It was the best-selling of Twain's works during his lifetime, as well as one of the best-selling travel books of all time.

    "Arguably the world's greatest living travel writer" (Outside). He draws on readings, reflections, and conversations with Japanese friends to illuminate an unknown place for newcomers, and to give longtime residents a look at their home through fresh eyes. A Beginner's Guide to Japan is a playful and profound guidebook full of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture. Iyer's adventures and observations as he travels from a meditation-hall to a love-hotel, from West Point to Kyoto Station, make for a constantly surprising series of provocations guaranteed to pique the interest and curiosity of those who don't know Japan, and to remind those who do of the wide range of fascinations the country and culture contain.

    David Frum urges a Republican party that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible - a party that can meet the challenges of the Obama years and lead a diverse America to a new age of freedom and prosperity.

    "Viva South America!" sets out to discover if that dream lives on. Is it fair to describe a land as 'independent' while poverty still enslaves millions, where violence lurks in the shadows and where lawlessness gnaws away at progress? Did the Liberators fail? Or are leaders such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales resurrecting those long-ago ideals?Armed with a reporter's notebook and an open mind, the author hits the road in search of answers. With the ghost of Bolivar as guide, the quest takes the reader off the tourist trail and into the weird and wonderful worlds of South American culture and society. By stepping into people's homes and into inmates' prison cells, by climbing onto dance floors and over road blocks, Oliver Balch unearths untold stories from the front line of South America's contemporary fight for freedom.

    Jack Witney served twenty-five years in prison although he shot no one and was released on appeal, only to be murdered in his Bristol flat a few years later. John Duddy died in Parkhurst after fifteen years. But Harry Roberts, by his own admission the instigator of the crime and the most notorious, was released from prison after forty-eight years in 2015 making national front page news. What could possess an apparently rational and sane man, albeit an habitual criminal, to commit such a callous and ruthless act? What kind of a man is he? How can an ordinary person understand what he did? Should he be forgiven?50 years later, the full story for the first time.

    She camps in the Sahara with a Bedouin "desert fox," is mistaken for a spy in Turkey, takes a lesson in beauty from a Kurdish family, and falls in love with a poet. She experiences souks and mosques, open-air lingerie bazaars and nightclubs grooving to hip-hop. In a region associated with terrorist havens, Masood meets ordinary Muslim men and women navigating the politics of culture, religion, and identity. Zaatar Days, Henna Nights offers a street-savvy take on the contemporary Arab world that's seldom seen on the evening news. This is a story of discovery and faith, of making bonds and breaking stereotypes, and of finding oneself where one least expects to.

    Now Randy's back in Last Flight Out, a brand-new collection of essays keeping us up to date on his latest excursions.Randy White is a "mover" and has no time for people who can't keep up. Join him as he dives in the infamous lake called the Bad Blue Hole on the desolate Cat Island in the Bahamas. Search for the perfect hot pepper in Colombia, and closer to home, go raccoon hunting in Pioneer, Ohio, where the hunted almost always outsmart the hunters. Get in the ring with Shine Forbes, an eighty-year-old fighter in prime condition and Ernest Hemingway's former sparring partner, and go on a secret mission to steal back General Manuel Noriega's bar stools. Though he rarely finds what he's looking for-such as the half-human, half-alligator creature known as "Gatorman"-he cultivates his unique ability to revel in the unique and comical situations of each exotic trip.From a jungle survival school in Panama to a week at a professional wrestler's training camp, White leaves the reader mesmerized by the potential of undiscovered places and the promise of endless adventure in unfamiliar territory. An icon of the new breed of thick-skinned, high endurance travelers, Randy White is the real deal.

    The 1960–70s image, bolstered by Tom Wolfe and Big Wednesday, was one of mild outlaws―tanned boys refusing to grow up, spending their days drinking beer and smoking joints on the beach in between mindless hours in the water.But in the 1980s, as surf brands morphed into multibillion-dollar companies, the derelict portrait began to harm business. The external surf image became Kelly Slater and Laird Hamilton, beacons of health, vitality, bravery, and clean-living.Internally, though, surfing had moved on from booze and weed to its heart’s true home, its soul’s twin flame: cocaine. The rise of cocaine in American popular culture as the choice of rich, white elites was matched, then quadrupled, within surf culture. The parties got wilder, the nights stretched longer, the stories became more ridiculously unbelievable. And there has been no stopping, no dip in passion.It is a forbidden love, and few, if any, outside the surf world know about this particular rhapsody. Drug use is kept very well-hidden, even from insiders, but evidence of its psychosis rears its head from time to time in the form of overdoses, bar fights, surf contests, murders, and cover-ups.Cocaine + Surfing draws back the curtain on a hopped-up, sometimes-sexy, sometimes-deadly relationship and uses cocaine as the vehicle to expose and explain the utterly absurd surf industry to outsiders.

