The weather for the past few days had not been altogether reliable; now windy, now calm - now snowing, now clear: regular spring weather, in other words... With this matter of fact sentence begins one of the most famous journeys in all exploration - Amundsen's conquest of the South Pole. The details of the tragic race with Scott are well known, but often forgotten is the sheer professionalism and courage which drove the Norwegian expedition on. Unlike the driven and tortured egos which bedeviled the British expeditions, the Norwegians worked purposefully as a team using the latest technology, and Amundsen acknowledges this openly when the Pole was finally achieved. I had determined that the act of planting it [the flag] - the historic event - should be equally divided among us all. It was not for one man to do this; it was for all who had staked their lives in the struggle, and held together through thick and thin. This was the only way in which I could show my gratitude to my comrades in this desolate spot... Five weather-beaten, frostbitten fists they were that grasped the pole, raised the waving flag in the air, and planted it as the first at

    289 authentic Renaissance woodcuts. Translated by Herbert Hoover. Reprint of English (1912) edition.

    M. Cornford showed that the remarkable burst of abstract speculation among pre-Socratic thinkers of the sixth century B.C. emerged directly from the religious thought of the preceding era in Greece. Combining profound classical scholarship with striking anthropological and sociological insight, Cornford rejected the post-Darwinian rationalist assumption that religion and philosophy are fundamentally different from each other. His book supplies a needed reminder of the intricate connections between critical scientific thought and social and emotional experience. As he probes the mythic antecedents of such persistent metaphysical concepts as Destiny, God, Soul, Substance, Nature, and Immortality, Cornford warns us that "unless we have some grasp of that history [of myth], we are not likely to understand the speculation, which, however scientific its spirit may be, constantly operates with these religious ideas, and is to a large extent confined in its movement within the limits already traced by them." Classicists, historians of religion, students of ancient history, and everyone concerned with the subject of myth will find this lucid and highly original work to be a source of rich insights about the organic nature and continuity of Western thought.

