My Story


Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum - 2019
    These stories tell of the vision behind Dubai’s meteoric growth from a small and bustling trading port to an international metropolis at the heart of global business. They record the evolution of the United Arab Emirates from a shared ideal to a nation where more than 195 nationalities live and work in peace, harmony and prosperity. And they reveal insights from a man whose drive, determination and will to succeed have become legendary. Within these stories lies the heart of Sheikh Mohammed the statesman, the equestrian, the poet and the leader. They are written with the intent to inspire and inform new generations of readers, and to celebrate the achievements of this young and vibrant nation and the people who shaped it. This celebration of a life in service is unavoidably incomplete. As Sheikh Mohammed himself indicates, there is still so much left to do. As a record of the first fifty years alone, however, it forms part of a remarkable legacy. Other titles written by Sheikh Mohammed and published by Explorer include Zayed, Reflections on Happiness & Positivity, Flashes of Verse and Two Great Leaders.

How to Be Yourself: Life-Changing Advice from a Reckless Contrarian


Simon Doonan - 2020
    Through his unconventional wisdom and singular storytelling, Simon Doonan is the ideal instructor to help readers find – and then flaunt – their own creative style and vision. With provocative wit, he walks us through every aspect of our lives: fashion, socializing, love, work, decor, and family, sharing case studies, quotations by cultural icons and practical tips.Illustrated with amusing vintage and contemporary photographs, some lifted from the Doonan family album, How to Be Yourself is an inspiring, joyful and entertaining survival guide – a literary GPS that promises to transport you away from your phone and back to yourself.

Pathfinder: First In, Last Out


Richard R. Burns - 2002
    Within just one month, during a holiday called Tet, the Communists would launch the largest single attack of the war--and he would be right in the thick of it. . . .In Vietnam, Richard Burns operated in live-or-die situations, risking his life so that other men could keep theirs. As a Pathfinder--all too often alone in the middle of a hot LZ--he guided in helicopters disembarking troops, directed medevacs to retrieve the wounded, and organized extractions. As well as parachuting into areas and supervising the clearing of landing zones, Pathfinders acted as air-traffic controllers, keeping call signs, frequencies, and aircraft locations in their heads as they orchestrated takeoffs and landings, often under heavy enemy fire.From Bien Hoa to Song Be to the deadly A Shau Valley, Burns recounts the battles that won him the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and numerous other decorations. This is the first and only book by a Pathfinder in Vietnam . . . or anywhere else.From the Paperback edition.

I Loved Lucy: My Friendship with Lucille Ball


Lee Tannen - 2001
    Lee first met Lucy as a child, but their close and enduring relationship began almost twenty-five years later. Now, Tannen gives us an intimate portrait of the "lost" Lucy years: from what life was like in her Beverly Hills and Palm Springs hideaways to how she traveled, what she ate, and how she entertained. I Loved Lucy reveals for the first time the private face of a beloved star whose public persona is the most famous in television history.

Dead Giveaway: The Rescue, Hamburgers, White Folks, and Instant Celebrity... What You Saw on TV Doesn't Begin to Tell the Story...


Charles Ramsey - 2014
    . . Charles Ramsey gives a roller coaster account of his life before, during, and after the dramatic rescue of three kidnapped women in Cleveland . . .Global news media declared him a hero. Well-wishers mobbed him. The Internet made him a viral sensation. It couldn't have happened to a less likely guy. Now, read how it all went down.Ramsey was in the wrong place at the right time when he answered a young woman's cry for help, kicked in his neighbor's locked front door, and got her the hell out of there--leading to the astonishing rescue of three young women--Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight--who had been missing for a decade.Reporters and TV cameras flocked to a neighborhood--and a man--they otherwise would have ignored. Ramsey was ready, with plenty to say."Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms . . . Dead giveaway." It was a quote that launched a thousand Internet memes . . .In this book Ramsey walks us step-by-step through the day of the rescue and talks about living right next door to Ariel Castro--outwardly charming, secretly a monster.He tells about life before the rescue--growing up a privileged black kid in a white suburb, seeking out trouble over and over, getting kicked out of school, selling drugs, going to prison, and ultimately finding work as a dishwasher and landing by chance on gritty Seymour Avenue.And he shares what it's like to become an instant celebrity, when suddenly everybody wants a piece of you. (For example, he learned the hard way that when a big TV network flies you to New York City for an interview, that doesn't mean they also bought you a ticket back home to Cleveland!)This is a wild, eye-opening tale told with a sharp sense of humor.

A Life Stolen: My Father's Journey Through Alzheimer's


Vanessa Luther - 2014
    It’s an inside look into the day-to-day challenges facing not only the patient, but also the caregivers. For many years, her father exhibited signs of dementia, eventually becoming too significant to ignore. Everything culminated during an incident one night, after which her father was taken away, never to return to his home again. The disease changed him every day until he was a stranger. Then, it stole his life. Through the initial days at home to hospital stays, living in a memory care unit, rehab stints and eventually hospice care, this book reveals many of the struggles encountered while facing Alzheimer’s in a world not quite ready for it. It is based on actual events depicted exactly as they happened while travelling the heartbreaking and harrowing road through this horrific illness. Its purpose is to give guidance and insight to others caring for loved ones with this terrible affliction, whether it is in providing helpful information, feelings of support or simply words of encouragement. Most importantly, the hope is that it will make the road for others an easier one to travel. May the many tears in this journey be the fortitude that helps others deal with the adversity from this overwhelming disease.

