It is rich with the scent of fin de siecle Istanbul in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. His mother was a beauty, married at thirteen, as befitted a Turkish woman of her class. His grandmother was an eccentric autocrat, determined at all costs to maintain her traditional habits. But the war changed everything. Death and financial disaster reigned, the Sultan was overthrown, and Turkey became a republic. The red fez was ousted by the cloth cap, and the family was forced to adapt to an unimaginably impoverished life. Filled with brilliant vignettes of old Turkish life, such as the ritual weekly visit to the hamam, as it tells the "other side" of the Gallipoli story, and its impact on one family and the transformation of a nation. "It is just as though someone had opened a door marked `Private' and showed you what was inside.... A most interesting and affectionate book."-Sir John Betjeman. "A wholly delightful book."-Harold Nicolson

    Lindbergh's historic transatlantic flightAlong with most of my fellow fliers, I believed that aviation had a brilliant future. Now we live, today, in our dreams of yesterday; and, living in those dreams, we dream again…Charles A. Lindbergh captured the world's attention—and changed the course of history—when he completed his famous nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927. In The Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh takes the reader on an extraordinary journey, bringing to life the thrill and peril of trans-Atlantic travel in a single-engine plane. Eloquently told and sweeping in its scope, Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prize-winning account is an epic adventure tale for all time.

    Over the next year, this "private army" carried out a series of daring and truly spectacular raids behind German lines: they freed prisoners, destroyed installations, and spread alarm. An enthralling first-person account, filled with danger and thrills.

    "I probably never would have become America's leading fire-eater if Flamo the Great hadn't happened to explode that night in front of Krinko's Great Combined Side Shows."A true story of carnival life, in which the author learns the tricks of the trade, meets some wonderful people (and some crooks) and lives an odd and interesting life.

    His attempts may sometimes be ridiculous, a muddled scramble of half-in and half-out of a train window, or sometimes eerie tunneling twenty feet deep in the clay and earth of Poland ...