    The western world was turned upside down by the rock ‘n' roll revolution and here's the real lowdown on the rock stars who made it happen — and what it did to their lives.

    He seeks conversions, not just votes. This Spotlight Story from TIME explores the Gospel of Bernie Sanders.

    After several failed attempts he got out over the wire and journeyed for weeks as a fugitive from northern France to Marseilles, then across the Pyrenees to Spain and Gibraltar and freedom. He was guided along the way by French civilians, resistance fighters and the organizers of the famous Pat escape line. His straightforward, honest and vivid memoir of his work as a surgeon at Dunkirk, life in the prison camps and his escape attempts gives a fascinating insight into his wartime experience. It records the ingenuity and courage of the individuals, the ordinary men and women, who risked their lives to help him on his way. It is also one of the best accounts we have of what it was like to be on the run in occupied Europe.

    The chafing restrictions of a typical upbringing in upper-class, small town Alabama simply did not apply to Zelda, who was described as an unusual child and permitted to roam the streets with little supervision. Zelda refused to blossom into a typical 'Southern belle' on anyone's terms but her own and while still in high school enjoyed the status of a local celebrity for her shocking behavior. Everybody in town knew the name Zelda Sayre. Queen of the Montgomery social scene, Zelda had a different beau ready and willing to show her a good time for every day of the week. Before meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda's life was a constant pursuit of pleasure. With little thought for the future and no responsibilities to speak of, Zelda committed herself fully to the mantra that accompanied her photo in her high school graduation book: "Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow. Let's think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow." But for now Zelda was still in rehearsal for her real life to begin, a life she was sure would be absolutely extraordinary. Zelda Sayre married F. Scott Fitzgerald on the 3rd of April 1920 and left sleepy Montgomery behind in order to dive headfirst into the shimmering, glamourous life of a New York socialite. With the publication of Scott's first novel, This Side of Paradise, Zelda found herself thrust into the limelight as the very epitome of the Flapper lifestyle. Concerned chiefly with fashion, wild parties and flouting social expectations, Zelda and Scott became icons of the Jazz Age, the personification of beauty and success. What Zelda and Scott shared was a romantic sense of self-importance that assured them that their life of carefree leisure and excess was the only life really worth living. Deeply in love, the Fitzgeralds were like to sides of the same coin, each reflecting the very best and worst of each other. While the world fell in love with the image of the Fitzgeralds they saw on the cover of magazines, behind the scenes the Fitzgerald's marriage could not withstand the tension of their creative arrangement. Zelda was Scott's muse and he mercilessly mined the events of their life for material for his books. Scott claimed Zelda's memories, things she said, experiences she had and even passages from her diary as his possessions and used them to form the basis of his fictional works. Zelda had a child but the domestic sphere offered no comfort or purpose for her. The Flapper lifestyle was not simply a phase she lived through, it formed the very basis of her character and once the parties grew dull, the Fitzgeralds' drinking became destructive and Zelda's beauty began to fade, the world held little allure for her. Zelda sought reprieve in work and tried to build a career as a ballet dancer. When that didn't work out she turned to writing but was forbidden by Scott from using her own life as material. Convinced that she would never leave her mark on the world as deeply or expressively as Scott had, Zelda retreated into herself and withdrew from the people she knew in happier times. The later years of Zelda's life were marred by her detachment from reality as, diagnosed with schizophrenia, Zelda spent the last eighteen years of her life living in and out of psychiatric hospitals. As Scott's life unraveled due to alcohol abuse, Zelda looked back on the years they had spent together, young and wild and beautiful, as the best of her life. She may have been right but she was wrong about one thing, Zelda did leave her mark on the world and it was a deep and expressive mark that no one could have left but her. Zelda Fitzgerald: The Biography

    B-36 crews trained for the one flight when they would be ordered to drop combat nuclear bombs on the USSR. Flights of fifteen hours over continental United States to grueling thirty-hour nonstop flights overseas were routine, all without the benefit of in-flight refueling—not yet invented. The experiences of this crew, as they flew their assigned missions, are part of the history of our nation’s defense. They were part of our Cold War Shield.

    But it is Stella’s voice, the amazing way that she tells her story, that makes this Holocaust story so unique, powerful and endearing. The reader listens to Stella’s stunning simplicity of expression, her use of Polish and Yiddish phrases, her humor, her all-so-frequent grammatical errors – and is charmed. It is a story that only Stella Yollin can tell, and it can only be told in Stella’s sweet and incomparable way.