Sir Ernest Shackleton had carefully picked crew and a stout, well-outfitted ship, the Endurance. But he had no radio, the world was at war, and at the edge of the Antarctic continent, the ship froze in the sea ice. After months of immobility, it was crushed. Then began an impossible journey. With three tiny boats, the crew worked their way across frozen the Antarctic Sea. This vivid book recounts the story of Shackleton's heroic voyage from South Georgia Island to Antarctica then back to South Georgia. It is a tribute to Shackleton and his crew's ability to fight for survival and one of the most harrowing adventures in history.

    I hated working for him and I hated being around him. I hated it when he walked through the front door at home. And we feared him from the moment he pulled up in front of the house in his car.” So writes conservative firebrand and popular radio host Larry Elder. For ten years Elder and his father did not talk to each other. When they finally did, the conversation went on for eight hours—eight hours that took Elder on his father’s journey from the Jim Crow South, to service in the Marine Corps, to starting a business in Southern California. Elder emerged not just reconciled with his dad, but admiring him, and realizing that he had never fully known him or understood him.  Heartfelt, beautifully written, compulsively readable, A Lot Like Me—originally published as Dear Father, Dear Son—is both a powerfully affecting memoir and a personal, provocative slice of American history.

    He survives this perilous wheel of fortune, and thrives in the face of danger! I would like to add to why my book is important, is that we are true authentic Alaskans that live life off of the grid and that we have been entrepreneurs, making our living off of the land and sea. We are wilderness and off the grid consultants if that is important. On our website we have a variety of things we consult on from sport fishing, hunting, adventures, lodges/outfitters, developing or improving remote properties, and much more.

    But Pankaj Mishra shows that it was otherwise in this stereotype-shattering book. His enthralling group portrait of like minds scattered across a vast continent makes clear that modern Asia’s revolt against the West is not the one led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants but one with deep roots in the work of thinkers who devised a view of life that was neither modern nor antimodern, neither colonialist nor anticolonialist. In broad, deep, dramatic chapters, Mishra tells the stories of these figures, unpacks their philosophies, and reveals their shared goal of a greater Asia.       Right now, when the emergence of a greater Asia seems possible as at no previous time in history, From The Ruins Of Empire is as necessary as it is timely—a book essential to our understanding of the world and our place in it.

    Here, the eminent historian Christopher Hibbert explores life in Victorian England, a time when the British Empire was at its height, when the prosperous English basked in the Pax Britannica and thought their progress and stability would go on forever.

    Traveling from the Natchez Trace to the yawning cotton fields of the Delta and from plantation houses to air-conditioned shopping malls, Walton challenged us to see Mississippi's memories of comfort alongside its legacies of slavery and the Klan.  He weaves in the stories of his family, as well as those of patricians and sharecroppers, redneck demagogues and martyred civil rights workers, novelists and bluesmen, black and white. Mississippi is a national saga in brilliant microcosm, splendidly written and profoundly moving.

    With deep learning and elegance, David Nirenberg shows how foundational anti-Judaism is to the history of the West. Questions of how we are Jewish and, more critically, how and why we are not have been churning within the Western imagination throughout its history. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; Christians and Muslims of every period; even the secularists of modernity have used Judaism in constructing their visions of the world. The thrust of this tradition construes Judaism as an opposition, a danger often from within, to be criticized, attacked, and eliminated. The intersections of these ideas with the world of power the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, the Spanish Inquisition, the German Holocaust are well known. The ways of thought underlying these tragedies can be found at the very foundation of Western history.

    With record-collector zeal, Cook analyzes everything from Sidney Bechet's 78s to Norah Jones' recent chart-topper.

    Far larger than the much more famous domains of Alexander the Great and ancient Rome, it has since been surpassed in overall size and reach only by the British Empire. The Rise and Fall of the Second Largest Empire in the World recounts the spectacularly rapid expansion and dramatic decline of the Mongol realm, while examining its real, widespread, and enduring influence on countless communities from the DanubeRiver to the Pacific Ocean.

