Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The Senate chamber is not the most beautiful space in the Capitol, but it is imposing nonetheless. The dun-colored walls are set off by panels of blue damask and columns of finely veined marble. Overhead, the ceiling forms a creamy white oval with an American eagle etched in its center. #2 I remember January 4, 2005, the day I and a third of the Senate were sworn in as members of the 109th Congress. The sun was bright, the air unseasonably warm. From Illinois, Hawaii, London, and Kenya, my family and friends crowded into the Senate visitors' gallery to cheer as my new colleagues and I stood beside the marble dais and raised our right hands. #3 I had experienced politics first hand in the Illinois legislature, and I had come to understand how it was played. I had thought that if I could reach out to the voters directly and explain the issues in a truthful manner, they would see that politics could be different. #4 After my victory, I felt like the rookie who showed up after the game, ready to play, even though his mud-splattered teammates tended to their wounds. Democrats told me about the fallen leader Tom Daschle, who had seen millions of dollars' worth of negative ads rain down on him.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 On September 3, 1939, Neville Chamberlain delivered a radio speech that announced Britain was at war with Germany. The children of London and the rest of Britain's cities were lined up on the platforms of railway stations and boarding trains for the countryside, where they would live with strangers. #2 On the evening of September 3, the train carrying Adolf Hitler's headquarters left Berlin. It was the mobile headquarters of Hitler, with a special security battalion traveling with him. Hitler was extremely taken with the forty-seven-year-old officer. #3 The United States remained resolutely unready for war. The country's best-known isolationist, aviator Charles Lindbergh, gave a national radio broadcast to rally opposition to the repeal of the Neutrality Act. #4 The meeting was held the next week with Heydrich, and the week after. Hitler had approved more detailed plans. In the short term, Jews would be consigned to ghettos until they could be expelled. There would be three categories of Poles in the annexed territories: political leaders, to be put in concentration camps; mid-level Poles, to be deported immediately; and all the rest, who would first be exploited as laborers, then pushed eastward.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 On July 12, 2008, Jessica Adam called 911 to report her friend Nancy Cooper missing. She had made plans to go running with a friend that morning, but hadn't returned yet. Her car was still at home, and her cell phone was there. #2 The Cary Police Department received a call about Nancy from her friend, Jessica Adam, at around 7 p. m. She told the dispatcher that Nancy had been an avid runner who had been training for a marathon. She wondered if Nancy had gone missing due to illness or injury. #3 On July 12, 2008, Clea Morwick, a friend and neighbor, called Krista Lister, Nancy's identical twin sister, to tell her about Nancy's disappearance. Krista was at a baseball game in Toronto with her husband at the time. #4 The Rentzes, who were extremely close with their son-in-law Brad, never heard a word from him about their daughter's disappearance. This worried them immensely.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The hospital at the Yambuku Catholic Mission in Zaire, Africa, was filled with African oil palms and tropical vegetation. The buildings were made of brown bricks, and had open porticoes running along their sides. The maternity ward was a modest pavilion with a room that contained nineteen beds. #2 The experience of Sister Beata, a nurse at the Yambuku hospital, demonstrates the severity of the malaria outbreak in the Congo Basin. She began to feel sick after delivering a stillborn baby five days ago. She quickly became extremely weak, and her headache and fever were caused by malaria. #3 Sister Beata's condition continued to deteriorate, and she began projectile vomiting. Her rocketing stopped when her stomach was completely empty, but her vomiting continued. She started bringing up masses of a black, wet, curdlike material. #4 Father Germain, the curate of the Yambuku Catholic Mission, was sent to care for Sister Beata. She had a Fever, and her skin felt only warm to the touch. Her nosebleed had stopped, and she was conscious. However, she was crying and blood came from her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I named the book Last Chance Texaco because I spent most of my life in cars, vans, and buses. I watched life approach and recede. I was always running away from and moving to new life, but I could never lay down roots. #2 I did drugs like I did everything else. On fire, with no back door. I escaped, of course, and I carried my heart out in a birdcage. But she was burned, and she cried so loud, casting wild notes over water and cloud. #3 I grew up in the Arizona of the 1960s. Phoenix was a quiet place in the desert, and the radio was our only means of touching the larger world. I knew America was succumbing to an expanding postwar pressure of social symmetry: be alike, fall in line. #4 The desert is a remnant of countless millions of years of other living things. The skeletons of their lives are the dirt of our cactus gardens. We too will become fossilized pages in some unimaginable future.