{ "item_title" : "A Terrible Thunder", "item_author" : [" Peter Hernon "], "item_description" : "When Terror Came to New Orleans: A City Under Siege On New Year's Eve 1972, Mark James Robert Essex, a 23-year-old former Navy seaman, began a calculated assault on the New Orleans police that would leave nine dead, ten wounded, and a city forever changed. What drove this quiet young man from small-town Kansas to wage a one-man war against an entire police force? Peter Hernon, who covered the siege as an Associated Press reporter, spent over a year investigating this shocking story. Through extensive interviews and previously unpublished material, he reconstructs both the terrifying 11-hour hotel siege and the tragic transformation of Mark Essex--from a happy-go-lucky youth in Emporia, Kansas, to an embittered gunman consumed by rage. The book alternates between the chaos of that January week--when hundreds of police officers, Marine helicopters, and volunteer gunmen battled a lone sniper while the Howard Johnson hotel burned around him--and Essex's journey through systematic racism in the U.S. Navy that left him, in Hernon's words, a casualty of history. This is more than a true crime narrative. It's a powerful examination of how persistent injustice can transform an ordinary person into an instrument of violence, and a sobering meditation on alienation in America. As The New York Times noted, Hernon's account reads as fluently as a novel while raising profound questions about society's responsibility for those it pushes to the breaking point. A meticulously researched, compellingly written account of one of the most violent attacks on police in American history--and the broken system that created a killer.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/89/105/348/1891053485_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "20.00", "online_price" : "20.00", "our_price" : "20.00", "club_price" : "20.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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