    San Quentin State Prison is located on 432 acres on Point Quentin in Marin County, California, and is north of San Francisco. It was opened in July, 1852 and is the oldest prison in California. The state's male death row is located at San Quentin, as well as it's only gas chamber. In recent years, however, the gas chamber has been used to carry out lethel injections. Donald Lowrie, a down and out young man, started out the book by asking several questions to the reader, showing why he committed a crime of which he would be sentenced to 15 years! Lowrie asks the reader: "Have you ever been broke? Have you ever been hungry and miserable, not knowing when or where you were going to get your next meal, nor where you were going to spend your next night? Have you ever made holes in your shoes trying to get work, meeting rebuff and insults in return for your earnestness and sincerity, and encountering an utter lack of an understanding of your crying necessity in those with whom you have pleaded for a chance? Thousands of persons have felt these thoughts, have suffered these experiences, but very few have done what I did and then told about it, as I am going to tell". So what did Lowrie do? Lowrie starts out by explaining that when he was a little boy, some unknown prowler went into his house at night and stole his father's watch. Lowrie claims that since he was jobless, homeless and futureless, "that childhood incident came back to me, and the fact that I decided to emulate the unknown gentleman who had appropriated my father's watch tends to stregnthen the claim that man is a simon-pure imitative animal". Lowrie takes a coin and decides if it comes up heads, he would rob a house, if tails, he would do nothing. Doing the coin flip under a gas lamp, it came down "heads". Lowrie relates: "the head of "Liberty" stared me in the face. I flung the coin into the gutter and buttoned my coat. I had suddenly become a criminal". Next, Lowrie breaks into a house at night and discovers someone else in the house with him. Everytime he moves, someone moves simultaneously. Lowrie writes: "I must get to the window, and quickly. As I moved, I noticed a glare on my right. The next instant I realized what had occurred. I had been dodging my own reflection in the hall mirror". Lowrie got out of the house with an 18 karat Swiss jewelled watch and three $20 gold pieces. Eating his first breakfast in 84 hours and reflecting on what he just did, he writes: "somehow I felt that there should be a reaction, that I ought to be horrified at the thought that I committed a crime:but the food tasted natural and I was happy, actually and unqualifiedly happy. I actually felt absolutely no qualms of conscience". Proud of his heist, he pawns the watch for $80 and realizes he needs sleep. Right before Lowrie goes to a rooming house, the pawn shop owner alerts the authorities of his suspicious customer and Lowrie is arrested. Lowrie explains next: "Against the advice of counsel, I pleaded not guilty and stood trial before the Superior Court. Before the trial was half over, however, I regretted my decision". Lowrie goes in front of a jury and is sentenced to 15 years in San Quentin State Prison. Lowrie states: "I was taken to San Quentin on the 24th day of July, 1901". Although this book predates both World War One and Two, it's antiquity doesn't tarnish it's message:"Imprisonment only makes bad criminals worse criminals". Although Lowrie tries to impress the reader with words that even I, with a fairly vast knowledge of esoteric vocabulary had to frequently search deeply and laboriously into a dictionary to keep up with his story, he presented a very clear and lucid journey into the hell of incarceration one faced back in 1901. It doesn't seem, although judged vicariously, that things have changed much even today. Lowrie detailed multiple instances of torture (several grueling instances are expounded upon in the book, especially in conjunction with the use of a straight jacket in an unlit dungeon for minor infractions) that the reader of this book will definately conclude is unhumane and barbaric. Here is Lowrie's description of his encounters with "The Jacket": "They took me down to the dungeon and onto one of the dark cells. There was an old mattress on the floor and they told me to lay down on it, and they put the jacket on me. It held my arms so I couldn't move them, but that wasn't enough. They turned me over on my stomach and laced me up. R....(name intentionally ommitted) put his foot in the middle of my back so as to pull the ropes up tight, and when I hollered he laughed. After they had me laced up so I could hardly breathe they went out and shut the door. It was about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, but when the door was shut it was just like night. For half an hour or so I didn't suffer much, but gradually I began to feel smothered, and my heart hurt me when it beat. I got scared and began to holler, but that only made my heart hurt more, and I was afraid I might die if I didn't lie still. Pretty soon my arms and hands began to tingle, just like pins and needles sticking in them, and this got so bad that I couldn't stand it and I began yelling again". Lowrie also comments further on the effects of a straight jacket's barbaric use as a means of maintaining order. Lowrie asserts:"I saw scores of cases and I talked with dozens of victims immediately after their punishment. The marks of the ropes, the red stripes around the torso and limbs, were always visible and the skin irritated in between. Quite often a man was unable to walk without assistance, and those who could walk did so uncertainly and feebly, somewhat like a man who is drunk". Is this how society corrected a wayward citizen in the early 20th century, or did this foster incorrigibility? This book's copyright is 1915. One wonder's how strict the laws must have been at the turn of the century for a first time offender to get 15 years for simple burglary with no weapon involved in an unoccupied dwelling. To get a feel of San Quentin and it's inmates attitudes, Lowrie wrote: "Like the public in general, I had imagined that men in prison went around with elongated countences and an expression of chronic gloom. Instead I found smiles and indifference-or feigned indifference. Every man realizes that self-pity, or a bid for sympathy, is dispicable. The jocular sarcasm I learned was merely an effort to delude themselves and each other that they didn't mind (being incarcerated). It was the innate, manly trait of "gameness". Many a smiling face in prison, just as in the world at large, conceals a tortured, dispairing soul". There are numerous stories Lowrie covers, e.g. the problem of tuberculosis (then called "consumption"), escape attempts that ended in guards committing cold blooded murder of inmates, how everything in the penetentiary is done "fast" (bathing, shaving, even an execution was done in less than three minutes), the problems of morphine, opium and heroin smuggled inth San Quentin. However, most disturbingly, the anecdotes of the stories of straight jacket torture were the most disturbing part of this book. One must remember, that the inmate was laid on a mattress face down in a pitch black dungeon for a week a a time tied in a super tight straight jacket. Could you imagine if you committed a minor crime and found yourself incarcerated and subjected to this mistreatment? Lowrie reminds the reader that during a bout with "the jacket", the inmate, with no food nor water, for a week at a time one would lay in pitch black and repeatedly urinate and defecate on themselves. Lowrie states that many a prisoner would become deranged in the process and aside from minor infractions, it was also used as a confession technique when the warden wanted to find out how an inmate acquired narcotics. As far as capital punishment, Lowrie voiced strong opinions in "My Life In Prison". Here were his thoughts: "It requires 12 to 18 seconds from the time a condemned man is started from the death chamber until he is dangling at the end of the rope. Why this scientific swiftness? Why the electric chair which is supposed to snuff out life in a flash? If the murder really is a deterrant, why not torture the victim? Why not strangle him to death slowly? Why not do it in the market place, where men and women may come and see? They used to have public executions. Why have they ceased to be public? Because it was found that the sight of a fellow creature being murdered in cold blood hardened those who saw it done. It was realized that such a sight was not good for human eyes and ears. And after all is said and done, it is the poor man for whom the gallows waits. During all the years that men have been murdered by the State at San Quentin, only one man with money has been hanged. Chinese, Indians, negroes, cholos, cripples and dements have died in mid-air, but only one man died who had money. In murder trials where high-priced lawyers are engaged it is the opposing lawyers, not the defendant, on trial". Finally, Lowrie creates a convincing argument that spending time in jail creates the following: "I say calmly and deliberately that few, if any, men are deterred from the commission of crime by fear of the consequences, even after they know the consequences down to the last sickening detail. If I felt that anything beneficial to anyone were accomplished by these conditions, I should have nothing to say. But I know that degradation and a spirit of revenge, a determination to retaliate, to "get even" is frequently the result". Remember, Donald Lowrey wrote these words in 1915. History reminds us that Adolf Hitler formulated most of his anti- semetic hatred of Jews and other minorities and visions of world conquest and domination while he was imprisoned in Germany following World War One. In fact, prison is exactly where he wrote his book "Mein Mampf" where he set down all the destructive roots as to what would follow in the Second World War where over 70 million men, women and innocent children perished. The question is: would this have happened if Lowrie's ideas of the uselessness of incarceration and the breeding of "hate and the spirit of revenge" had been listened to? There has got to be a better way! Regardless, if you can find this book, there are priceless lessons of man's inhumanity and the faults of our systems of criminal correction that exist even today! Find this book!

