About 200 corpses counted from the train. Large steamship stranded two miles inland. Nothing could be seen of Galveston. Loss of life and property undoubtedly most appalling. Weather clear and bright here with gentle southeast wind.” – G.L. Vaughan, Manager of Western Union in Houston, in a telegram to the Chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau on the day after the hurricane. In 2005, the world watched in horror as Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, and the calamity seemed all the worse because many felt that technology had advanced far enough to prevent such tragedies, whether through advanced warning or engineering. At the same time, that tends to overlook all of the dangers posed by hurricanes and other phenomena that produce natural disasters. After all, storms and hurricanes have been wiping out coastal communities ever since the first humans built them. As bad as Hurricane Katrina was, the hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas on September 8, 1900 killed several times more people, with an estimated death toll between 6,000-12,000 people. Prior to advanced communications, few people knew about impending hurricanes except those closest to the site, and in the days before television, or even radio, catastrophic descriptions were merely recorded on paper, limiting an understanding of the immediate impact. Stories could be published after the water receded and the dead were buried, but by then, the immediate shock had worn off and all that remained were the memories of the survivors. Thus, it was inevitable that the Category 4 hurricane wrought almost inconceivable destruction as it made landfall in Texas with winds at 145 miles per hour. It was only well into the 20th century that meteorologists began to name storms as a way of distinguishing which storm out of several they were referencing, and it seems somewhat fitting that the hurricane that traumatized Galveston was nameless. Due to the lack of technology and warning, many of the people it killed were never identified, and the nameless corpses were eventually burned in piles of bodies that could not be interred due to the soggy soil. Others were simply buried at sea. The second deadliest hurricane in American history claimed 2,500 lives, so it’s altogether possible that the Galveston hurricane killed over 4 times more than the next deadliest in the U.S. To this day, it remains the country’s deadliest natural disaster. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 chronicles the story of the deadliest hurricane in American history. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Galveston Hurricane like never before, in no time at all.

    Alone and poor, she fights fiercely to give her son the very best. Gary chronicles his childhood with her in Russia, Poland, and on the French Riviera. And he recounts his adventurous life as a young man fighting for France in the Second World War. But above all, he tells the story of the love for his mother that was his very life, their secret and private planet, their wonderland "born out of a mother's murmur into a child's ear, a promise whispered at dawn of future triumphs and greatness, of justice and love." A romantic, thrilling memoir that has become a French classic.

    On the French liner home, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, "With Miss Pao it wasn't a matter of heart or soul. She hadn't any change of heart, since she didn't have a heart." In a sort of painful comedy, Fang obtains a teaching post at a newly established university where the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian's merciless satire. Soon Fang is trapped into a marriage of Nabokovian proportions of distress and absurdity. Recalling Fielding's Tom Jones in its farcical litany of misadventures and Flaubert's "style indirect libre," Fortress Besieged is its own unique feast of delights.

    A unique memoir of the first half of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of one born to be an absolute monarch, the book begins with the author's vivid account of the last, decadent days of the Ching Dynasty, and closes with an introspective self-portrait of the last Ching emperor transformed into a retiring scholar and citizen of the People's Republic of China.In detailing the events of the fifty years between his ascension to the throne and the final period of his life as a quiet-living resident of Beijing, Pu Yi reveals himself to be first and foremost a survivor, caught up in the torrent of global power struggles and world conflict that played itself out on the Asian continent through many decades of violence and upheaval.The firsthand description of the dramatic events of Pu Yi's life was the basis for the internationally acclaimed 1987 Bernardo Bertolucci film The Last Emperor which was named Best Picture of the Year by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. From Emperor to Citizen readily lends itself to cinematic adaptation as a personal narrative of continuously significant and revealing episodes.Becoming emperor and then forced to abdicate with the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911, all before he is seven years old, Pu Yi continues to live in the Forbidden City for another decade, still treated as the Son of Heaven by the moribund Ching court, but in reality a virtual prisoner with little genuine human contact apart from his beloved nurse Mrs. Wang, his teacher Chen Pao-shen and his English teacher Reginald Johnston.When at the age of nineteen Pu Yi is finally forced to vacate his isolated existence within the Forbidden City, he begins his long odyssey as the dependent of the occupying imperial Japanese regime, first in Tientsin, and eventually installed as "emperor" of the Japanese puppet state styled Manchukuo in China's northeast provinces. With the defeat of Japan and the end of the Second World War, Pu Yi faces a very uncertain future as he is shunted off to Russia for five years before returning to a new China transformed by revolution, where he is confined in the Fushun War Criminal Prison. Here he undergoes several years of rehabilitation, "learning how to become a human being," as he calls it, before receiving an official pardon and being allowed to finally live as an ordinary citizen of Beijing.This autobiography is the culmination of a unique and remarkable life, told simply, directly and frankly by a man whose circumstances and experiences were like no other.

