IL DOTTORE is the gripping account of how a 'nerdy Jewish kid' from the Bronx became physician to New York godfathers like John Gotti, Carlos Gambino and Joe Bonanno. In Mafia circles he became known simply as Il Dottore. At the same time he was gaining a reputation as a top cardiac surgeon.
Author Ron Felber paints a vivid portrait of Il Dottore's amazing double life during the 1970s and'80s.
When he wasn't making house calls on Dons,the doctor was asked to dispose of evidence such as bullets used in hits,medical records and other sensitive material,and also acted as a courier while attending international medical conferences.
In return,he was welcomed into an exciting and glamorous underworld of disco,drugs,high-stakes gambling and beautiful women.
But when an informant ended up on his operating table - and at his mercy - his two worlds collided,with devastating consequences.
Torn between his loyalty to La Cosa ostra and his devotion to the Hippocratic Oath,Il Dottore followed his heart.It was a decision that would change his life forever.

Minnie Dean,the respectable ex-schoolmistress who was so proud of her garden.....did she use it as a graveyard and was she the merciless poisoner of legend?
Was Charles Clements fully sane when he butchered his wife with a tomahawk?
Did Hugh Sweeney,in fact,kill his mistress and set fire to her cottage to cover his crime?
These and other criimes are described in Hanlon:A Casebook,a selection of many of the famous cases,mainly murder,that were defended by Alfred Charles Hanlon.
In the latter years of the nineteenth century and in the first three decades of the the twentieth,Hanlon's name was a legend in law.
While carving out a one-man law practice from the entrenched partnerships of Otago's legal society,"Alf" Hanlon was to defend,usually with dramatic success,a great number of murder cases.Whatever the outcome,the cases described herein show the skill and originality that were to give Hanlon a place in New Zealand's legal history.

This work tells the story of how in 1870, four travellers in Dilessi, Greece, three British and one Italian, were kidnapped by a gang of bandits and held for ransom. The negotiations were botched and eventually the four were murdered. The episode severely tested the relations of the young Greek state with Britain, under Gladstone at the time, and a country that had done much to help it gain its independence from the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The story throws light upon Greece and British diplomacy. One chapter of the book, "Truth and Ethnic Truth", caused some offence in Athens at the time but has since been considered as an analysis of the modern Greek mind. The book was written in 1961.

Gideon Tait was born in Wellington but raised in the godfearing,sometimes stern but often gentle atmosphere of rural central Otago and Southland in the 1920s.He first worked as a young farm labourer,a freezing-worker and a railwayman,but on turning twenty-one was able to fulfill his single minded ambition to become a policeman.
He was to become one of the most controversial as well as one of the most respected police officers in the history of the force.
Throughout his career he established a reputation as a police officer unflinchingly resolute in his campaign against lawbreaking - the hard line viewpoint he still adheres to in this book on his life.
It's a book full of the challenges and rewards he found in police work,with no punches pulled on many matters still of public concern.
Basically it's the story of a man who in everything he did kept to the conviction that meant most to him -
NEVER BACK DOWN.

First Offender is one of the most unusual and important books ever to be published in New Zealand.
Writing under his own name,and only thinly disguising his material as fiction,Ken Berry has penned a sincere and compassionate account of the two years and eight months he served for embezzlement in the first offenders prison of "Te Ariki".
For its social importance,its sheer gusto and humour,its honesty and its underlying tragedy,First Offender will be widely read and enjoyed by thinking New Zealanders in all sectors of the community.