Is a suspected child abductor laughing in the faces of the police and the victims’ families? For years, little girls have been disappearing from the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area. Their bodies have never been found. One man ties the cases together. He contacts the police. He helps search for the missing children. He offers support and love to the grieving families. Is he guilty? Or, is he the victim of his own eccentricities? Timothy James Bindner has appeared on talk shows, attended victims’ memorials, and offered meticulously detailed theories of the crimes themselves. Yet, in spite of years of intensive investigation, surveillance, and interrogation, Bindner has never been charged. Steadfastly maintaining his innocence, Bindner has infuriated the authorities with his public and outspoken challenges to make their case or leave him alone. This inside account—featuring the words of Bindner himself—takes us into the mind of a suspected child abductor as well as the complex realm of modern forensic investigation. A shocking indictment of our flawed legal system, Stalemate asks the even more disturbing question of whether Timothy James Bindner is playing a sinister game of cat and mouse—and getting away with it.

Eve Duncan is a forensic sculptor goes to South America to help a drug lord in need of her services, after he offers to help her find her seven-year-old daughters body and killer.

Gridlock is not a modern legislative condition. Although the term is said to have entered the American political lexicon after the 1980 elections, Alexander Hamilton complained about it more than two hundred years ago. In many ways, stalemate seems endemic to American politics. Constitutional skeptics even suggest that the framers intentionally designed the Constitution to guarantee gridlock. In Stalemate, Sarah Binder examines the causes and consequences of gridlock, focusing on the ability of Congress to broach and secure policy compromise on significant national issues. Reviewing more than fifty years of legislative history, Binder measures the frequency of deadlock during that time and offers concrete advice for policymakers interested in improving the institutional capacity of Congress. Binder begins by revisiting the notion of "framers' intent," investigating whether gridlock was the preferred outcome of those who designed the American system of separated powers. Her research suggests that frequent policy gridlock might instead be an unintended consequence of constitutional design. Next, she explores the ways in which elections and institutions together shape the capacity of Congress and the president to make public law. She examines two facets of its institutional evolution: the emergence of the Senate as a coequal legislative partner of the House and the insertion of political parties into a legislative arena originally devoid of parties. Finally, she offers a new empirical approach for testing accounts of policy stalemate during the decades since World War II. These measurements reveal patterns in legislative performance during the second half of the twentieth century, showing the frequency of policy deadlock and the legislative stages at which it has most often emerged in the postwar period. Binder uses the new measure of stalemate to explain empirical patterns in the frequency of gridlock. The results weave together the effects of institu

A classic of Holocaust literature from “one of the great masters of the short novel.” —The New Yorker In the Vilna Ghetto during World War II, Nazi Commandant Schoger demands that all children be sent to the death camp. When Abraham Lipman pleads with him to spare their lives, Schoger reconsiders, and tells Lipman there will be a chess match between himself and Lipman’s only surviving son, Isaac, a chess prodigy. If Isaac wins, the children will live, but Isaac will die. If Isaac loses, the children will die, but Isaac will live. Only a draw will save the ghetto from this terrible predicament. The chess game begins: a nightmarish contest played over the course of several evenings, witnessed by an audience impotent to act, staking the lives of their children on a stalemate. This is a moving story of a father and a son who shame their cruel perpetrator with their dignity, spirit, and extraordinary courage. Stalemate speaks to the power of humor even under the direst circumstances. As a parable that gives voice to the unspeakable, Stalemate is an antidote to despair. “Gripping . . . a truly memorable work.” —Booklist

"Stunning....The portrait of the embattled and unyielding president that emerges is vivid and memorable."—Publishers Weekly By 1968, the United States had committed over 525,000 men to Vietnam and bombed virtually all military targets recommended by the joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet, the United States was no closer to securing its objectives than it had been prior to the Americanization of the war. The long-promised light at the end of the tunnel was a mirage. This absorbing account reveals the bankruptcy of the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, the failures of political reform in South Vietnam and the bitter bureaucratic conflicts between the US government and its military commanders.