    Author of over a hundred books and articles, Belloc was a journalist, polemicist, social and political analyst, literary critic, poet, and novelist. The Servile State has endured as his most important political work. The effect of socialist doctrine on capitalist society, Belloc wrote, is to produce a third thing different from either—the servile state, today commonly called the welfare state.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    Houghton and Mifflin to tell his tale. THE LOSS OF THE S.S. TITANIC represents Beesley's attempt not just to record the events of the sinking but to set the record straight. In so doing, he captures both the majesty and the tragedy of this legendary voyage -- the view from the lifeboat as well as that from the deck. Full of wonderful nautical detail and written with a hair-raising clarity, THE LOSS OF THE S.S. TITANIC is an altogether spellbinding tale of that fateful night -- one you won't soon forget.

    Over roughly four centuries prior to his journey, the native peoples and tribes had suffered atrocious mistreatment at the hands of colonial settlers who would murder, rape or enslave natives with near-impunity. Owing to these horrors, the Putumayo region gained the grim nickname: 'The Devil's Paradise'.Exposing the consequences of these terrible injustices was the primary purpose of Hardenburg's trek. In his journey and photographs we discover a people whose diverse beliefs, traditions and hitherto undisturbed way of life had been destroyed by successive invasions of colonial explorers. Their numbers and habitat depleted, Hardenburg encountered many natives who were demoralized and miserable following generations of ruthless exploitation.Hardenburg recounts stories of how better armed and organised newcomers to the region were able to cause great devastation to the tribes of the region. Lands were seized and great tracts of rainforest cleared for profiteering plantations of rubber and other lucrative materials. Yet the sustainability and planning of many operations was poor; many closed after a mere handful of years in operation, leaving only empty, barren plains behind.The Putumayo is a grim and eye-opening book which in many ways foreshadows the modern environmental disasters confronting Peru, Brazil and the greater Amazon rainforest region. As such, it is a history of immeasurable value, gravity and importance.

    A fascinating biography of the founder of the Salvation Army, one of the world's most successful distributers of humanitarian aid.

    A novelization of the life and death of of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII.

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    These manuscripts range from Greek cursive papyri to the book-hands of the 15th century, and from Roman cursive writing on tablets and papyri through a succession of Latin book-hands as employed in medieval documents throughout Europe.

    Anecdotes of Aurangzeb is an english translation of AHKAM-I-ALAMGIRI ascribed to Hamid-ud-din Khan Bahadur, with a short biography of Aurangzeb and Historical Notes by the author.

