Included here are such classics as REMEMBERING NEEDLEMAN, THE KUGELMASS EPISODE, a new story called CONFESSIONS OF A BUGLAR, and more.

    ‘Help for the helpless in the storms of the Sierra Nevada Mountains!’" – Eliza P. Donner Houghton, The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate The westward movement of Americans in the 19th century was one of the largest and most consequential migrations in history, and for countless people back east, the West represented opportunities for adventure, independence, and fortune. Even in the 21st century, Americans look back on the era fondly, even romantically, and millions are familiar with the popular game that reignited interest in the Oregon Trail Of course, it’s easy for people with modern transportation to comfortably reminisce about the West, because many pioneers discovered that the traveling was fraught with various kinds of obstacles and danger, including bitter weather, potentially deadly illnesses, and hostile Native Americans, not to mention an unforgiving landscape that famous American explorer Stephen Long deemed “unfit for human habitation.” 19th century Americans were all too happy and eager for the transcontinental railroad to help speed their passage west and render overland paths obsolete. One of the main reasons people yearned for new forms of transportation is because of the most notorious and tragic disasters in the history of westward travel. While people still romanticize the Wild West, many Americans are still all too familiar with the fate of the Donner Party, a group of 87-90 people that met with disaster in the Sierra Nevada mountain range during the winter of 1846-1847. The party knew the journey would take months, but early snowfalls in the mountains left dozens of people trapped in snow drifts that measured several feet, stranding them in a manner that made it virtually impossible for them to go any further for several weeks. Inevitably, as the Donner Party’s supplies began to run low, there was little hope of acquiring new provisions high up in the mountains, and even worse, their location and the technology of the time also made it virtually impossible for relief expeditions to reach them. Due to exposure and lack of food, the health of many in the party began to deteriorate quickly in the tough winter conditions, and the animals brought along with the group died at alarming rates. Most of the men who set out to try to get help died en route, while the families back in camp tried to cope with dozens of deaths suffered by young and old alike. As a few able-bodied people went for help, the people who remained back in their wagons resorted to the most desperate of measures in attempts to either stay alive or keep their children alive. Some members of the Donner Party fought with each other, occasionally fatally, and the journey is perhaps best known today for accounts of cannibalism. One member of the group noted in his diary in February 1847, "Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that thought she would Commence on Milt. & eat him. I dont that she has done so yet, it is distressing.” All the while, the plight of the Donner Party made news across the nation, even before the surviving members were rescued and brought to safety, and by the time the doomed expedition was over, less than 50 of them made it to California.

    She sees nothing reprehensible in Richard III, yet burns with contempt for Elizabeth I, and documents several reigns with breezy nonchalance.This volume also contains 'Lesley Castle', a delightful and often hilarious correspondence detailing the mishaps and misapprehensions that befall five young ladies.

    It's only five in the afternoon, but a sandtorm has plunged everything into a hellish twilight of murky, red dust. On rooftops, in alleyways lurk militiamen with machine guns, AK rifles and the odd rocket-propelled grenade. Artillery bombardment has shattered the town's sewers and rubble is piled up in lagoons of human excrement. It stinks. Welcome to Iraq... Within hours of 9/11, America's war on terrorism fell to those like the 23 Marines of the First Recon Battalion, the first generation dispatched into open-ed combat since Vietnam. They were a new breed of American warrior unrecognizable to their forebears-soldiers raised on hip hop, Internet porn, Marilyn Manson, video games and The Real World, a band of born-again Christians, dopers, Buddhists, and New Agers who gleaned their precepts from kung fu movies and Oprah Winfrey. Cocky, brave, headstrong, wary, and mostly unprepared for the physical, emotional, and moral horrors ahead, the "First Suicide Battalion" would spearhead the blitzkrieg on Iraq, and fight against the hardest resistance Saddam had to offer. Generation Kill is the funny, frightening, and profane firsthand account of these remarkable men, of the personal toll of victory, and of the randomness, brutality, and camaraderie of a new American war.

    

    In the course of a confession to a white 'sahib' the imprisoned Ameer Ali recounts his life as a devoted follower of Thuggee, a secret religious cult practising ritual mass murder and robbery. Taylor uncovered evidence of the crimes committed by bands of Thugs as a Superintendent of Police in India during the 1820s. Introducing a new standard of ethnographic realism to western fiction about India, Confessions of a Thug is a strikingly vivid, chilling and immensely readable thriller. This unique critical edition makes available a fascinating and significant work of Empire writing.

    Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip. It is an examination of the lure of the hunt and an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man.

