Hansen
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1480423874

DIVRon Hansen’s engrossing novel of the violent life and criminal exploits of the Dalton gang, as remembered by its last surviving member/divDIV From his home in Los Angeles, an aging Emmett Dalton reminisces about his glory days in America’s Wild West. Now sixty-five years old, and a Hollywood fixture, he makes a comfortable living selling stories of his earlier exploits to movie studios. But years before, he rode with his two brothers—charming, handsome, charismatic Bob, and the cold-eyed killer Grat, so wild and unpredictable that even his own family was afraid of him—committing brazen acts of robbery, bootlegging, and murder. As the last surviving member of the infamous Dalton gang, it’s Emmett’s responsibility to keep their legend alive. He has resolved to tell the full truth about the fabled career of the three criminal brothers and Eugenia Moore, the former schoolmarm who was an indispensable partner in their crimes, even if that truth turns out to be a darker, more painful, and less heroic picture than Hollywood’s moguls would make it out to be./divDIV /divDIVThe critically acclaimed debut novel by bestselling author Ron Hansen, Desperadoes is a masterwork of historical fiction that brings a fabled era of American outlaws and violence to breathtaking life./div

Astray

Astray
Author: Emma Donoghue
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2012-10-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316206261

From the New York Times bestselling author of Room comes a moving set of historical stories spanning centuries and continents. ​ The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress. With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times.

Jesse James

Jesse James
Author: T J Stiles
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2012-04-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1407074717

At sixteen, Jesse James began his fighting career by killing Unionist neighbours on their doorsteps. In the bloodshed and bitterness that followed the South's surrender at Appomattox, Jesse and his fellow guerillas, with their gunfights and hold-ups, became part of the intensely brutal struggle by the White South against the racial egalitarianism and Federal power fostered by Reconstruction. In the first serious biography of Jesse James in forty years, T. J. Stiles paints a strikingly new and vivid portrait of the period before the American Civil War, during the conflict and its aftermath. With groundbreaking scholarship and dazzling reinterpretation, T. J. Stiles has refashioned one of the great legends of American history.

Exiles

Exiles
Author: Ron Hansen
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2010-05-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 142994143X

With Exiles, Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of "elected silence" with an outpouring of dazzling poetry. In December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremen, bound for England and then America. On board were five young nuns who, exiled by Bismarck's laws against Catholic religious orders, were going to begin their lives anew in Missouri. Early one morning, the ship ran aground in the Thames and more than sixty lives were lost—including those of the five nuns. Hopkins was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales, and he was so moved by the news of the shipwreck that he wrote a grand poem about it, his first serious work since abandoning a literary career at Oxford to become a priest. He too would die young, an exile from the literary world. But as Hansen's gorgeously written account of Hopkins's life makes clear, he fulfilled his calling. Combining a thrilling tragedy at sea with the seeming shipwreck of Hopkins's own life, Exiles joins Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy (called "an astonishingly deft and provocative novel" by The New York Times) as a novel that dramatizes the passionate inner search of religious life and makes it accessible to us in the way that only great art can.

My Year of Flops

My Year of Flops
Author: Nathan Rabin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2010-10-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1439160317

In 2007, Nathan Rabin set out to provide a revisionist look at the history of cinematic failure on a weekly basis. What began as a solitary ramble through the nooks and crannies of pop culture evolved into a way of life. My Year Of Flops collects dozens of the best-loved entries from the A.V. Club column along with bonus interviews and fifteen brand-new entries covering everything from notorious flops like The Cable Guy and Last Action Hero to bizarre obscurities like Glory Road, Johnny Cash’s poignantly homemade tribute to Jesus. Driven by a unique combination of sympathy and Schadenfreude, My Year Of Flops is an unforgettable tribute to cinematic losers, beautiful and otherwise.

American Outlaw

American Outlaw
Author: Jesse James
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2011-05-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451627882

The New York Times bestselling self-portrait of a flawed but determined Jesse James: rebel, outlaw, gearhead, artist, entrepreneur, lost son, and fiercely committed father. Jesse James is everything you imagined him to be—and more than you ever expected. He has led a violent life. He’s survived lower depths, faced harder times, and beaten down more private demons than most—and lived to tell his story with honesty, introspection, and humility. He’s tough as nails and riding hard through life, with plenty of wisdom to share about taking a hit and coming back up. In American Outlaw, Jesse reveals all: from his volatile upbringing and troubled relationship with his father to his wild days of car thieving and juvenile detention; from knocking heads as a rock ’n’ roll bodyguard to his destructive drinking and barroom brawling; from building an empire from the ground up to marriages marked with both happiness and gut-wrenching pain; from living inside the hottest level of paparazzi hell to rehab and making peace with his past.

Mariette in Ecstasy

Mariette in Ecstasy
Author: Ron Hansen
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2009-10-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061978280

The highly acclaimed and provocatively rendered story of a young postulant's claim to divine possession and religious ecstasy.