Enveloped by mystery whether he reached Mount Everest's summit before his fall, he continues to grip the imagination. An exceptionally gifted and driven climber, his spell-binding memory inspires mountaineers to this day, attracting lively speculation as well as fact-finding expeditions to retrace his steps. Climbing Everest gathers for the first time Mallory's influential canon on mountaineering from its disparate locations in archives.Mallory was unique in drawing a new literature from his mountain craft. For him, as for his predecessors, earth was still a heroic place with hidden parts promising novel experiences while the eyes of history were trained upon them. But he was strongly inspired by the Bloomsbury group, unlike previous explorers, and a talented writer and poet. He chose to break with the Edwardian stiff upper lip in favor of emotional truthfulness about the art of climbing. The result created a novel branch of mountaineering literature, as fresh and vivid as the feelings he recorded in handwriting under the most harrowingly extreme mountain-top conditions.--From the 2010 edition.

    January 30, 1969 was one of those moments. There are those who were on the periphery of the event that day and heard what was going on; but as one of the few remaining insiders who accompanied the Beatles up onto the cold windswept roof of the Apple building, Ken Mansfield had a front row seat to the full sensory experience of the moment and witnessed what turned out to be beginning of the end. Ken shares in The Roof: The Beatles Final Concert, the sense that something special was taking place before his eyes that would live on forever in the hearts and souls of millions. As the US manager of Apple, Ken Mansfield was on the scene in the days, weeks, and months leading up to this monumental event. He shares his insights into the factors that brought them up onto that roof and why one of the greatest bands of all time left it all on that stage. Join Ken as he reflects on the relationships he built with the Fab Four and the Apple corps and what each player meant to this symphony of music history.

    This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

    On board was an international team of explorers led by Robert Falcon Scott, a man determined to be the first to reach the South Pole. A year and a half later, Scott and three members of his team died during a brutal blizzard. Their dream of reaching the Pole first had already been dashed by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, and now on their return trip--slowed by ill health and bad weather--Scott's party found themselves trapped in a tent without sufficient provisions, while the wind howled endlessly outside. Even in his final hours, Scott found the strength to continue the journal he'd started at the beginning of his adventures; the diary was found beside his frozen body.Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals is the explorer's detailed account of his time in Antarctica. The team's daily progress towards their final goal is recorded in Scott's vivid, personal narrative, as well as his impressions of the harsh conditions, the stark beauty of the tundra, and his own increasingly desperate ambition to beat his rivals to the Pole. Shortly before he died, Scott wrote: "Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman." Robert Falcon Scott and his men died, but their story lives on in his journals.

    He first saw conflict on Crete in May 1941, during the only large-scale parachute invasion in wartime history. Just four days later, Bill was wounded and eventually captured.Twice he tried to escape his internment — with horrific consequences. He suffered greatly but found courageous support from his fellow prisoners.His new wife Myra and his large family thought he was dead until news of his capture finally reached them.Back home, Myra too was a prisoner of sorts, with her own secrets. Then, fifty years after the war, unhealed wounds unexpectedly opened for Bill and Myra, testing them once again.Private Bill is a classic heart-warming story — as told by their son — of how a loving couple prevailed over the adversities of war to live an extraordinarily ordinary, happy life.

    A role model for generations of writers and performers, Doc was renowned for his mastery of virtually every popular style, from the gutbucket rhythm and blues of “Lonely Avenue” to the symphonic soul of “Save the Last Dance for Me” to the pure pop of “Viva Las Vegas.” His songs-“This Magic Moment,” “A Teenager in Love,” “Hushabye,” “Little Sister,” “Turn Me Loose,” and many others-have been recorded by everyone from Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, and B. B. King to Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and Bruce Springsteen, with sales exceeding $100 million. Doc was ready-made for literature. His collaborator Mort Shuman once described him as an “entire rollicking soul neighborhood rolled into one man.” Garrulous, profane, hilarious, and Rabelaisian, Doc was never inhibited about offering his opinions and his friendship. His confidants, collaborators, and discoveries included Duke Ellington, John Lennon, Dr. John, Jimmy Scott, Bette Midler, and Lou Reed. In the words of renowned producer Jerry Wexler, “If the music industry had a heart, it would be Doc Pomus.” Despite, or more likely because of, his successes, few acquaintances knew that this writer of jukebox hits led one of the most dramatic and unlikely lives of his time. Spanning extravagant wealth and desperate poverty, suburban domesticity and the depths of New York’s underworld, worldwide fame and near-total obscurity, enduring love and persistent loneliness, Doc’s story remains one of the great untold American lives. Its chapters comprise a back-room history of rock ’n’ roll, touching on more than a half-century of American popular music-from the blues Doc performed with Lester Young to his collaborations with the luminaries of New York’s punk scene, shot through with vivid portraits of virtually every major player. Lonely Avenue is the first biography of this American original, so elegantly rendered that it reads like a novel, and fortified by full, exclusive access to Doc Pomus’s family, friends, voluminous journals, and archives.

