Best of
Non-Fiction

1956

Night


Elie Wiesel - 1956
    Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's testimony to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this horror must simply never be allowed to happen again.

The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom


Slavomir Rawicz - 1956
    The harrowing true tale of seven escaped Soviet prisoners who desperately marched out of Siberia through China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and over the Himalayas to British India.

Nancy Wake


Russell Braddon - 1956
    But when her husband was called up for military service, Nancy felt she had just as much of a duty to fight for freedom. By 1943, her fearless undercover work even in the face of personal tragedy had earned her a place on the Gestapo’s ‘most wanted’ list.Mixing armed combat with a taste for high living, Nancy frustrated the Nazis at every turn—whether she was smuggling food and messages as part of the underground Resistance or being parachuted into the heart of the war to lead a 7,000-strong band of Resistance fighters.The extraordinary courage of this unequalled woman changed the course of the war, and Russell Braddon’s vividly realised biography brings her incredible story to life.Revised edition: This edition of Nancy Wake includes editorial revisions.

The Singing Wilderness


Sigurd F. Olson - 1956
    Olson was for more than thirty years a wilderness guide in the Quetico-Superior country, and no one knew with the same intimacy the mysteries of the lakes and forests of that magnificent primitive area. To the many out-of-doorsmen who canoed and portaged with him through this wilderness, he was known honorifically as the Bourgeois--as the voyageurs of old called their trusted leaders through this same region.

The Birth of Britain


Winston S. Churchill - 1956
    Churchill's most magnificent literary works. Begun during Churchill's 'wilderness years' when he was out of government, first published in 1956 after his leadership through the darkest days of World War II had cemented his place in history and completed when Churchill was in his 80s, it remains to this day a compelling and vivid history.The first volume - The Birth of Britain - tells the story of the formation of the British state, from the arrival of Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire through the invasions of the Vikings and the Normans, the signing of the Magna Carta and establishment of the mother of parliaments to the War of the Roses.

My Family and Other Animals


Gerald Durrell - 1956
    My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the island but ended up as a delightful account of Durrell’s family’s experiences, from the many eccentric hangers-on to the ceaseless procession of puppies, toads, scorpions, geckoes, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, bats, and butterflies into their home.

The Drunken Forest


Gerald Durrell - 1956
    With Durrell for interpreter, an orange armadillo, or a horned toad, or a crab-eating raccoon, or a baby giant anteater suddenly discovers the ability not merely to set you laughing but actually to endear itself to you.ContentsExplanationSaludos1. Oven-birds and burrowing owls2. Eggbert and the Terrible TwinsInterlude3. Fields of flying flowers4. The orange armadillos5. Bevy of bichos6. Fawns, frogs, and fer-de-lance7. Terrible toads and a bushel of birds8. The four-eyed bird and the anaconda9. Sarah Huggersack10. Rattlesnakes and revolutionInterlude11. The Rhea HuntAdios!Acknowledgements

The Last Grain Race


Eric Newby - 1956
    The four-masted barque Moshulu ended up as a dockside restaurant in Philadelphia; the young apprentice went on to become one of the greatest travel writers of this century. The Last Grain Race is Eric Newby's spell-binding account of his time spent on the Moshulu's last voyage in the Australian grain trade.As always, Eric Newby's sharp eye for detail captures the hardships, danger, squabbles, companionship and sheer joy of shipboard life - bedbugs, ferocious storms, eccentric Finnish crew and all. By pure chance, Eric witnessed the passing of the era of sail, and his tale is all the more significant for being the last of its kind.

Carve Her Name with Pride


Rubeigh James Minney - 1956
    She met and married Etienne Szabo, a Captain in the French Foreign Legion in 1940. Shortly after the birth of her daughter, Tania, her husband died at El Alamein. She became a FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) and was recruited into the SOE and underwent secret agent training. Her first trip to France was completed successfully even though she was arrested and then released by the French Police.On June 7th, 1944, Szabo was parachuted into Limoges. Her task was to co-ordinate the work of the French Resistance in the area in the first days after D-Day. She was captured by the SS 'Das Reich' Panzer Division and handed over to the Gestapo in Paris for interrogation. From Paris, Violette Szabo was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp where she was executed in January 1945. She was only 23 and for her courage was posthumously awarded The George Cross and the Croix de Guerre.

The Outsider


Colin Wilson - 1956
    First published over forty years ago, it made its youthful author England's most controversial intellectual. The Outsider is an individual engaged in an intense self-exploration-a person who lives at the edge, challenges cultural values & "stands for Truth." Born into a world without perspective, where others simply drift thru life, the Outsider creates his own set of rules & lives them in an unsympathetic environment. The relative handful of people who fulfilled Wilson's definition of the Outsider in the 1950s have now become a significant social force, making Wilson's vision more relevant today than ever. Thru the works & lives of various artists--including Kafka, Camus, Eliot, Hemingway, Hesse, Lawrence, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Shaw, Blake, Nietzsche & Dostoyevski--Wilson explores the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society & society's effect on him. Wilson illuminates the struggle of those who seek not only the transformation of Self but also the transformation of society as a whole. The book is essential for everyone who shares his conviction that "a new religion is needed".