Undercover Cop: How I Brought Down the Real-Life Sopranos


Mike Russell - 2013
    The next, he was lying facedown in an alley after being ambushed and shot in the back of the head by a mobster over a dispute.Russell miraculously healed, and rather than press charges, he maintained his cover. Soon he had a stroke of good luck when he saved a man from an attack by two street thugs. The man he saved turned out to be Andy Gerardo, one of the ranking captains of the Genovese crime family. Quickly earning the trust of his new friend, Russell would orchestrate one of the biggest Mafia takedowns of all time.Urged by his police handlers, Russell used his cover story---an ex-cop fired for excessive force who now made his living from an oil-delivery business---and street skills to assimilate into the Genovese crime family in New Jersey, ultimately leading to more than fifty arrests of mobsters, corrupt prison officials, and even a state senator. Straddling the thin line between collecting evidence and participating in the very crimes he was leaking to the cops, Russell consistently placed himself at risk—especially when his police handlers disregarded his wishes and his well-being, conducting premature raids on the gangsters. With his marriage suffering and his family in danger, Russell took extraordinary steps to ensure his financial security and safety, demanding better terms from the police and allowing a film crew to document the final moments of the epic bust for a documentary that was later sold to HBO.A real-life version of The Sopranos, Undercover Cop immerses readers in the colorful yet harrowing trials of a standout cop who faced the mob on his own terms, crippled organized crime in New Jersey, and forever redefined undercover law enforcement.

Underneath It All


Erica Mena - 2013
    When I m alone I am haunted by my truth. A girl who entered this world in a jail cell. A girl who was served struggle with a side of pain on a broken platter. A girl who was thrown into a tank with sharks deep in a world whose motto is to eat or be eaten. I can still see the dirt underneath my nails; I've fought too hard to get where I am and I don t plan on looking back. However, there s always someone waiting to knock me down because they don t think I deserve it. Well I say to hell with them. I've put in too much to allow anyone to drag me down. So either you re riding with me or against me...

Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918


Harry Graf Kessler - 2011
    Kessler’s immersion in the new art and literature of Paris, London, and Berlin unfolds in the first part of the diaries. This refined world gives way to vivid descriptions of the horrific fighting on the Eastern and Western fronts of World War I, the intriguing private discussions among the German political and military elite about the progress of the war, as well as Kessler’s account of his role as a diplomat with a secret mission in Switzerland.   Profoundly modern and often prescient, Kessler was an erudite cultural impresario and catalyst who as a cofounder of the avant-garde journal Pan met and contributed articles about many of the leading artists and writers of the day. In 1903 he became director of the Grand Ducal Museum of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, determined to make it a center of aesthetic modernism together with his friend the architect Henry van de Velde, whose school of design would eventually become the Bauhaus. When a public scandal forced his resignation in 1906, Kessler turned to other projects, including collaborating with the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the German composer Richard Strauss on the opera Der Rosenkavalier and the ballet The Legend of Joseph, which was performed in 1914 by the Ballets Russes in London and Paris. In 1913 he founded the Cranach-Presse in Weimar, one of the most important private presses of the twentieth century.   The diaries present brilliant, sharply etched, and often richly comical descriptions of his encounters, conversations, and creative collaborations with some of the most celebrated people of his time: Otto von Bismarck, Paul von Hindenburg, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Sarah Bernhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Marie Rilke, Paul Verlaine, Gordon Craig, George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville-Barker, Max Klinger, Arnold Böcklin, Max Beckmann, Aristide Maillol, Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, Éduard Vuillard, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Ida Rubinstein, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Pierre Bonnard, and Walther Rathenau, among others.   Remarkably insightful, poignant, and cinematic in their scope, Kessler’s diaries are an invaluable record of one of the most volatile and seminal moments in modern Western history.

Dawn


Phil Elverum - 2008
    "Dawn" delves deep into an intensely creative period of Elverum s life, with a beautiful mix of journal writing, jokes, photographs, and music. This 144-page hardcover collection chronicles a winter spent alone in a cabin in arctic Norway, wrestling with ghosts, gathering wood, acting out myths--3 months of unfiltered brain torrents interspersed with drawings. It comes with a 17-track CD of songs written during that time, songs that have become well known over the years through recordings and live performances. The CD is a kind of lost album finally recorded properly, pared down to just guitar and vocals. Also included is a 16-page color photo booklet.

Red Love: The Story of an East German Family


Maxim Leo - 2009
    Why did his parents, once passionately in love, grow apart? Why did his father become so angry, and his mother quit her career in journalism? And why did his grandfather Gerhard, the Socialist war hero, turn into a stranger? The story he unearths is, like his country's past, one of hopes, lies, cruelties, betrayals but also love. In Red Love he captures, with warmth and unflinching honesty, why so many dreamed the GDR would be a new world and why, in the end, it fell apart.Growing up in East Berlin, Maxim Leo knew not to ask questions. All he knew was that his rebellious parents, Wolf and Anne, with their dyed hair, leather jackets and insistence he call them by their first names, were a bit embarrassing. That there were some places you couldn't play; certain things you didn't say.