    This means amazing reading material dating from the 1400's in beautifully crafted rare and out of print books. Owning a rare book is a treasure and a truly pleasurable experience. Rare books on Joan of Arc are often artistically decorated and brilliantly illustrated using techniques that have gone by the wayside, replaced by mass-produced and less personal cookie-cutter products. --saint-joan-arc.com/rare-books Large folio, 12 x 15 inches. Hardback; original paper-covered boards with design of Joan in armor with arms outstretched, against a background of a fleur-de-lys filled cross; printed in gilt and blue on tan paper. 40 large full-color plates with decorative frames. All pages, both text and plates, on stubs. --ilab.org Octave Denis Victor Guillonnet (1872-1967) was a French painter. Gifted in being allowed to live “the dreaming life” as he proclaimed, Octave Guillonnet proved to be an extraordinary talent. He entered the art studio of Lionel Royer in Paris at the young age of 13, won his first award at 15, and by the time he was 20, he earned the rank of Hors-Concours in the Salons. With this designation, his paintings hung directly in exhibits without needing to be judged by committee before inclusion. He excelled through his broad interpretation of the Impressionist School in painting garden and beach scenes, most often featuring women, with illusionary elements.The son of a well-to-do couple, the Guillonnet family owned a summer residence near Monaco in Carras, and lived the rest of the year in Garches, west of Paris. He won a prestigious national travel scholarship in 1901 and went abroad to Algeria. With his new perspectives on the bright light and colors of North Africa, Guillonnet developed new concepts for producing his ethereal portrayals. -vallejogallery.com

    When plans for Jean Aubry's revolutionary "combat aircraft" are stolen by a German spy, his daughter Germaine volunteers to bring them back. Disguised as a governess, Germaine infiltrates the highest levels of the German military. When she is finally unmasked and imprisoned, her father and her aviator fiancé call on the ultimate secret agent to help bring her home. Chantecoq. King of detectives, master of disguise. But even the mercurial, theatrical Chantecoq will find his ingenuity stretched to the very limits to rescue Germaine Aubry from Spandau Citadel. Originally published as Coeur de Française, and translated into English for the first time, this first Chantecoq adventure is a bold pulp tale of honour, patriotism, romance, and selfless heroism. Filled with suspense, fast cars, swordfights and daring escapes, the action unfolds against a backdrop of growing hostility between France and Germany.

    The Photographic History of the Civil War was first published in 1911 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the great conflict. Extremely popular then, it has become a rare book. Here, in five double volumes, is the complete and unabridged original edition, text and photographs carefully reproduced in the original format and full size.The thousands of photographs contained within are remarkable in their immediacy, spontaneity, and authenticity. They demonstrate the power of the camera as well as the importance of the photographer. They are a unique record of one of the greatest conflicts in the history of mankind.These pictures can be viewed as art, as history and as journalism. Covering every aspect of the war --from the front to weapons, from tactics to the wounded, from everyday life to grief, from victory to defeat—these volumes are a testament to a mighty conflict and to the great nation which emerged from it.This volume covers the armies and the leaders of the Civil War, as well as some of the eloquent writing to emerge from the battle, including poetry.

    

    The chronological dispute as to the relative antiquity of the two countries is of minor importance; for while in Babylonia the historical material is almost entirely inscriptional, in Egypt we know the handicrafts, the weapons, the arts, and, to a certain extent, the religious beliefs of the race up to a period when it was just emerging from the Stone Age. In a word, Egypt presents the most ancient race whose manner of life is known to man. From the beginning of its history—that is, from about 4500 B.C.—we can trace the development of a religion one of whose most prominent elements was a promise of a life after death. It was still a great religion when the Christian doctrine of immortality was enunciated. In the early centuries of the Christian era, it seemed almost possible that the worship of Osiris and Isis might become the religion of the classical world; and the last stand made by civilized paganism against Christianity was in the temple of Isis at Philae in the sixth century after Christ.

    Includes tales of St. Alban, St. Patrick, St. Bridget, St. Cuthbert, St. Columba, St. Margaret of Scotland, and others. Attractively illustrated.

    

    For the ordained clergyman it is a book for continual reference: for the theological student it is a necessity in the study of worship: for the layman it is helpful in the better understanding of liturgical worship.Originally published by the Harrison Trust, this new edition is published on behalf of the Church Society, with the prayerful hope that it will lead to a better and clearer understanding of the Book of Common Prayer."