Joe Jackson

Winner of the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman PrizeWinner of the PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for BiographyBest Biography of 2016, True West magazine Winner of the Western Writers of America 2017 Spur Award, Best Western BiographyFinalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for BiographyLong-listed for the Cundill History PrizeOne of the Best Books of 2016, The Boston GlobeThe epic life story of the Native American holy man who has inspired millions around the worldBlack Elk, the Native American holy man, is known to millions of readers around the world from his 1932 testimonial Black Elk Speaks. Adapted by the poet John G. Neihardt from a series of interviews with Black Elk and other elders at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Black Elk Speaks is one of the most widely read and admired works of American Indian literature. Cryptic and deeply personal, it has been read as a spiritual guide, a philosophical manifesto, and a text to be deconstructed—while the historical Black Elk has faded from view.In this sweeping book, Joe Jackson provides the definitive biographical account of a figure whose dramatic life converged with some of the most momentous events in the history of the American West. Born in an era of rising violence between the Sioux, white settlers, and U.S. government troops, Black Elk killed his first man at the Little Bighorn, witnessed the death of his second cousin Crazy Horse, and traveled to Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Upon his return, he was swept up in the traditionalist Ghost Dance movement and shaken by the Massacre at Wounded Knee. But Black Elk was not a warrior, instead accepting the path of a healer and holy man, motivated by a powerful prophetic vision that he struggled to understand. Although Black Elk embraced Catholicism in his later years, he continued to practice the old ways clandestinely and never refrained from seeking meaning in the visions that both haunted and inspired him.In Black Elk, Jackson has crafted a true American epic, restoring to its subject the richness of his times and gorgeously portraying a life of heroism and tragedy, adaptation and endurance, in an era of permanent crisis on the Great Plains.

The story of one man’s journey down the Amazon— and how it changed history In 1876, a man named Henry Wickham smuggled seventy thousand rubber tree seeds out of the rainforests of Brazil and delivered them to Victorian England’s most prestigious scientists at Kew Gardens. Those seeds, planted around the world in England’s colonial outposts, gave rise to the great rubber boom of the early twentieth century—an explosion of entrepreneurial and scientific industry that would change the world. The story of how Wickham got his hands on those seeds—a sought-after prize for which many suffered and died—is the stuff of legend. In this utterly engaging account of obsession, greed, bravery, and betrayal, author and journalist Joe Jackson brings to life a classic Victorian fortune hunter and the empire that fueled, then abandoned, him. In his single-minded pursuit of glory, Wickham faced deadly insects, poisonous snakes, horrific illnesses, and, ultimately, the neglect and contempt of the very government he wished to serve. His idealism and determination, as well as his outright thievery, perfectly encapsulate the essential nature of Great Britain’s colonial adventure in South America. The Thief at the End of the World is a thrilling true story of reckless courage and ambition.

A fast-paced, dynamic account of the race to cross the Atlantic, and the larger-than-life personalities of the aviators who captured the world's attentionIn 1919, a prize of $25,000 was offered to the first aviator to cross the Atlantic in either direction between France and America. Although it was one of the most coveted prizes in the world, it sat unclaimed (not without efforts) for eight long years, until the spring of 1927. It was then, during five incredibly tense weeks, that one of those magical windows in history opened, when there occurred a nexus of technology, innovation, character, and spirit that led so many contenders (from different parts of the world) to all suddenly be on the cusp of the exact same achievement at the exact same time. Atlantic Fever is about the race; it is a milestone in American history whose story has never been fully told. Richard Byrd, Noel Davis, Stanton Wooster, Clarence Chamberlin, Charles Levine, René Fonck, Charles Nungesser, and François Coli—all had equal weight in the race with Charles Lindbergh. Although the story starts in September 1926 with the crash of the first competitor, or even further back with the 1919 establishment of the prize, its heart is found in a short period, those five weeks from April 14 to May 21, 1927, when the world held its breath and the aviators met their separate fates in the air. Illustrated with photos.

Like Charles Seife’s Zero and Dava Sobel’s Longitude , this passionate intellectual history is the story of the intersection of science and the human, in this case the rivals who discovered oxygen in the late 1700s. That breakthrough changed the world as radically as those of Newton and Darwin but was at first eclipsed by revolution and reaction. In chronicling the triumph and ruin of the English freethinker Joseph Priestley and the French nobleman Antoine Lavoisier—the former exiled, the latter executed on the guillotine— A World on Fire illustrates the perilous place of science in an age of unreason.

