Book picks similar to
Tales Of Endurance by Fergus Fleming
history
exploration
paperback
nonfiction
Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India
Cleo Odzer - 1995
Goa Freaks begins in the mid 1970s and tells of Cleo's love affair with Goa, a resort in India where the Freaks (hippies) of the world converge to partake in a heady bohemian lifestyle. To finance their astounding appetites for cocaine, heroin, and hashish, the Freaks spend each monsoon season acting as drug couriers, and soon cleo is running her own "scams" in Canada, Australis, and the United States. (She even gets her Aunt Sadie in on the action.) Wish her earnings she builds a veritable palace on the beach- the only Goa house with running water and a flushing toilet. Cleo becomes the hostess of Anjuna Beach, holding days-long poker games and movie nights and, as her money begins to run out, transforming the house into a for-profit drug den. Tracing Cleo's love affairs, her stint hiding out at the ashram of the infamous Bhagwan Rajneesh, and her sometimes-harrowing drug experiences, Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India is candid and compelling, bringin to life the spirit of a now-lost era.
Pedalling to Hawaii: A Human Powered Adventure
Stevie Smith - 2004
One rainy, miserable Monday he resolves to grab life with both hands and embark on an adventure: the first entirely human-powered journey around the world. Although he had never been on an expedition of any kind and had no money, Stevie and his friend Jason dreamed up a voyage that would take them from England to Hawaii by bicycle, inline skates and ocean-going pedal boat. For 111 days, they pedalled 7,500 kilometers across the Atlantic, and then crossed the United States to take on the challenge of the Pacific. Pedalling to Hawaii is hilarious, entertaining and refreshingly non-heroic, packed with thrills and spills as the intrepid and sometimes blundering duo make their way around the world. It is also a meditative account of a search for simplicity and integrity.
A Road More or Less Traveled: Madcap Adventures on the Appalachian Trail
Stephen Otis - 2008
A 300-pounf hiker drop half his body weight because all he can afford is oatmeal. A dysentery-infected Mormon tries to steal a dog from a private detective. A stoic woodsman smacks a bear across the snout with a flaming brand. Two hikers wander into a hyper religious commune in upstate New York and find out where all the soap in the world is made. A Road More or Less Traveled is the strange but true tale of two men who set out to hike the Appalachian Trail, America's most heralded footpath, extending over two thousand miles from Maine to Georgia. Along the way, they find uncouth beauty, collide head-on with America's churning technocracy, and battle through a faith in the ruins. Road is a story filled with adventure, absurdity, laugh-out-loud humor and gnarly soul searching. You should read it.
WHITE HOUSE USHER: Stories from the Inside
Christopher Beauregard Emery - 2017
government—an usher in the White House. For more than 200 years, a small office has operated on the State Floor of the White House Executive Residence. Known as the Usher's Office, whose mission is to accommodate the personal needs of the first family, and to make the White House feel like a home. The Usher's Office is the managing office of the Executive Residence and its staff of 90-plus. The staff consists of butlers, carpenters, grounds personnel, electricians, painters, plumbers, florists, maids, housemen, cooks, chefs, storekeepers, curators, calligraphers, doormen, and administrative support. Ushers work closely with the first family, senior staff, Social Office, Press Office, Secret Service Agency, and military leaders to carry out White House functions: luncheons, dinners, teas, receptions, meetings, conferences, and more. Chris Emery was only the 18th White House Usher since 1891, and had the honor and privilege to serve presidential families for three years during the Reagan administration, four years for President H. W. Bush, and 14 months under President Clinton. His vignettes recreate intimate White House happenings from an insider’s viewpoint. Chris Emery was the only White House Usher to be terminated in the 20th century. Turn the pages to find out which first lady fired him... “With his book, White House Usher: Stories from the Inside, former usher Chris Emery gives his readers a peek inside what happens upstairs at the White House. Chris’ anecdotes tell a rich story of how America’s house really is the First Families’ home. I loved my trip down memory lane.” - Former First Lady Barbara Bush (October 2017)
The American Revolution
John Fiske - 1891
You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
Crushed: An Amazing True Story of Determination and Survival
Kathryn Mann - 2013
Crushed and left with broken ribs, a punctured lung, and compression fractures in his chest, spine, and pelvis, Bob pushed his arms forward, dug his fingers into the freezing mud and dragged his mostly paralyzed body forward. Saturated to the skin in freezing rain, far from help, and with the night fast approaching, Bob refused to give up.This includes photographs, documentation, and inspirational verses.This amazing true story was featured on the It's a Miracle series hosted by Richard Thomas. It aired on PAX Television as Chain Reaction in 1999.