    Book acquired by Warner Brothers.This memoir divides comfortably between the North [of Ireland] and New York. Millar's vivid recollection of privations withstood during the blanket protest offers grim testimony to the limits of human endurance. Like others around him Millar would not be broken, even when political conviction was reduced to dogged resistance against a repressive prison regime. He then emigrated to New York, worked in illicit casinos. The American chapters unveil a gambling underworld run by New York's Irish gangs. The empire wasn't built to last but Millar eyed a much bigger prize. Teaming up with an associate to rob $7.2 million from the hitherto impregnable Brinks Security operation in Rochester. It was a daring and bloodless heist. “Brilliant."Irish Examiner“Michael Mann’s Heist meets Jim Sheridan’s In The Name of The Father, and you come close to what awaits you in On The Brinks. An unbelievably cool book.”Village Voice, New York"Brilliant. Powerful..."Irish Times“His memoir, On The Brinks, has all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster…cool narration of a life on the edge…he has a distinctive style and a compelling story. With the right marketing, his book will become a bestseller.” Books Ireland

    In the brilliant dual biography, the award-winning writer Roland Huntford re-examines every detail of the great race to the South Pole between Britain's Robert Scott and Norway's Roald Amundsen. Scott, who dies along with four of his men only eleven miles from his next cache of supplies, became Britain's beloved failure, while Amundsen, who not only beat Scott to the Pole but returned alive, was largely forgotten. This account of their race is a gripping, highly readable history that captures the driving ambitions of the era and the complex, often deeply flawed men who were charged with carrying them out. THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH is the first of Huntford's masterly trilogy of polar biographies. It is also the only work on the subject in the English language based on the original Norwegian sources, to which Huntford returned to revise and update this edition.

    A. Andrée, the visionary Swedish aeronaut who, in 1897, during the great age of Arctic endeavor, left to discover the North Pole by flying to it in a hydrogen balloon. Called by a British military officer “the most original and remarkable attempt ever made in Arctic exploration,” Andrée’s expedition was followed by nearly the entire world, and it made him an international legend. The Ice Balloon begins in the late nineteenth century, when nations, compelled by vanity, commerce, and science, competed with one another for the greatest discoveries, and newspapers covered every journey. Wilkinson describes how in Andrée several contemporary themes intersected. He was the first modern explorer—the first to depart for the Arctic unencumbered by notions of the Romantic age, and the first to be equipped with the newest technologies. No explorer had ever left with more uncertainty regarding his fate, since none had ever flown over the horizon and into the forbidding region of ice.   In addition to portraying the period, The Ice Balloon gives us a brief history of the exploration of the northern polar regions, both myth and fact, including detailed versions of the two record-setting expeditions just prior to Andrée’s—one led by U.S. Army lieutenant Adolphus Greely from Ellesmere Island; the other by Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who initially sought to reach the pole by embedding his ship in the pack ice and drifting toward it with the current.   Woven throughout is Andrée’s own history, and how he came by his brave and singular idea. We also get to know Andrée’s family, the woman who loves him, and the two men who accompany him—Nils Strindberg, a cousin of the famous playwright, with a tender love affair of his own, and Knut Fraenkel, a willing and hearty young man.   Andrée’s flight and the journey, based on the expedition’s diaries and photographs, dramatically recovered thirty-three years after the balloon came down, along with Wilkinson’s research, provide a book filled with suspense and adventure, a haunting story of high ambition and courage, made tangible with the detail, beauty, and devastating conditions of traveling and dwelling in “the realm of Death,” as one Arctic explorer put it.

    He returned with stories of exotic people, tremendous riches, and the most powerful ruler in the world – Kublai Khan. The explorer told of inventions ranging from gunpowder to paper money. The intellectual ferment and cultural diversity he described helped move Europe out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. In his lifetime, people scoffed at his stories. But as this book explains, he changed the world.

