Maybe he's running from his dad, who has an uncontrollable temper. Maybe he's running from a lost love, his high-school sweetheart, who is a stranger to him now. Or maybe he's just running -- to find himself.Desperate to experience real life, Rick enlists in the army with the Charlie Rangers, a special unit in Vietnam. They infiltrate the jungle, kill with precision, and get out quickly. Rick isn't sure he can shoot anyone, but he wants to be tested, like his heroes, Hemingway and Conrad. If he can see the heart of darkness and survive, he'll be a man -- and finally have something to write about.But as Rick discovers, war isn't what anyone -- either the protestors, the politicians, or the writers -- say it is. It's far bigger, scarier, and more complicated than anything he could ever have imagined.Dean Hughes captures the sights and sounds of war -- and the courage of a young soldier fighting to survive.

    Bradley on Lake Michigan, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the wreck.At approximately 5:30 P.M. on November 18, 1958, the Carl D. Bradley, a 623-foot limestone carrier caught in one of the most violent storms in Lake Michigan history, snapped in two and sank within minutes. Four of the thirty-five man crew escaped to a small raft, where they hung on in total darkness, braving massive waves and frigid temperatures. As the storm raged on, a search-and-rescue mission hunted for survivors, while the frantic citizens of nearby Rogers City, the tiny Michigan hometown to twenty-six members of the Bradley crew, anxiously awaited word of their loved ones' fates.In Wreck of the Carl D., Michael Schumacher reconstructs, in dramatic detail, the tragic accident, the perilous search-and-rescue mission, and the chilling aftermath for the small town so intimately affected by the tragedy. A fitting tribute to a powerful ship, the men who died aboard it, and the town that still mourns its loss, Schumacher's compelling follow up to Mighty Fitz is a wonderful addition to the literature of the Great Lakes and maritime history.

    Over the coming weeks they must brave the stormy waters of the Atlantic in their mission to seek out and destroy British supply ships. But the tide is beginning to turn against the Germans in the war for the North Atlantic. Their targets now travel in convoys, fiercely guarded by Royal Navy destroyers, and when contact is finally made the hunters rapidly become the hunted. As the U-boat is forced to hide beneath the surface of the sea a cat-and-mouse game begins, where the increasing claustrophobia of the submarine becomes an enemy just as frightening as the depth charges that explode around it. Of the 40,000 men who served on German submarines, 30,000 never returned. Written by a survivor of the U-boat fleet, Das Boot is a psychological drama merciless in its intensity, and a classic novel of World War II.

    Halfway through the voyage, the crew were beset by a monstrous storm off the coast of West Africa, and the Mignonette was sunk by a massive forty-foot wave. Cast adrift a thousand miles from landfall with no food or water and faced with almost certain death, the captain resorted to a grisly practice common among seamen of the time: the "custom of the sea." While the others watched, the captain killed the weakest of them, the cabin boy, and his body was eaten. In this riveting account of the ordeal of the crew and the sensational trial that followed, Hanson recreates the shocking events that held a nation spellbound. Drawing from newspaper accounts, personal letters, court proceedings, and first-person accounts, he has brilliantly told a tale rife with moral dilemmas.

    What he discovered surprised even him, and made him a media sensation.     Shoalts was no stranger to the wilderness. He had hacked his way through jungles and muskeg, had stared down polar bears and climbed mountains. But one spot on the map called out to him irresistibly: the Hudson Bay Lowlands, a trackless waste of muskeg and lonely rivers, moose and wolf, much bigger than the Amazon. Little of it has ever been explored.      Cutting through this forbidding landscape is a river no hunter, no explorer, no Native guide has left any record of paddling. It is far from any important waterways, even further from any arable land, and about as far from civilization as one can get. It was this river that Shoalts was obsessively determined to explore.      It took him several attempts, years of research, and two friendships that collapsed under the strain of Adam's single-minded thirst to explore this river. But finally, alone, he found the headwaters of the Again. He believed he had discovered what he had set out to find. But the adventure had just begun.     Paddling his way back to Hudson Bay, where a float plane would pick him up, Shoalts discovered something that seemingly shouldn't exist: a towering unmapped waterfall. He also discovered edenic islands, and braved rock-strewn rapids, but the waterfall captured both his imagination and the world's.     Adam did a single interview, with The Guardian, and once the story hit, he was a celebrity. He appeared on morning TV and was made the Explorer in Residence of the Canadian Geographic Society. What struck a chord with people was the realization that the world is bigger than we think. We assume that because we have mapped it from space, it must be exhaustively known. But it is wilder, stranger, less homogenous than we assume. We hardly know it. And, contrary to popular wisdom, it is certainly not flat. In other words, the age of exploration is not over.

    All are chronicled in a new chapter which, with a section of completely up-to-date color photographs, makes this edition a must.

    Winner of the American Book AwardBased on the author's own experiences, this award-winning novel was the first to tell the story of the evacuation, relocation, and dispersal of Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry during the Second World War.

    Before its voyage was over, 34 Union merchant and whaling ships and their cargoes would be sunk. Four months after the Civil War was over, the captain learned the war was over, and he had gone from being an enemy combatant to a pirate, a hangable offense.

