Nigel Blundell: 10 books

Joseph Stalin was a monster. He sacrificed his friends and allies in pursuit of power, murdered thousands with sadistic brutality to maintain it and callously obliterated millions more of his own people over a quarter century of his leadership. Yet almost as frightening as the horrendous crimes he...

Charles Manson, Aileen Wuornos, Burke & Hare, the Boston Strangler, the Zodiac Killer, and other remorseless serial murderers whose crimes made history.   From Victorian era graveyards to a rented room in Paris to an isolated Indian farm and the California hills, the shocking murders collected...

The body snatcher who inspired Psycho, the noblewoman known as Countess Dracula, Jack the Ripper, and other killers for whom murder was just the beginning.   From Gilles de Rais’ castle in fifteenth-century France to “the Bloody Benders’” eighteenth-century Kansas farm to Jeffrey Dahmer’s...

One hundred years of the most depraved criminal minds—from H. H. Holmes and Ted Bundy to John Wayne Gacy, Ian Brady, and Myra Hindley.   Their monikers have become part of the true crime lexicon: among them, the Moors Murders; the Hillside Strangler; Killer Clown; Son of Sam; the Love Slave Killers;...

Crime DOES pay. There's no denying it. And in pursuit of riches and power, those outside the law have always tended to band together - spawning today's murky, brutal world of organised crime.The origins of the archetypical gangster can be traced to 1920s America, when Prohibition turned street-corner...

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill is known chiefly for his leadership of the United Kingdom during World War Two. He served as Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, writer and...

From Clifford Irving and his Howard Hughes hoax to the great imposter Frank “Catch Me if You Can” Abagnale—a fascinating history of the art of the con.   They’re shrewd, cunning, devious—and charmingly trustworthy. While the criminal exploits of these tricksters, frauds, and swindlers can’t...

A rare, revealing, and chilling photographic history of Adolf Hitler—from mollycoddled child to vile propagandist to despotic madman.   One of the most intriguing mysteries about the rise of history’s most despised dictator is just how utterly ordinary he once seemed. A chubby child, a mama’s...

It was the field of dreams, the birthplace of legends, the hallowed home of our sporting gods. Historic Wembley Stadium, with its iconic Twin Towers, was truly the most revered of venues. Until the Millennium, when the world-renowned colossus was demolished to make way for its futuristic replacement,...

This book is a catalog of disaster – literally. Within its pages are the major man-made calamities that shocked the world throughout the twentieth century. It was a period during which the power and scale of industrialization changed the planet, an unforeseen consequence being the creation...