Edward Humes

"Transportation dominates our daily existence. Thousands, even millions, of miles are embedded in everything we do and touch. We live in a door-to-door universe that works so well most Americans are scarcely aware of it. The grand ballet in which we move ourselves and our stuff is equivalent to building the Great Pyramid, the Hoover Dam, and the Empire State Building all in a day. Every day. And yet, in the one highly visible part of the transportation...

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist takes readers on a surprising tour of the world of garbage. Trash is America's largest export. Individually, we make more than four pounds a day, sixty-four tons across a lifetime. We make so much of it that trash dominates America's place in the global economy--now the most prized product made in the United States. In 2010, China's number-one export to the U.S. was computer equipment. America's two biggest exports...

Profiles an unlikely American high school--Whitney High, located in a run-down section of Los Angeles--in search of secrets to this "dream school" envied by people all over California for its remarkable performance.

Extraordinary stories of ordinary men and women whose lives were changed forever by landmark legislation-and how they went on to change the country. Inspiring war stories are familiar. But what about after-the-war stories? From a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Over Here is the Greatest Generation's after-the-war story-vivid portraits of how the original G.I. Bill empowered an entire generation and reinvented the nation. The G.I. Bill opened college...

In the 1980's, Adolfo Constanzo, devotee of Santería and powerful cult leader opened shop in Mexico City as a fortune-teller. He soon realized that there were greater profits in drug money than the occult, and as his status grew in the drug trade, so too did his legendary brutality. Kidnappings, torture, and murder were three weapons in his arsenal that he used to keep a vice grip on the drug trade. In Buried Secrets, Edward Humes explores the intersections...

Examines the case of Jo Ann Parks, the sole survivor and eyewitness of a Los Angeles apartment fire in which her three young children perished. Parks was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole based on forensic fire science that is now being challenged by the California Innocence Project, which contends tunnel vision and outright bias not only led to life in prison for an innocent mother, but convicted her of a crime that never actually...