    Berr brought a keen literary sensibility to her writing, a talent that renders the story it relates all the more rich, all the more heartbreaking. The first day Berr has to wear the yellow star on her coat, she writes, “I held my head high and looked people so straight in the eye they turned away. But it’s hard.” More, many more, humiliations were to follow, which she records, now with a view to posterity. She wants the journal to go to her fiancé, who has enrolled with the Free French Forces, as she knows she may not live much longer. She was right. The final entry is dated February 15, 1944, and ends with the chilling words: “Horror! Horror! Horror!” Berr and her family were arrested three weeks later. She went — as was discovered later — on the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in April 1945, within a month of Anne Frank and just days before the liberation of the camp.The journal did eventually reach her fiancé, and for over fifty years it was kept private. In 2002, it was donated to the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris. Before it was first published in France in January 2008, translation rights had already been sold for twelve languages.

    It paints a vivid picture of his childhood in Crete, still occupied by the Turks, and then steadily grows into a spiritual quest that takes him to Italy, Jerusalem, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Russia and the Caucasus, and finally back to Crete again. At different times Nietzsche, Bergson, Buddha, Homer and Christ dominate as his spiritual masters.

    How can something she has eaten readily in China seem grotesque in England? The question lingers over this "autobiographical food-and-travel classic" (Publishers Weekly).

    He writes of his wartime experiences, and particularly of his period as Squadron Leader and Wing Commander and his involvement in the Battle of Britain.

    In a body of work spanning over a half-century, he was variously a draughtsman, a printmaker, a sculptor and a painter. This short book is both a biography and a guide to his art. It focuses on the extraordinary works that Henri Matisse made during the last period of his life - the large-scale cut-outs on coloured paper, including his famous Blue Nudes, The Snail and Large Composition with Masks.

    Kennedy, Groucho Marx, Charles Dickens, Katharine Hepburn, Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, Clementine Churchill, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut and many more.

    Unlike other zoos that owe their existence to philanthropists, explorers or big game hunters, Chester Zoo was the brainchild of one working-class man with a dream he had nurtured since he was a boy: to build a zoo without bars.June Mottorshead was four years old when her father, George, moved his family to Upton, two miles out Chester, to begin the process of turning his dream into a reality. With no other children around to play with - her sister Muriel was 10 years older - June's friends became the animals. Her closest companion was an orphaned chimpanzee which her sister hadshe hand reared, and for six years the two were inseparable. June soon became the poster girl for Chester Zoo and photographs of her cuddling lion clubs, head-butting a goat or opening the beak of a pelican soon graced the front pages of British newspapers. She was 13 when war was declared on 1939 and, with the backbone of the staff headed for the front, it fell to June to take over as head keeper. Keeping the zoo running while the war waged was no easy task. Despite rationing the animals had to be fed and all of them - penguins, elephants, leopards, tigers, lions, kangaroos and polar bears - needed to be moved into secure locked quarters inside as soon as the air raid siren sounded.June, now in her eighties, is the guardian of her family's legacy and here in Our Zoo, she tells

    Their wisdom has profoundly shaped Eastern cultures over the centuries.

    The book delves into the dilemmas that face modern cricket, such as ball-tampering, race and national identity.

    Vivid, eloquent, haunting, For the Time Being evokes no less than the terrifying grandeur of all that remains tantalizingly and troublingly beyond our understanding.

    Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society