Lady Sings the Blues


Billie Holiday - 1956
    Updated with an insightful introduction and a revised discography, both written by celebrated music writer David Ritz.Lady Sings the Blues is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred autobiography of Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation. Taking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Holiday’s rough-and-tumble Baltimore childhood (where she ran errands at a whorehouse in exchange for the chance to listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith albums), to her emergence on Harlem’s club scene, to sold-out performances with the Count Basie Orchestra and with Artie Shaw and his band, this revelatory memoir is notable for its trenchant observations on the racism that darkened Billie’s life and the heroin addiction that ended it too soon. We are with her during the mesmerizing debut of “Strange Fruit”; with her as she rubs shoulders with the biggest movie stars and musicians of the day (Bob Hope, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and more); and with her through the scrapes with Jim Crow, spats with Sarah Vaughan, ignominious jailings, and tragic decline. All of this is told in Holiday’s tart, streetwise style and hip patois that makes it read as if it were written yesterday.

Sold for a Farthing


Clare Kipps - 1956
    "...Will be sold by the hundred thousand. The photographs are astonishing in themselves and a wonderful witness of the love that extends to all creatures great and small..." - Walter de la Mare

Etymological Dictionary of the English Language


Walter W. Skeat - 1956
    

Song of America


George Mardikian - 1956
    Tells of George Mardikian's life and opening Omar Khayyam’s famous restaurant in San Francisco, the story of an immigrant’s dream come true.

In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908-09


Mary Ellicott Arnold - 1956
    Although the area had been the scene of a gold rush some fifty years earlier, they write in the foreword, "the social life of the Indian—what he believed and the way he felt about things—was very little affected by white influence. The older Indians still had the spaced tatoo marks on their forearms, by which they could measure the length of the string of wampum required to buy a wife. . . . The white men we knew on the Rivers were pioneers of the Old West. . . . All around us was gold country, the land of the saloon and of the six-shooter. Our friends and neighbors carried guns as a matter of course, and used them on occasion. But the account given in these pages is not of these occurrences but of everyday life on the frontier in an Indian village, and what Indians and badmen did and said when they were not engaged in wiping out their friends and neighbors. It is also the account of our own two years in Indian country where, in the sixty-mile stretch between Happy Camp and Orleans, we were the only white women, and most of the time quite scared enough to satisfy anybody."

Man of high fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong, A biography


Lawrence P. Lessing - 1956
    

Battle Hymn


Dean E. Hess - 1956
    Hess is the subject of this inspiring autobiography, Battle Hymn, first published in 1956, which tells of his experiences as a U.S. Air Force colonel, including his involvement in the so-called “Kiddy Car Airlift” during the Korean War on December 20, 1950.With the airfield over capacity, Hess sent Korean orphans to an orphanage in Seoul. When the North Korean forces began to capture the city, Hess reportedly organized 15 C-54 Skymaster aircraft to airlift 950 orphans and 80 orphanage staff from the path of the Chinese advance to safety on Jeju Island. When Hess departed Korea in June 1951, a new orphanage on this island held over 1,000 Korean children.The book later served the basis for the 1957 film of the same name, where he was played by Rock Hudson.

Hunza: The Lost Kingdom of the Himalayas


John Clark - 1956
    In this book, he relates his fascinating experiences of life among the remote mountain people of Hunza, a small hill-state on the extreme north of Pakistan-held Kashmir. Illustrated with photographs, maps, etc.

Four Ways of Being Human: An Introduction to Anthropology


Gene Lisitzky - 1956
    Sad to see that it is no longer in print.

Sorrow built a bridge: The life of Mother Alphonsa, daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne


Katherine Burton - 1956
    Although culturally enhanced by the European travels, her formal education was random and erratic, provided mainly by her parents and by instructors at home. Like both her brother, Julian, and her sister, Una, Lathrop felt compelled to further the Hawthorne literary fame. She began writing stories when she was eleven, married a writer when she was twenty, and spent the next 25 years of an unfulfilled, stormy marriage writing and publishing poetry, short stories, and sketches. Her only child, Francis, died in 1881 at the age of four.Restless and rootless, Lathrop renounced her Unitarian faith in 1891, and she and her husband were received into the Catholic church. In 1895 with church permission, she formally separated from her husband to devote her life to the care of impoverished, dying victims of cancer, and she organized a group who called themselves Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer. In 1900, two years after the death of her husband, Lathrop was named Sister Mary Alphonsa in the Dominican Order. A year later, as head of two resident homes she had established for the incurably ill, she became Mother Alphonsa. She directed one of these homes, Rosary Hill, in Hawthorne, New York, until her death.