Churchill and the Avoidable War: Could World War II Have Been Prevented?
Richard M. Langworth - 2015
Churchill, 1948: World War II was the defining event of our age—the climactic clash between liberty and tyranny. It led to revolutions, the demise of empires, a protracted Cold War, and religious strife still not ended. Yet Churchill maintained that it was all avoidable. Here is a transformative view of Churchill’s theories, prescriptions, actions, and the degree to which he pursued them in the decade before the war. It shows that he was both right and wrong: right that Hitler could have been stopped; wrong that he did all he could to stop him. It is based on what really happened—evidence that has been “hiding in public” for many years, thoroughly referenced in Churchill’s words and those of his contemporaries. Richard M. Langworth began his Churchill work in 1968 when he organized the Churchill Study Unit, which later became the Churchill Centre. He served as its president and board chairman and was editor of its journal Finest Hour from 1982 to 2014. In November 2014, he was appointed senior fellow for Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project. Mr. Langworth published the first American edition of Churchill’s India, is the author of A Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill, and is the editor of Churchill by Himself, The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill, The Patriot’s Churchill, All Will Be Well: Good Advice from Winston Churchill, and Churchill in His Own Words. His next book is Winston Churchill, Urban Myths and Reality. In 1998, Richard Langworth was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by HM The Queen “for services to Anglo-American understanding and the memory of Sir Winston Churchill.”
21 Months a Captive: Rachel Plummer and the Fort Parker Massacre (Annotated)
Rachel Plummer - 2016
Some residents were brutally murdered, others taken prisoner.Among those captured was eleven year old Cynthia Parker, who would remain with the Comanche for 24 years and give birth to famed Chief Quanah.Another captive was 17-year-old Rachel Plummer, mother of one, pregnant with her second child. She would soon have her first-born ripped from her arms, never to be seen again, and later watched as her second-born was killed before her eyes.After twenty-one months of captivity that destroyed her health, she was purchased and returned to her family. In this extraordinary account, her father tells of that horrible day when the fort was attacked, and his desperate efforts to find and retrieve the captives. Rachel details her terrible enslavement and how she eventually fought back.For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers, tablets, and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.
Without a Paddle: Racing Twelve Hundred Miles Around Florida by Sea Kayak
Warren Richey - 2010
A reporter with a beautiful wife and talented son, Richey couldn’t imagine how it could be any better....Then his marriage falls apart and he can’t imagine how it could be any worse.The divorce leaves Richey questioning everything, while struggling to find a way forward. To get his bearings, he enters the first Ultimate Florida Challenge, an all-out twelve-hundred-mile kayak race around Florida.The UFC is less of a race than it is a dare or a threat. The thirty-day deadline sets a grueling, twenty-four-hour-a-day pace through shark- , alligator- , and even python-infested waters. But those twelve hundred miles are only a fraction of a journey that pulls Richey back to when he was embedded with troops in Iraq, reporting on missing children, and hiking the mountains of Montana with his son, and shows him where he went wrong, where he went right, and how to do it better the second time around.Warren Richey’s memoir Without a Paddle is a remarkable physical and emotional journey that cuts to the heart of what it means to be a man, a husband, and a father.
