Thus began their extraordinary journey to Java. Covering 4,162 miles, the small boat was battered by continuous storms, and the men on board suffered crippling illness, near starvation, and attacks by islanders. The journey was one of the greatest achievements in the history of European seafaring and a personal triumph for a man who has been misjudged by history.Captain Bligh's Portable Nightmare reveals Bligh's great mapmaking skills, used to particular effect while he was exploring with Captain Cook. We discover his guilt over Cool's death at Kealakekua Bay. We learn of the failure of the Bounty expedition and the myths that surround it, the trials and retributions that followed Bligh's return to England, his successes as a navigator and as a vice-admiral fighting next to Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen.Combining extensive research with dazzling storytelling, John Toohey tells a gripping tale of seafaring, exploration, and mutiny on the high seas, while also dismissing the black legend of the cruel and foulmouthed Captain William Bligh and reinstating him not just as a man of his times but as a true hero.

    Not long after her arrival, however, tragedy strikes, and Fanny and her brood repair to a quiet artists' colony in France where she can recuperate. There she meets Robert Louis Stevenson, ten years her junior, who is instantly smitten with the earthy, independent and opinionated belle Americaine.A woman ahead of her time, Fanny does not immediately take to the young lawyer who longs to devote his life to literature, and who would eventually write such classics as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In time, though, she succumbs to Stevenson's charms. The two begin a fierce love affair, marked by intense joy and harrowing darkness, which spans decades as they travel the world for the sake of his health. Eventually they settled in Samoa, where Robert Louis Stevenson is buried underneath the epitaph: Under the wide and starry sky,Dig the grave and let me lie.Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he longed to be;Home is the sailor, home from sea,And the hunter home from the hill.(Requiem, Robert Louis Stevenson)

    Driving the car is Michael Paterniti, a young journalist from Maine. Sitting next to him is an eighty-four-year-old pathologist named Thomas Harvey who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955--and simply removed the brain and took it home. And kept it for over forty years.On a cold February day, the two men and the brain leave New Jersey and light out on I-70 for sunny California, where Einstein's perplexed granddaughter, Evelyn, awaits. And riding along as the imaginary fourth passenger is Einstein himself, an id-driven genius, the original galactic slacker with his head in the stars.Part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part biography, and part meditation, Driving Mr. Albert is one of the most unique road trips in modern literature. With the brain as both cargo and talisman, Paterniti perceives every motel, truck-stop diner, and roadside attraction as a weigh station for the American dream in the wake of the scientist's mind-blowing legacy. Finally, inspired by the man who gave a skeptical world a glimpse of its cosmic origins, this extraordinary writer weaves his own unified field theory of time, love, and the power to believe, once again, in eternity.

    After an agonizing eleven hours, the relentless sea would drag her down, settling the "Doria" uneasily into the murky Atlantic ocean floor nearly two hundred and fifty feet below. AmazingIy, due to a daring and fevered rescue operation by her oceangoing brethren, only fifty-one of the more than 1,700 people on board both ships were killed in the collision. Years have passed since that tragedy, yet the "Andrea Doria" is still taking lives. Deep DescentDrawn by the sirens call of adventure, a small but fanatical group of extreme scuba divers has long challenged the "Andrea Doria," pushing themselves far beyond the limits of recreational divers, up to the very limits of human endurance. Not all of them have succeeded. In "Deep Descent," an author and frequent Doria diver Kevin McMurray takes you inside this elite club, offering an unsparing and unsentimental exploration ofthose men and women who dare to go deeper, farther, and closer to the edge than prudence or common sense might allow.Considered the Mt. Everest of diving, the "Andrea Doria" is the ultimate deepwater wreck challenge -- lying in an area long known as the Bermuda Triangle of the Northeast, some fifty miles south of Nantucket Island and two hundred miles east of Sandy Hook, New Jersey. This region, no stranger to disaster, is fog-shrouded and prone to sudden changes of wind, weather, and tide. In addition to many shipping disasters, it has borne mute witness to such recent tragedies as the fatal crash of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s small plane and themysterious downing of EgyptAir Flight 990. It is an area that guards its secrets well, only surrendering its treasures to the bravest ormost determined seekers.Told with a vivid and startling clarity, "Deep Descent" is a story of courage and bravado, of the human spirit overcoming human frailty, and of fearsome risks traded for a hardwired adrenaline rush. With each page, McMurray draws us deeper into the cold heart of the unforgiving sea, giving us a powerful vision of a place to which few will ever have the skills or the daring to go.