    All the rest is misery," wrote Cesare Pavese, whose short, intense life spanned the ordeals of fascism and World War II to witness the beginnings of Italy's postwar prosperity. Searchingly alert to nuances of speech, feeling, and atmosphere, and remarkably varied, his novels offer a panoramic vision, at once sensual and finely considered, of a time of tumultuous change. This volume presents readers with Pavese's major works. The Beach is a wry summertime comedy of sexual and romantic misunderstandings, while The House on the Hill is an extraordinary novel of war in which a teacher flees through a countryside that is both beautiful and convulsed with terror. Among Women Only tells of a fashion designer who enters the affluent world she has always dreamed of, only to find herself caught up in an eerie dance of destruction, and The Devil in the Hills is an engaging road novel about three young men roaming the hills in high summer who stumble on mysteries of love and death.

    Michener’s monumental saga chronicles the epic history of Texas, from its Spanish roots in the age of the conquistadors to its current reputation as one of America’s most affluent, diverse, and provocative states. Among his finely drawn cast of characters, emotional and political alliances are made and broken, as the loyalties established over the course of each turbulent age inevitably collapse under the weight of wealth and industry. With Michener as our guide, Texas is a tale of patriotism and statesmanship, growth and development, violence and betrayal—a stunning achievement by a literary master.  Praise for Texas   “Fascinating.”—Time   “A book about oil and water, rangers and outlaws, frontier and settlement, money and power . . . [James A. Michener] manages to make history vivid.”—The Boston Globe   “A sweeping panorama . . . [Michener] grapples earnestly with the Texas character in a way that Texas’s own writers often don’t.”—The Washington Post Book World  “Vast, sprawling, and eclectic in population and geography, the state has just the sort of larger-than-life history that lends itself to Mr. Michener’s taste for multigenerational epics.”—The New York Times

    Swift and Defoe used his experiences as inspiration in writing Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Captain Cook relied on his observations while voyaging around the world. Coleridge called him a genius and "a man of exquisite mind." In the history of exploration, nobody has ventured further than Englishman William Dampier. Yet while the exploits of Cook, Shackleton, and a host of legendary explorers have been widely chronicled, those of perhaps the greatest are virtually invisible today—an omission that Diana and Michael Preston have redressed in this vivid, compelling biography.As a young man Dampier spent several years in the swashbuckling company of buccaneers in the Caribbean. At a time when surviving one voyage across the Pacific was cause for celebration, Dampier ultimately journeyed three times around the world; his bestselling books about his experiences were a sensation, influencing generations of scientists, explorers, and writers. He was the first to deduce that winds cause currents and the first to produce wind maps across the world, surpassing even the work of Edmund Halley. He introduced the concept of the "sub-species" that Darwin later built into his theory of evolution, and his description of the breadfruit was the impetus for Captain Bligh's voyage on the Bounty. Dampier reached Australia 80 years before Cook, and he later led the first formal expedition of science and discovery there.A Pirate of Exquisite Mind restores William Dampier to his rightful place in history—one of the pioneers on whose insights our understanding of the natural world was built.

    Two years out of Nantucket on a whaling voyage in 1824, he organized a mutiny and murdered the officers of the Globe. It was a premeditated act; in his sea chest Comstock carried the seeds, tools, and weapons with which he would found his own island kingdom. He had often described these plans to one of his brothers, William. But the chief witness and chronicler of the mutiny was young George Comstock, who neither participated in nor approved of his brother's savage deed.Within days of settling on Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Comstock was murdered by his fellow mutineers. Six innocent seamen—George among them—seized the Globe and escaped; most of the rest were killed by natives. Two survivors lived for twenty-two months, half-prisoners and half-adoptees of the natives, until they were rescued in a bold and dangerous maneuver by a landing party from the U.S. schooner Dolphin.The Globe's story is one of terror, adventure, endurance, and luck. It is also the story of one of the most bizarre and frightening minds that ever went to sea.

    As workers in one of the world's most dangerous - and lucrative - professions, the crewmen in Nights of Ice face a constant onslaught of roaring waves, stories-high swells, and life-stealing ice. Within seconds, a vessel such as the forty-ton Tidings can fill with icy water and slip into the depths, hurling crewmen into the freezing ocean and entombing the skipper inside its sinking hull. A ship like the Mia Dawn can run aground on a piece of submerged rock and immediately ice over, sinking steadily as her crew, battered by hypothermia and ninety-mph winds, assembles a life raft to await helicopter rescue by the U.S. Coast Guard. Tested by the elements, ravaged by their own emotions, the seamen in these extraordinary stories battle both fear and the violent unpredictability of nature. As Spike Walker's deft narration reveals, they do so with courage, instinct, and an unrelenting will to survive.

    Their experiences encompass the span of the Cold War, from voyages in WW2-era submarines under Arctic ice to nuclear-powered espionage missions in Soviet-dominated seas. There are dangerous encounters with Russian spy ships in UK waters and, finally as the communist facade begins to crack, they hold the line against the Kremlin's oceanic might, playing a leading role in bringing down the Berlin Wall. It is the first time they have spoken out about their covert lives in the submarine service.This is the dramatic untold story of Britain's most secret service.

    Canadian Literature greeted its first appearance in these terms: "It is the French-Canadian writer Roch Carrier who comes closest to the significance, power and artistry of Faulkner at his best . . . . He might well be able to do for French Canada what Faulkner did for the American South."