Examined from both sides - the Bureau of Alcohol and Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI on one hand, and David Koresh and his followers on the other - this text focuses on the events at Mt. Carmel, near Waco Texas. Dick J. Reavis contends that the government had little reason to investigate Koresh, and even less to raid the compound at Mt. Carmel. The government lied to the public about most of what happened - about who fired the first shots, about drugs allegations, and about the child abuse. The FBI was duplicitous and negligent in gassing Mt. Carmel - and that alone could have started...

The summer of 1964 had been "Freedom Summer" for a few campuses. The Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee (SNCC) had drawn some five hundred students, most of them white, from Ivy League and prestigious universities to help its integration efforts in Mississippi. An up-and-coming leader named Stokely Carmichael had told a group of prospective volunteers in New York that SNCC wanted to be sure that if blacks were killed for the civil rights cause, whites would die with them. What he said was prophetic, even if it wasn't popular. A few weeks after his speech, three young men--two white...

Reavis reported to a labor hall each morning hoping to "catch out," or get job assignments. To supplement his savings for retirement, the sixty-two-year-old joined people dispatched by an agency to manual jobs for which they were paid at the end of each day. Reavis writes with simple honesty, sympathy, and self-deprecating wit about his life inside day labor agencies, which employ some 3 million Americans. .

Written with the flair of a gifted portraitist and storyteller, the book describes his days on jobs at a factory, as a construction and demolition worker, landscaper, road crew flagman,...