    Brought up on a hill-station in north-west India, he killed his first leopard before he was nine and wenton to achieve a legendary reputation as a hunter.Corbett was also an author of great renown. His books on the man-eating tigers he once tracked are not only established classics, but have by themselves created almost a separate literary genre. Man Eaters of Kumaon is the best known of Corbett's books, one which offers ten fascinating andspine-tingling tales of pursuing and shooting tigers in the Indian Himalayas during the early years of this century. The stories also offer first-hand information about the exotic flora, fauna, and village life in this obscure and treacherous region of India, making it as interesting a travelogueas it is a compelling look at a bygone era of big-game hunting.

    Her deep empathy and understanding, her years of observing Kenya’s rich variety of wildlife, and her pioneering work in perfecting the right husbandry and milk formula have saved countless elephants, rhinos, and other baby animals from certain death. In this heartwarming and poignant memoir, Daphne shares her amazing relationships with a host of orphans, including her first love, Bushy, a liquid-eyed antelope; Rickey-Tickey-Tavey, the little dwarf mongoose; Gregory Peck, the busy buffalo weaver bird; Huppety, the mischievous zebra; and the majestic elephant Eleanor, with whom Daphne has shared more than forty years of great friendship.  But this is also a magical and heartbreaking human love story between Daphne and David Sheldrick, the famous Tsavo Park warden. It was their deep and passionate love, David’s extraordinary insight into all aspects of nature, and the tragedy of his early death that inspired Daphne’s vast array of achievements, most notably the founding of the world-renowned David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and the Orphans’ Nursery in Nairobi National Park, where Daphne continues to live and work to this day.  Encompassing not only David and Daphne’s tireless campaign for an end to poaching and for conserving Kenya’s wildlife, but also their ability to engage with the human side of animals and their rearing of the orphans expressly so they can return to the wild, Love, Life, and Elephants is alive with compassion and humor, providing a rare insight into the life of one of the world’s most remarkable women.

    No bodies of water can compare to them. One of them, Superior, is the largest lake on earth, and the five lakes together contain a fifth of the world's supply of standing fresh water. Their ten thousand miles of shoreline bound eight states and a Canadian province and are longer than the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States. Their surface area of 95,000 square miles is greater than New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island combined. People who have never visited them -- who have never seen a squall roar across Superior or the horizon stretch unbroken across Michigan or Huron -- have no idea how big they are. They are so vast that they dominate much of the geography, climate, and history of North America. In one way or another, they affect the lives of tens of millions of people.The Living Great Lakes is the most complete book ever written about the history, nature, and science of these remarkable lakes at the heart of North America. From the geological forces that formed them to the industrial atrocities that nearly destroyed them, to the greatest environmental success stories of our time, the lakes are portrayed in all their complexity. The book, however, is much more than just history. It is also the story of the lakes as told by biologists, fishermen, sailors, and others whom the author grew to know while traveling with them on boats and hiking with them on beaches and islands.The book is also the story of a personal journey. It is the narrative of a six-week voyage through the lakes and beyond as a crewmember on a tallmasted schooner, and a memoir of a lifetime spent on and near the lakes. Through storms and fog, on remote shores and city waterfronts, the author explores the five Great Lakes in all seasons and moods and discovers that they and their connecting waters -- including the Erie Canal, the Hudson River, and the East Coast from New York to Maine -- offer a surprising and bountiful view of America. The result is a meditation on nature and our place in the world, a discussion and cautionary tale about the future of water resources, and a celebration of a place that is both fragile and robust, diverse, rich in history and wildlife, often misunderstood, and worthy of our attention.