New Releases by Lance Williams

In Chicago in mid-twentieth century amid the haze and smoke of urban renewal and the sounds of the wrecking balls and bulldozers, there lived two men, both street-savvy, one Black, one Irish, one young, one old and both leaders of their clans. Each ruled with an iron fist. Each embodied the fighting spirit of the turbulent 1960s. One was David Barksdale, the Black Disciples leader, a Black youth club that would give birth to America''s largest street gang; the other was Richard J. Daley, the legendary Mayor of the City of Chicago. He was one of the longest-serving, most prominent mayors in American history and the last of the big-city "bosses." Although the two never met, at least not face-to-face, their fates were linked by a time of change, an era of protest, which was a decisive moment of transformational power that was on the verge of a violent uprising in America''s second-largest city. This is a book that is as lively as its subject. A braided narrative of two larger than life people, it has the boldness to combine two oddly related 1960s stories into a single narrative that is both intimate and epic. One captures the unlikely story of a Negro boy whose share-cropping family migrated from rural Mississippi to Chicago, where he started a street gang that became the largest in America. The book''s other path follows America''s last big city "boss," whose persona is legendary and bigger than life. While historians, political pundits, and those who knew him speak of "Hizzonor" as being a proud, Irish-Catholic who was the long-time godfather of the Chicago Democratic Party and Mayor who saved Chicago from becoming another Detroit or Cleveland, they also acknowledge that he was a fierce segregationist. He had a contentious relationship with civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Richard Daley also played a significant role in the history of the United States Democratic Party. Williams an internationally recognized gang expert and interventionist, eloquently tells the story of these men, their clans, and their on-going struggle for power, status, and legacy. However unheard of and unimaginable, some of the incidents may seem, this is not a work of fiction. Everything written comes from archival documents, official reports, focus groups, in-depth interviews, or first-hand accounts. The action takes place mostly in Chicago''s Englewood neighborhood. Still, there are some occasions where the action takes place in Bronzeville, the Woodlawn community, on the West Side of the City and downtown.

The mighty Roman Empire has fallen...again. History tends to repeat itself as it did with this star spanning empire. Thriving republics become expanding empires, empires fall, and new struggling republics rise again. Where do patriots of the old nation go? Do they fight and die with the old regime? Join the new regime? Or carve out their own place in history?Admiral Jendarm has found a potential new home for his Fleet. Can he keep it? Old enemies already confront him and try to steal his new star systems before the new governments are fully established. Local rivals attempt to disrupt his hold and cast the exiled Romans off to the depths of space. His crew needs a home, something bigger than themselves to fight for. And a home that will give them much needed supplies. Now the crew of Hyperfleet must utilize military strength with political cunning to keep what they have. Then a new enemy enters the equation.

Long ago, settlers from a faraway continent built a floating city under the command of the Engine Master. High above the mountains and sprawling pine forests of the new land, Morinuin runs on coal and steam, and bustles with automatons and flying steam cars as well as humans. It''s the year 121, and the Native villagers below the city are getting in the way of the coal mines. War breaks out and everyone must take a side. It won''t be long before the city will run out of energy, unless someone finds another power source... Aneka does all she can to provide for her younger brother, Oliver. That''s the way it always has been, at least since the siblings'' parents died. But everything changes when their parents'' legacy leads them to a quest to save their dying city, Morinuin. In search of a new power source, Aneka and Oliver are joined by a pickpocket, a royal servant, a former assassin, and a Native outcast to find the enigmatic Engine Master, who disappeared long after Morinuin was built. Will their mission keep the city afloat amidst war and death?

The mighty Roman Empire has fallen...again. History tends to repeat itself as it did with this star spanning empire. Thriving republics become expanding empires, empires fall, and new struggling republics rise again. Where do patriots of the old nation go? Do they fight and die with the old regime? Join the new regime? Or carve out their own place in history?Admiral Trevin Jendarm and the crew of Hyperfleet, a crew made up of the politically unreliable, undesirable, and just plain forgotten, have that choice to make. Caught between a dying empire that ruled with an iron fist, and an overzealous new republic that wants to punish everything Roman, the men and women of Hyperfleet must decide their own destiny. One that will allow them to adhere to the ideals and values they signed up to fight for, and hopefully one that will not get them destroyed. Admiral Jendarm must lead Hyperfleet in their quest for a new home in a very dangerous galaxy.

Were the Stones criminals, brainwashed terrorists, victims of their circumstances, or champions of social change? Or were they all of these, their role perceived differently by different races and socioeconomic groups? --

In the summer of 1998 two of baseball leading sluggers, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, embarked on a race to break Babe Ruth’s single season home run record. The nation was transfixed as Sosa went on to hit 66 home runs, and McGwire 70. Three years later, San Francisco Giants All-Star Barry Bonds surpassed McGwire by 3 home runs in the midst of what was perhaps the greatest offensive display in baseball history. Over the next three seasons, as Bonds regularly launched mammoth shots into the San Francisco Bay, baseball players across the country were hitting home runs at unprecedented rates. For years there had been rumors that perhaps some of these players owed their success to steroids. But crowd pleasing homers were big business, and sportswriters, fans, and officials alike simply turned a blind eye. Then, in December of 2004, after more than a year of investigation, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams broke the story that in a federal investigation of a nutritional supplement company called BALCO, Yankees slugger Jason Giambi had admitted taking steroids. Barry Bonds was also implicated. Immediately the issue of steroids became front page news. The revelations led to Congressional hearings on baseball’s drug problems and continued to drive the effort to purge the U.S. Olympic movement of drug cheats. Now Fainaru-Wada and Williams expose for the first time the secrets of the BALCO investigation that has turned the sports world upside down. Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroid Scandal That Rocked Professional by award-winning investigative journalists Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, is a riveting narrative about the biggest doping scandal in the history of sports, and how baseball’s home run king, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, came to use steroids. Drawing on more than two years of reporting, including interviews with hundreds of people, and exclusive access to secret grand jury testimony, confidential documents, audio recordings, and more, the authors provide, for the first time, a definitive account of the shocking steroids scandal that made headlines across the country. The book traces the career of Victor Conte, founder of the BALCO laboratory, an egomaniacal former rock musician and self-proclaimed nutritionist, who set out to corrupt sports by providing athletes with “designer” steroids that would be undetectable on “state-of-the-art” doping tests. Conte gave the undetectable drugs to 28 of the world’s greatest athletes—Olympians, NFL players and baseball stars, Bonds chief among them. A separate narrative thread details the steroids use of Bonds, an immensely talented, moody player who turned to performance-enhancing drugs after Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals set a new home run record in 1998. Through his personal trainer, Bonds gained access to BALCO drugs. All of the great athletes who visited BALCO benefited tremendously—Bonds broke McGwire’s record—but many had their careers disrupted after federal investigators raided BALCO and indicted Conte. The authors trace the course of the probe, and the baffling decision of federal prosecutors to protect the elite athletes who were involved. Highlights of Game of Shadows include: Barry Bonds A look at how Bonds was driven to use performance-enhancing drugs in part by jealousy over Mark McGwire’s record-breaking 1998 season. It was shortly thereafter that Bonds—who had never used anything more performance enhancing than a protein shake from the health food store—first began using steroids. How Bonds’s weight trainer, steroid dealer Greg Anderson, arranged to meet Victor Conte before the 2001 baseball season with...