    

    

    There were three of them, followed by screeching tyres and a screaming engine. In a matter of seconds I recalled the conversation I'd had with Mary. She'd been right after all. 'You'll be fine for a few days,' she'd said, 'but after that they'll turn on you. Our cultures are too different. You won't live through it, not just because of the cultural differences, but because of the common crime. Find a home here in the suburbs where you belong.' The three gunshots had been my first, but perhaps for those who'd lived in these streets for years they were only three gunshots among countless others. Who knows? Perhaps three a week, maybe even three a night? Either way, I'd have to get used to them - or leave. Ignoring advice from his white friends, and to the bemusement of his black friends, Steven Otter throws caution to the wind and moves into Khayelitsha, a black township outside Cape Town. The story of his experiences in the uneven spread of shacks and informal housing that are home to more than a million people provides an unusual perspective on and insight into a predominantly Xhosa community and their reaction to an umlungu in their midst. Steven comes to understand his identity as a South African, the true meaning of community and brotherhood, and that some tsotsis are not what they seem. He finds that his preconceived notions of culture and race are called into question and that ubuntu, community and a sense of humour may still thrive alongside poverty and crime.

    According to ancient Hindu beliefs, dreads signified a singleminded pursuit of the spiritual. Devotion to God displaced vanity, and hair was left to its own devices.Dreads captures this organic explosion of hair in all its beautiful, subversive glory. One hundred duotone portraits present dread-heads from around the world, in all walks of life. Interviewed on location by the photographers, jatta-wearers wax philosophic about the integrity of their hair, and every stunning image confirms their choice. Alice Walker puts words to pictures, offering lyrical ruminations about her decision to let her own mane mat.

    The secret, though, that surrounded my parents’ unhappy life together, was divulged to me by accident . . .’ Hidden under some papers in his father’s bureau, the sixteen-year-old Derek Malcolm finds a book by the famous criminologist Edgar Lustgarten called The Judges and the Damned. Browsing through the Contents pages Derek reads, ‘Mr Justice McCardie tries Lieutenant Malcolm – page 33.’ But there is no page 33. The whole chapter has been ripped out of the book. Slowly but surely, the shocking truth emerges: that Derek’s father, shot his wife’s lover and was acquitted at a famous trial at the Old Bailey. The trial was unique in British legal history as the first case of a crime passionel, where a guilty man is set free, on the grounds of self-defence. Husband and wife lived together unhappily ever after, raising Derek in their wake. Then, in a dramatic twist, following his father’s death, Derek receives an open postcard from his Aunt Phyllis, informing him that his real father is the Italian Ambassador to London . . . By turns laconic and affectionate, Derek Malcolm has written a richly evocative memoir of a family sinking into hopeless disrepair. Derek Malcolm was chief film critic of the Guardian for thirty years and still writes for the paper. Educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, he became first a steeplechase rider and then an actor after leaving university. He worked as a journalist in the sixties, first in Cheltenham and then with the Guardian where he was a features sub-editor and writer, racing correspondent and finally film critic. He directed the London Film Festival for a spell in the 80s and is now President of both the International Film Critics Association and the British Federation of Film Societies. He lives with his wife Sarah Gristwood in London and Kent and has published two books – one on Robert Mitchum and another on his favourite 100 films. He is a frequent broadcaster on radio and television and a veteran of film festival juries all over the world.

    After a successful career in the private sector, Nasir El-Rufai rose to the top ranks of Nigeria's political hierarchy, serving first as the privatization czar at the Bureau for Public Enterprises and then as Minister of the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja under former President Olesegun Obasanjo. In this tell-all memoir, El-Rufai reflects on a life in public service to Nigeria, the enormous challenges faced by the country, and what can be done while calling on a new generation of leaders to take the country back from the brink of destruction. The shocking revelations disclosed by El-Rufai about the formation of the current leadership and the actions of prominent statesmen make this memoir required reading for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of power politics in Africa's most populous nation.