For 125 years, the GAA has been a fixed point in a fast-changing age, & this oral history marks the 125th anniversary of the Association. It is the story of the GAA as seen through the eyes of those key personalities who shaped it.

Author Jon Scally has carried out over a hundred revealing interviews with players & managers who are synonymous with the Games, including Babs Keating, Jimmy Barry-Murphy, Ger Loughnane, D.J. Carey, Liam Griffin, Mick O

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Over half-a-century ago fanciful & exotic stories began to appear in the world's press about settlers on the remote Galapagos island of Floreana. The tales were of nudism, free love communes, stainless steel dentures
- a latter-day Garden of Eden. But the truth was even stranger. Friedrich Ritter, an eccentric German intellectual, & his long-suffering companion Dora Strauch, were the first arrivals. Once established, they were soon joined by others. Most bizarre & dangerous was the self-styled Baroness Wagner-Bosquet. She ruled her three young male lovers with a riding crop, a pearl-handled revolver & insatiable sexual demands
- terrorising other settlers. Her mysterious disappearance & the discovery of unidentified bodies on a nearby island perplexed the world. Now The Galapagos Affair unravels the whole incredible story.

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As far as those who marvel at his sporting glories are concerned, Oisín Mc Conville is a winner. His career has marked him out as one of the most gifted footballers of a generation. To date, he has won eleven Ulster titles
& four All Irelands for club & country, picking up two All Stars & becoming the top scorer in Ulster football along the way. But off the pitch, winning has not been so easy.

Outside the sport, Mc Conville looked for other ways to replicate the buzz he felt while on the pitch for Crossmaglen & Armagh, & things very quickly got out of control. After the closure of his pub, it was rumoured that he had a drinking problem but in fact Mc Conville had fallen victim to another addiction: gambling. What started out as a hobby became an overwhelming obsession & as his debts mounted the only escape he could find was on the football field.

In The Gambler, Mc Conville relives the darkest days of his addiction & the six months he spent in rehabilitation while also recalling the highlights of his career.




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For over thirty years, John Pearson has provided us with literary exposures of some of the most enigmatic people & underground organisations of our modern world. The Gamblers follows the fortunes of five men at the centre of the ultra-fashionable Clermont Set: the Clermont Club ...

This classic history of crime tells how the Chicago underworld earned
- & kept
- its notorious reputation, from the time it

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Home to the notorious ' Blue Book', which listed the names & addresses of every prostitute living in the city, New Orleans's infamous red-light district gained a reputation as one of the most raucous in the world. But the New Orleans underworld consisted of much more than the local bordellos. It was also well known as the early gambling capital of the United States, & sported one of the most violent records of street crime in the country. In The Gangs of New Orleans, Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York, chronicles the immense underbelly of ' The Big Easy'. From the murderous exploits of Mary Jane ' Bricktop' Jackson & Bridget Fury, two prostitutes who became famous after murdering a number of their associates, to the faux-revolutionary 'filibusters' who, backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars of public support
- though without official governmental approval
- undertook military missions to take over the bordering Spanish regions in Texas, the French Quarter had it all. Once again, Asbury takes the reader on an intriguing journey through a unique history of the American underworld.

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The Gangs of New York is a tour through a now unrecognisable city of abysmal poverty & habitual violence cobbled from legend, memory, police records, the self-aggrandizements of aging crooks, popular journalism, & solid historical research. Asbury presents the definitive work on this subject, an illumination of the gangs of old New York that ultimately gave rise to the modern Mafia & its depiction in films like The Godfather. ...

Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York & The Gangs of Chicago, turns his attention to chronicle the seedy underworld of San Francisco, from its gold-rush glories to its subterranean opium dens. Houses of ill repute play host to shanghaied sailors, & the Chinese tong wars rage around the city. San Francisco's historic past is here brought to life in all its scintillating & infamous glory. ...