Anne Frank: Life and Legacy


Jemma J. Saunders - 2015
     In 1945, at the age of fifteen she died at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, becoming one of the six million Jews who were murdered in Europe under the Nazi regime. But through her writing her memory lives on. Her ‘Diary of a Young Girl’ remains one of the most widely read non-fiction books in the world and was described as ‘one of the greatest books of the last century’. Anne started keeping a diary shortly before she went into hiding with her family in 1942, and over the course of two years she honed her craft as a writer, documenting the details of their daily lives alongside her personal reflections, fears, and aspirations. By chance, the majority of her writings were saved after the family was arrested and in 1947, after much deliberation, her father, Otto, oversaw the publication of the first edition of her diary in the Netherlands. Within a decade, it had become an international bestseller. First adapted for both stage and screen in the 1950s, awareness and readership of Anne’s diary continued to grow and its author became a household name, gradually acquiring something of a symbolic status. 70 years on ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ still resonates just as powerfully with young and old readers alike. Jemma Saunders goes beyond Anne’s diary to fill in the gaps about her family history, her life before she went into hiding, and her final months at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. A sobering tale, Anne Frank’s story is one that will continue to inspire generations of readers for decades to come. Jemma J Saunders works at the University of Birmingham. She is also the author of ‘The Holocaust: History in an Hour’. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

Notes From a Very Small Island


Anthony Stancomb - 2015
    Full of acute observation, uncontrollable humour and a rousing climax.’ - Country Life ‘To his credit Stancomb resists the stereotype of the closed-minded British expatriate.’ - Independent on Sunday - Pick of the paperbacks ‘A thoroughly good read ---An endearing tale of a roller coaster ride.’ - Croatia Online ‘This is not a tale of your usual English couple. This is such a fantastic read ... both humorous and thought provoking.’ - Travellingbookjunkie ‘The author presents this quirky little tale in an honest way, even when he is on the receiving end of a joke. You don’t need to make a break with your past to enjoy this book. It is a fascinating, humorous and totally believable read.’ - Robin’s Reviews ‘A good read. I enjoyed best the humorous bits.’ Tony Rossiter (author of It’s Only a Bloody Game) ‘A good read.’ - Tariq Ali Notes From a Very Small Island is the follow-up to the bestselling ‘Under a Croatian Sun’, which tells the story of a couple upping sticks and leaving their humdrum life in London for blue skies and café life on an island in Croatia. In this second book, the couple continue their attempts to fit in with the village community, but it’s not always easy, and more often than not their endeavours involve them in in hilarious disasters. They also now try to start some projects up, but they have to battle with maddening ex-communist authorities and highly suspicious locals. However, through this, they get to see the crippling legacies that communism and the recent war have left in the lives of their new neighbours. Although largely a light hearted tale, the book is also a heartfelt insight into a community trying to adjust to being members of the EU and the ways of the Western World.

Gringo Nightmare: A Young American Framed for Murder in Nicaragua


Eric Volz - 2010
    He and a friend cofounded a bilingual magazine, "El Puente, " and it proved more successful than they ever expected. Then Volz met Doris Jimenez, an incomparable beauty from a small Nicaraguan beach town, and they began a passionate and meaningful relationship. Though the relationship ended amicably less than a year later and Volz moved his business to the capital city of Managua, a close bond between the two endured.Nothing prepared him for the phone call he received on November 21, 2006, when he learned that Doris had been found dead---murdered---in her seaside clothing boutique. He rushed from Managua to be with her friends and family, and before he knew it, he found himself accused of her murder, arrested, and imprisoned.Decried in the press and vilified by his onetime friends, Volz suffered horrific conditions, illness, deadly inmates, an angry lynch mob, sadistic guards, and the merciless treatment of government officials. It was only through his dogged persistence, the tireless support of his friends and family, and the assistance of a former intelligence operative that Eric was released, in December 2007, after more than a year in prison.A story that made national and international headlines, this is the first and only book to tell Eric's absorbing, moving account in his own words."Visit the companion Exhibit Hall at the Gringo Nightmare website for additional photos, audio clips, video, case files, and more."

The Miss Dennis School of Writing: And Other Lessons from a Woman's Life


Alice Steinbach - 1996
    These pieces thus explore, with quiet grace, the unexpected pleasures that are gleaned from an appreciation of the ordinary - a sleeping cat, a blooming garden, a well-cooked meal. Such familiar - even ostensibly mundane - details of our lives, Steinbach maintains, play a far more important part in shaping our identities and our sense of our relationship to the world than do the exotic encounters or momentous events to which we attach much significance. Alternately poignant and humorous, sedately contemplative and bristling with emotional energy, Steinbach's various musings on the daily rhythms of her own moods and experiences transform everyday life into a rich and meaningful journey.