San Antonio College Library

From The Books Inside Cover: Kidnapping! The theft of a human being! The word is ripped from today's headlines, and the name of Patty Hearst, Paul Getty, Reg Murphy and Victor Samuelson are on everyone's lips. But few people know the long and colorful, often grim and occasionally comic history of the crime, with stories as full of suspense, inventiveness and bizarre variety as the human mind has been able to conceive.

Can crime make our world safer? Crimes are the worst of humanity's wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes "trigger" improvement in our lives. Crimes That Changed Our World explores some of the most important trigger cases of the past century, revealing much about how change comes to our modern world. The exact nature of the crime-outrage-reform dynamic can take many forms, and Paul and Sarah Robinson explore those differences in the cases they present....

"The extraordinary story of a Renaissance-era executioner and his world, based on a rare and overlooked journal In the late 1500s a Nuremberg man named Frantz Schmidt began to do something utterly remarkable for his era: he started keeping a journal. But what makes Schmidt even more compelling to us is his day job. For forty-five years, Schmidt was an efficient and prolific public executioner, employed by the state to extract confessions and put convicted...