Rendezvous With Death

A book to challenge the status quo, spark a debate, and get people talking about the issues and questions we face as a country!

When reporter, Shelley Jackson, discovers the body of her friend and informant in an alley, she teams up with the dead man's brother, architect, Jason Mallory, to solve the crime. But two more murders, a couple of arsons, and whispers of unsafe building practices tell them the deaths are connected to city corruption being investigated by Shelley's newspaper. Their relationship heats up to nights of hot sex, while their search for the truth has buildings crumbling around them. But the killer is watching from the shadows of respectability and planning for the couple's demise. Can they reveal the killer before they become tomorrow’s headline?

WAR POET is a biography of American poet, Alan Seeger, killed at the battle of the Somme in July 1916 and author of "I Have a Rendezvous with Death," the favorite poem of President John F. Kennedy and one of the most powerful and memorable war poems of all time. When first published in the fall of 1916, Seeger became an instant hero in America and, in Europe, many compared him to the martyred British poet Rupert Brooke. His death was seen by many as "one of the most romantic incidents of the war" and declared his poetry "the authentic voice of ... war's ennobling glory." Theodore Roosevelt called Seeger a "gallant, gifted young man ... A dreamer of dreams, whose deeds made his death nobly good." Even after the Great War ended the memory of Seeger and his poem did not die, with literary allusions to his work and his "rendezvous with death" making their way into the works of such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. With a single poem, Alan Seeger entered the pantheon of history's greatest war poets. Even now, over one hundred years later, it is a work of power and magic which still resonates through generation after generation of Americans. Drawing on new and important archival material, Michael Hill, author of "Elihu Washburne: Diary and Letters of America's Minister to France During the Siege and Commune of Paris", paints a noble and poignant portrait of this little known but fascinating American poet.

This masterfully assembled volume, arranged chronologically, reveals American poets' shifting, conflicting reactions to the war and highlights their efforts to shape U.S. policies and define American attitudes. In his introduction, Mark W. Van Wienen describes the rapid, politically charged responses possible in a culture attuned to poetry. His historical and biographical notes provide a sturdy framework for the study of poetry's role in social activism and change during the "war to end war." The most complete resource of its kind, Rendezvous with Death brings together poetry originally published in little magazines, labor journals, newspapers, and wartime anthologies. Alight with sorrow, grace, silliness, satire, pride, and anger, works by IWW members, sock poets, pacifists, and protestors take their places next to those by Edith Wharton, Alan Seeger, Wallace Stevens, James Weldon Johnson, Amy Lowell, and Claude McKay.

Alan Seeger was born on June 22nd 1888 in New York. The family moved to Staten Island when he was 1 for 9 years and then on to Mexico until he was 12. After attending several elite preparatory schools he enrolled at Harvard in 1906 where he also edited and wrote for the Harvard Monthly. He graduated in 1910 and went to live the life of a bohemian in Greenwich Village, New York thereafter moving to Paris to continue his poetry writing in the Latin quarter. War's looming dark shadow was to have a transformative effect on the young poet and on August 24th 1914 he joined the French Foreign Legion so he could fight for the Allies. On American Independence day, July 4th, 1917 whilst urging on his fellow soldiers in a successful charge at Belloy-en-Santerre he was hit several times by machine gun fire and died. His poetry was published posthumously later that year, it was not a great success but his poem 'I Have a Rendezvous with Death . . .' is now regarded as a classic. On the sixth anniversary of his death a memorial to the American volunteers was unveiled in the Place des Etats-Unis. The memorial was created by Jean Boucher who had used a photograph of Seeger as his inspiration. Two quotes from his poem 'Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France are inscribed upon it: "They did not pursue worldly rewards; they wanted nothing more than to live without regret, brothers pledged to the honour implicit in living one's own life and dying one's own death. Hail, brothers! Goodbye to you, the exalted dead! To you, we owe two debts of gratitude forever: the glory of having died for France, and the homage due to you in our memories."

The harrowing true stories of fallen police officers and how they met their end in a rendevous with death on the path of duty. A new century and a new nation forged by the will of the people seemed to turn a new page and raised hope for a better future. In this there was abundant truth, but there still lurked the malcontents who fed on unsuspecting hosts using violence in support of their enterprise and deadly force to avoid detection. These are the traumatic stories of policemen, working class men, family men, often benighted men, who died at the hands of the mad, bad and sad and unexpectedly. They died in the knowledge that duty expected of them the laying down their lives for the community they were sworn to serve. They died bravely for the new nation, for its people and esprit de corps . This is a richly illustrated account of men who died preserving the peace at home, while their brothers-in- arms fought evil on the front lines of Europe. Their stories are often intertwined.

HISTORICAL MYSTERIES. A man's body is hauled from the Thames dressed like a commoner but with the face of a gentleman, yet no one has come forward to claim the body. Blackstone enters the world of the aristocracy and tramps the dangerous streets of London's Little Russia- both where English law and order are not welcome.

This book sheds new light on the colorful personalities including Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Ivor Gurney, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth, all major figures among England's creative artists during the First World War.Thanks to the authors research and knowledge, the book is a very English story about the tragically short spring of English artistic creativity between 1910 and 1920; the greatest such renaissance since Shakespeare and Purcell in the 17th century. It focuses on these exceptional poets, composers and artists' experiences in the front line and what resulted from these.A short personal Preface records that the authors father, Sergeant Major Anthony Geraghty (later anglicized as Garrity) survived one year and 271 days on the front line with the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders including the Somme, in which he served alongside the composer Butterworth in 13th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry.

‘You’re being watched. You give us five minutes before leaving here. Five minutes. “If you want Laidlow back, don’t blow it.”' An important British diplomat is abducted in Pakistan. What appears to be a terrorist outrage may be the result of a vendetta by a powerful tycoon. Crime and mystery novel Rendezvous with Death follows the story of Nick Dyson, a young barrister in London, who accepts the appointment as personal assistant to his friend Robert Laidlow who is a Special Envoy to the Middle East, based in Islamabad. Nick, Robert and Robert’s wife, Emma have made a bitter enemy of Gerald Macbeth, now an influential tycoon in Islamabad. When Robert disappears and his security guard is beheaded, Nick begins to suspect that Macbeth is behind the crimes. He tries to persuade Emma to leave Pakistan with him. She refuses and dies in a speedboat acciden. Robert is executed by terrorists. Nick flees to London with over a million dollars of bribe money paid to Robert. Rendezvous with Death will appeal to those who enjoy crime and mystery novels plus fans of Gil’s former novels.