The Ogre: Biography of a mountain and the dramatic story of the first ascent
Doug K. Scott - 2017
Few are both.On the afternoon of 13 July 1977, having become the first climbers to reach the summit of the Ogre, Doug Scott and Chris Bonington began their long descent. In the minutes that followed, any feeling of success from their achievement would be overwhelmed by the start of a desperate fight for survival. And things would only get worse.Rising to over 7,000 metres in the centre of the Karakoram, the Ogre – Baintha Brakk – is notorious in mountaineering circles as one of the most difficult mountains to climb. First summited by Scott and Bonington in 1977 – on expedition with Paul ‘Tut’ Braithwaite, Nick Estcourt, Clive Rowland and Mo Anthoine – it waited almost twenty-four years for a second ascent, and a further eleven years for a third. The Ogre, by legendary mountaineer Doug Scott, is a two-part biography of this enigmatic peak: in the first part, Scott has painstakingly researched the geography and history of the mountain; part two is the long overdue and very personal account of his and Bonington’s first ascent and their dramatic week-long descent on which Scott suffered two broken legs and Bonington smashed ribs. Using newly discovered diaries, letters and audio tapes, it tells of the heroic and selfless roles played by Clive Rowland and Mo Anthoine. When the desperate climbers finally made it back to base camp, they were to find it abandoned – and themselves still a long way from safety.The Ogre is undoubtedly one of the greatest adventure stories of all time.
J K Rowling and the Hary Potter Phenomenon
Lindsey Fraser - 2011
Nothing of Importance: A Record of Eight Months at the Front with a Welsh Battalion, October 1915 to June 1916
John Bernard Pye Adams - 1916
Nothing could have prepared him for the reality he ended up facing. Placing his focus on the day to day existence of the soldiers in the trenches, Adams presents a grim picture of mud-coated billets, relentless artillery barrages, working parties, training and the art of military sniping. Just as it would have been for the soldiers’ lives, Adams heightens his work with an emotive account of his first night patrol, the detonation of mines, battlefield duels and being wounded whilst out wiring in No Man’s Land. Understated and striving for truth over melodrama, Nothing of Importance is the original memoir of the First World War — the only record published while the conflict was still being fought — and the definitive account of trench warfare. Bernard Adams (1890-1917) was a British Army officer, joining 1 Royal Welsh Fusiliers as a Lieutenant in November 1914. He was the first of a triumvirate of authors who, for a time, served simultaneously in the same battalion: the second was Siegfried Sassoon, the third Robert Graves. Written whilst convalescing in 1916, he did not live to see it published.
Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West
D'Arcy Jenish - 2003
Traveling across the prairies, over the Rockies, and on to the Pacific, Thompson transformed the raw data of his explorations into a map of the Canadian West. Measuring ten feet by seven feet and laid out with astonishing accuracy, the map became essential to the politicians and diplomats who would decide the future of the rich and promising lands of the West. Yet its creator worked without personal glory and died in penniless obscurity.Drawing extensively on Thompson’s personal journals, illustrated with his detailed sketches, intricate notebook pages, and the map itself, Epic Wanderer charts the life of a man who risked everything in the name of scientific advancement and exploration.
Family Secrets: The scandalous history of an extraordinary family
Derek Malcolm - 2017
The secret, though, that surrounded my parents’ unhappy life together, was divulged to me by accident . . .’ Hidden under some papers in his father’s bureau, the sixteen-year-old Derek Malcolm finds a book by the famous criminologist Edgar Lustgarten called The Judges and the Damned. Browsing through the Contents pages Derek reads, ‘Mr Justice McCardie tries Lieutenant Malcolm – page 33.’ But there is no page 33. The whole chapter has been ripped out of the book. Slowly but surely, the shocking truth emerges: that Derek’s father, shot his wife’s lover and was acquitted at a famous trial at the Old Bailey. The trial was unique in British legal history as the first case of a crime passionel, where a guilty man is set free, on the grounds of self-defence. Husband and wife lived together unhappily ever after, raising Derek in their wake. Then, in a dramatic twist, following his father’s death, Derek receives an open postcard from his Aunt Phyllis, informing him that his real father is the Italian Ambassador to London . . . By turns laconic and affectionate, Derek Malcolm has written a richly evocative memoir of a family sinking into hopeless disrepair. Derek Malcolm was chief film critic of the Guardian for thirty years and still writes for the paper. Educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, he became first a steeplechase rider and then an actor after leaving university. He worked as a journalist in the sixties, first in Cheltenham and then with the Guardian where he was a features sub-editor and writer, racing correspondent and finally film critic. He directed the London Film Festival for a spell in the 80s and is now President of both the International Film Critics Association and the British Federation of Film Societies. He lives with his wife Sarah Gristwood in London and Kent and has published two books – one on Robert Mitchum and another on his favourite 100 films. He is a frequent broadcaster on radio and television and a veteran of film festival juries all over the world.