    In The Windsor Knot, one of Fleet Street's most experienced journalists gives you an inside look at one of the most infamous love triangles in history. Branded as "the other woman" Camilla still shoulders the blame for the failure of Charles and Diana's "fairytale" marriage -- despite the fact that an apparent truce was made between mistress and princess in the last year of Diana's life. Now, locked in a perpetual struggle to gain acceptance from the British public -- and, more importantly, from the Royal Family -- Charles and Camilla persevere. Tracing more than three decades of love, passion, and deception, The Windsor Knot ties up all the loose ends of a liaison hidden in plain sight. The Palace won't speak of it, but Christopher Wilson tells all.

    "As he has recorded the events of history, man has often forgotten to mention the hand that rocked the cradle." These remarkable Mormon women gave their all for the gospel of Christ. With drama and emotion stronger than that found in any work of fiction, the inspirational stories in Heroic Mormon Women will bring to light the incredible strength, virtue, and faith of the heroic women of the restoration. Some women included in this book are: Rachel Ivins Grant Jane Grover Jane Elizabeth Manning James Sarah Melissa Granger Kimball Heroic Marys Elizabeth Claridge McCune Sarah Pea Rich Aurelia Spencer Rogers Amanda Barnes Smith Eliza Roxey Snow Amanda Barnes Smith Lucy Mack Smith Emma Hale Smith

    His Labour government introduced sweeping new legislation that unchained the country from its old conservative bonds, established the world's first nuclear free state and let loose a free market economic agenda that radically transformed the country. It was a rapid climb to the very top for the overweight doctor's son from working class South Auckland. As leader during the final years of the Cold War he confronted the agendas of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and lived through the political upheavals of the fall of the Soviet Union, post-apartheid South Africa and Rajiv Ghandi's India. Along the way he memorably defeated the Reverend Jerry Falwell in a famous Oxford Union debate about the morality and sanity of the nuclear arms race, and negotiated the aftermath of the tragic bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French agents in Auckland harbour.

    The weather for the past few days had not been altogether reliable; now windy, now calm - now snowing, now clear: regular spring weather, in other words... With this matter of fact sentence begins one of the most famous journeys in all exploration - Amundsen's conquest of the South Pole. The details of the tragic race with Scott are well known, but often forgotten is the sheer professionalism and courage which drove the Norwegian expedition on. Unlike the driven and tortured egos which bedeviled the British expeditions, the Norwegians worked purposefully as a team using the latest technology, and Amundsen acknowledges this openly when the Pole was finally achieved. I had determined that the act of planting it [the flag] - the historic event - should be equally divided among us all. It was not for one man to do this; it was for all who had staked their lives in the struggle, and held together through thick and thin. This was the only way in which I could show my gratitude to my comrades in this desolate spot... Five weather-beaten, frostbitten fists they were that grasped the pole, raised the waving flag in the air, and planted it as the first at

    His destination was the uncharted end of the earth: the icy continent of Antarctica. But the commandant's plans for a three-year expedition to reach the magnetic South Pole would be thwarted at each turn. Before the ship cleared South America, it had already broken down, run aground, and lost several key crew members, leaving behind a group with dubious experience for such an ambitious voyage.As the ship progressed into the freezing waters, the captain had to make a choice: turn back and spare his men the potentially devastating consequences of getting stuck, or recklessly sail deeper into the ice pack to chase glory and fame. He sailed on, and the Belgica soon found itself stuck fast in the icy hold of the Antarctic continent. The ship would winter on the ice. Plagued by a mysterious, debilitating illness and besieged by the monotony of their days, the crew deteriorated as their confinement in suffocating close quarters wore on and their hope of escape dwindled daily. As winter approached the days grew shorter, until the sun set on the magnificent polar landscape one last time, condemning the ship's occupants to months of quarantine in an endless night.Forged in fire and carved by ice, Antarctica proved a formidable opponent for the motley crew. Among them was Frederick Cook, an American doctor--part scientist, part adventurer, part P.T. Barnum--whose unorthodox methods delivered many of the crew from the gruesome symptoms of scurvy and whose relentless optimism buoyed their spirits through the long, dark polar night. Then there was Roald Amundsen, a young Norwegian who went on to become a storied polar explorer in his own right, exceeding de Gerlache's wildest dreams by leading the first expeditions to traverse the Northwest Passage and reach the South Pole.Drawing on firsthand accounts of the Belgica's voyage and exclusive access to the ship's logbook, Sancton tells the tale of its long, isolated imprisonment on the ice--a story that NASA studies today in its research on isolation for missions to Mars. In vivid, hair-raising prose, Sancton recounts the myriad forces that drove these men right up to and over the brink of madness.