Eudora Welty Reads


Eudora Welty - 1956
    from the uproariously irreverent Why I Live at the P.O. and the quieter, richly perceptive A Memory and A Worn Path to sponteneous Powerhouse and the insightful voice of women's truth's in Petrified Man, Welty opens up her stories and invites the listener in.Description: 2 sound cassettes (1 hr., 38 min.) : analog, Dolby processed.

Youth: The Years From Ten to Sixteen


Arnold Gesell - 1956
    The Years from Ten to Sixteen.Hardback, ex-library, with usual stamps and markings, in fair all round condition, suitable as a study copy.

The Seed From The East


Bertha Holt - 1956
    The Holts adopted eight children from Korea. It literally took an act of congress. It is an amazing story of what God can do through those that choose to follow Him.

The Atom of Delight


Neil M. Gunn - 1956
    

How to Survive on Land and Sea


Frank C. Craighead Jr. - 1956
    The classic one-stop guide to outdoor survival for everyone from the novice hiker to the experienced mariner.

Structural Problems In Shakespeare: Lectures And Essays By Harold Jenkins


Harold Jenkins - 1956
    Many of these are now out of print, or have never been formally published, making this a unique tribute edition. Jenkins was a globally respected academic, and his works are still critically current. His most memorable essays have been chosen and edited by Ernst Honigmann to give the reader unique access to the very best of Harold Jenkins' critical work. Featuring in particular his famous essays on Hamlet, this book makes an invaluable companion piece to Jenkins' Arden edition of the play.

turning needs to deeds


Various - 1956
    assortment of heart warming short stories

A Dictionary of Sea Terms


A. Ansted - 1956
    I do not profess to teach those who may be already experienced in yachting and the art of boat sailing, and still less those acquainted with the sea. For these there are various nautical dictionaries but so far as I am aware, there is no such work exclusively devoted to those who start in entire ignorance of their subject and to supply this apparent want the present work is an attempt. The dictionary is fully illustrated and in almost every case from the object described.'Keywords: Little Dictionary Boat Sailing I Am Aware Yachting Acquainted Dictionaries Art

The English master of arms from the twelfth to the twentieth century


J.D. Aylward - 1956
    

The Sermon on the Mount


Charles Haddon Spurgeon - 1956
    The Beatitudes (Matt. 5:1-12)2. The Candle (Matt. 5:15, 16)3. The Perpetuity of the Law of God (Matt. 5:18)4. A Call to Holy Living (Matt. 5:47)5. The Fatherhood of God (Matt. 6:9)6. A Heavenly Pattern for Our Earthly Life (Matt. 6:10)7. A Single Eye and Simple Faith (Matt. 6:22, 23)8. Thought Condemned, Yet Commanded (Matt. 6:31–33)No Difference (Matt. 6:45)10. Knock! (Matt. 7:12)11. The Disowned (Matt. 7:21–23)12. The Two Builders and Their Houses (Matt. 7:24–27)

Life in Shetland: A World Apart


Ursula Venables - 1956
    In Life in Shetland, the second of her memoirs, she details both the natural life of Shetland as well as local traditions. Shetland has changed dramatically in the ensuing decades, and Life in Shetland lovingly captures details of a disappearing world.

The Dîné: Origin Myths of the Navaho Indians


Aileen O'Bryan - 1956
    Other groups of the same stock are the Apaches (Nde), Lipanes (Lipa Nde), Hupas of California, and various Dene tribe inhabiting British Columbia and Alaska (see DeNeS). This points to a migration of the Navajo, centuries ago, from the extreme north. They themselves have a vague tradition of the "Dine Nahodoni", i.e., "other Navajos", living far away. According to their myths they emerged from lower worlds somewhere in the San Juan Mountains in south-west Colorado. At present they occupy an extensive reservation in the north-east corner of Arizona and the north-west corner of New Mexico; but many of them live beyond its borders, especially towards the south. Formerly their habitat extended somewhat farther to the north-east.

Empire of Fear


Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov - 1956
    Vladimir Petrov was the Third Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Canberra and head of Soviet espionage in Australia.This is their joint biographies, from their birth in pre-revolution Russia to their defection.

The ABC of Gourmet Cookery


Ruth McCrea - 1956
    “Here we have gourmet recipes that are easy to make, require only those ingredients readily found on most home pantry shelves, and which are reputation-making for the cooks that use them,” says the editor. With refined recipes from A to Z and amusing rhymes, this vintage cookbook is a tried-and-true introduction to the ins and outs of simple gourmet cooking, from an astounding Arroz Con Pollo to zesty Zabaglione.Artistic cooking’s aGourmet’s delight;He dreams up the menuAnd cooks it just right!