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The Broadway Books Library of Larceny
Luc Sante, General Editor
For more than fifty years, Willie Sutton devoted his boundless energy and undoubted genius exclusively to two activities at which he became better than any man in history: breaking in and breaking out. The targets in the first instance were banks and in the second, prisons. Unarguably America's most famous bank robber, Willie never injured a soul, but took on almost a hundred banks and departed three of America's most escape-proof penitentiaries. This is the stuff of myth--rascally and cautionary by turns--yet true in every searing, diverting, and brilliantly recalled detail.

A natural history of rain, told through a lyrical blend of science, cultural history, and human drama

It is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of all the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain.

Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science--the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of colored rains--with the human story of our attempts to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey's mopes and Kurt Cobain's grunge. Rain is...