In the tradition of Nathaniel Philbrick's bestselling In the Heart of the Sea, Joe Jackson's A Furnace Afloat tells of the American clipper ship Hornet, which went down in flames, casting its crew adrift for forty-three days on the open ocean. Along with the stories of the Bounty and the whaleship Essex, the Hornet disaster was once one of the country's most infamous naval disasters. Over the years, a handful of famous shipwrecks have become symbols of something greater, their accounts a floating opera of sudden disaster, wasted life, and privations endured by survivors. One of these was the 1866 saga of the clipper ship Hornet, the crew of which barely survived for six weeks on ten days' worth of rations and shoe leather, drifting 4,300 miles in a single lifeboat as they all slowly weakened and became delirious or mad. The American clipper ship Hornet left her homeport of New York City on January 15, 1866, and embarked on what was considered a routine voyage to San Francisco around Cape Horn. She enjoyed an exceptionally smooth passage until the morning of May 3, when the ship ghosted gently a thousand miles west of the Galápagos Islands. On that day, the first mate went below to draw some varnish from a cask and accidentally set the cask afire. Within minutes, the entire ship was engulfed. The ship's company of thirty-one men escaped into three small boats, set adrift under the burning sun of the Pacific Ocean to watch helplessly as the Hornet became a floating bonfire and sank beneath the waves. The Hornet's complement -- twenty-nine officers and crew, and two aristocratic passengers -- mirrored all the prejudices and nuances of Industrial Age America. Their ordeal was harrowing: half of the Hornet's crew disappeared; the survivors were stalked by sharks and waterspouts, desiccated by heat, driven mad by lack of food and water. Soon the social divisions in the boat erupted into class war. The crewmen accused the captain of hoarding food, water, and even gold, and they plotted mutiny. Their only salvation was to land on the "American group," a mythical set of islands said to exist somewhere in the Pacific. But the islands never materialized, and with no hope left, the men planned the details of cannibalism. On the day they were to draw straws, they reached Hawaii. By chance, a young, little-known Samuel Langhorne Clemens was in Hawaii. He wrote an account of the voyage that would make the crew famous, and Mark Twain (Clemens' nom de plume) a household name. Drawing on extensive primary sources, including survivors' diaries and letters, as well as newspaper accounts and Twain's reporting, Jackson has created a gripping narrative of the horrors and triumphs of men against the sea.

In June, 1983, Dennis Stockton entered Death Row in Virginia's state penitentiary, accused of a murder he insisted he had not committed. For the next 12 years he remained there, during which time he helped plan the only successful mass escape from Death Row in our history (though he ultimately decided not to join the escapees), developed a career as a writer through a diary and newspaper columns, and continually proclaimed his innocence. His explosive diary entries - published in the (Norfolk) Virginian Pilot - about life on Death Row made him a marked man among prisoners and guards alike. Despite strong evidence of his innocence, however, Stockton was executed on September 27, 1995. Dead Run is the stunning story of Dennis Stockton's life in "the monster factory," his name for Death Row. Written by his editor at the Virginian Pilot and the reporter who investigated his claims of innocence, it is a riveting true-life thriller and essential reading for anyone with an opinion on the death penalty.

For twenty-four years Frank Grigware ran from the law. Convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced in 1909 to life in Leavenworth, America’s first federal penitentiary, Grigware joined five other inmates in a daring escape. The six men hijacked a supply train and rammed it through the prison’s west gate. Investigative journalist Joe Jackson, four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and 2002 Edgar Award nominee for Best Fact Crime book, follows a young, guileless Grigware in a journey not to fabulous adventure in America’s legendary West but rather to an ill-fated association with train robbers—and to his arrest and soon, imprisonment. Five months later, Grigware would be journeying again, this time in desperate flight across the Canadian border to a new life as a husband, father, and mayor. Grigware’s story is also the story of the Pinkerton detective agency and of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which sought Grigware through the 1920s and ’30s. It culminates in a meticulously documented, revealing examination of criminal justice in two nations, when Grigware is apprehended by Canadian Mounties and the Canadian government refuses to extradite to the United States “the sort of man we want settling our land”—with results more surprising than fiction. Eight pages of photographs complete this tale of America's most elusive fugitive. “A journalistic meditation on frustrated fantasies, crime, punishment, justice and absolution.... Absorbing.... Meticulously documented.”—Washington Post “Gripping.”—The Economist

In the waning days of one of the most unrecognized American exoduses of the twentieth-century, millions of broken people have left the strip mines of Appalachia in search of better things. In 1961, two of these yearning souls—Dahlia Jean Coker, the teenage daughter of a sluttish mother and a deadbeat Daddy, and "Twitch," an ex-con descended from the legendary outlaw Younger clan—are looking for their own ways out. After a botched robbery by Twitch, Dahlia takes the lead—with Twitch's loot and his teenage son—while the old man gives chase, with revenge in his heart and Dahlia's mother by his side. Through the South, and finally on to a Key West reeling from the Bay of Pigs debacle, the chase is at once thrilling, heartbreaking, murderous, dark, and hilarious. Along the way, readers encounter a snake-handling evangelist, determined civil rights activists, equally determined Klansmen, and the unfortunate wife of an adulterous NASA scientist. Battling a Tennessee flood of biblical proportions and a looming Florida hurricane, Dahlia, Twitch, and their improbable traveling companions all land up at Dahlia's daddy's houseboat. The final showdown, with a fortune and dreams of a better life at stake, will have readers marveling.