    McRaven, US Navy (Ret.). The most moving and powerful war stories ever told, by the men and women who lived them.*Walk in my Combat Boots* is a powerful collection crafted from hundreds of original interviews by James Patterson, the world’s #1 bestselling writer, and First Sergeant US Army (Ret.) Matt Eversmann, part of the Ranger unit portrayed in the movie *Black Hawk Down*.These are the brutally honest stories usually only shared amongst comrades in arms. Here, in the voices of the men and women who’ve fought overseas from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is a rare eye-opening look into what wearing the uniform, fighting in combat, losing friends and coming home is *really* like. Readers who next thank a military member for their service will finally have a true understanding of what that thanks is for

    Varun whiles away his time, hopping from pub to pub, spending time with friends and keeping a track of his love interest on Facebook.These traits worry his mother to the bone, compelling her to put the very meddlesome Anu Aunty on the job, to help get her son moving in the right direction in life. Anu Aunty does a rather good job of this, much to Varun's dismay. He then does all that he can to get her off his track, while pursuing his dreams to become an entrepreneur.How I Braved Anu Aunty and Co-Founded A Million Dollar Company is the author’s debut novel and is on its fourth reprint already. Having sold twenty thousand copies in only a month, the book has become a bestseller by national standards. It has also occupied a firm foothold on the bestseller charts for eighty days at a stretch. The author attained initial popularity with his Facebook blog posts, a few of which were sent to his publishers. The book was conceived once they demanded a full manuscript.

    It identifies its author by the names 'Kauṭilya' and 'Vishnugupta', both names that are traditionally identified with Chanakya (c. 350–283 BC), who was a scholar at Takshashila and the teacher and guardian of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya, founder of the Mauryan Empire. The text was influential until the 12th century, when it disappeared. It was rediscovered in 1904 by R. Shamasastry, who published it in 1909. The first English translation was published in 1915.Roger Boesche describes the Arthaśāstra as "a book of political realism, a book analysing how the political world does work and not very often stating how it ought to work, a book that frequently discloses to a king what calculating and sometimes brutal measures he must carry out to preserve the state and the common good."Centrally, Arthaśāstra argues how in an autocracy an efficient and solid economy can be managed. It discusses the ethics of economics and the duties and obligations of a king. The scope of Arthaśāstra is, however, far wider than statecraft, and it offers an outline of the entire legal and bureaucratic framework for administering a kingdom, with a wealth of descriptive cultural detail on topics such as mineralogy, mining and metals, agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine and the use of wildlife. The Arthaśāstra also focuses on issues of welfare (for instance, redistribution of wealth during a famine) and the collective ethics that hold a society together.

    Guided by his roommates, Fat Frank and Chris, he sets out to cleanse his body and mind. Not knowing his fist from his elbow, the author is drawn into the world of Japanese martial arts, joining the Tokyo Riot Police on their yearlong, brutally demanding course of budo training, where any ascetic motivation soon comes up against bloodstained "white pyjamas" and fractured collarbones. In Angry White Pyjamas, Twigger blends, the ancient with the modern--the ultratraditionalism, ritual, and violence of the dojo (training academy) with the shopping malls, nightclubs, and scenes of everyday Tokyo life in the 1990s--to provide a brilliant, bizarre glimpse of life in contemporary Japan.

    Completely updated and revised by preeminent historian J. M. Roberts, this volume features ninety up-to-date maps, new sections, and extremely well-written and accessible articles throughout. Truly global and comprehensive, it succeeds in conveying the staggering diversity of the human experience across a vast range of climates and conditions. This is the one book for anyone interested in the variety and grandeur of history’s march.

    They also saw the structure of the army, with its recruitment on the basis of caste and religion, as incompatible with their hopes for a new secular nation.India has successfully preserved its democracy, however, unlike many other colonial states that inherited imperial "divide and rule" armies, and unlike its neighbor Pakistan, which inherited part of the same Indian army in 1947. As Steven I. Wilkinson shows, the puzzle of how this happened is even more surprising when we realize that the Indian Army has kept, and even expanded, many of its traditional "martial class" units, despite promising at independence to gradually phase them out.Army and Nation draws on uniquely comprehensive data to explore how and why India has succeeded in keeping the military out of politics, when so many other countries have failed. It uncovers the command and control strategies, the careful ethnic balancing, and the political, foreign policy, and strategic decisions that have made the army safe for Indian democracy. Wilkinson goes further to ask whether, in a rapidly changing society, these structures will survive the current national conflicts over caste and regional representation in New Delhi, as well as India's external and strategic challenges.

    For millennia it has been worshipped as a god; for centuries used as a tool of imperial expansion; today it is the cement of Pakistans fractious union. Five thousand years ago, a string of sophisticated cities grew and traded on its banks. In the ruins of these elaborate metropolises, Sanskrit-speaking nomads explored the river, extolling its virtues in Indias most ancient text, the Rig-Veda. During the past two thousand years a series of invaders Alexander the Great, Afghan Sultans, the British Raj made conquering the Indus valley their quixotic mission. For the people of the river, meanwhile, the Indus valley became a nodal point on the Silk Road, a centre of Sufi pilgrimage and the birthplace of Sikhism. Empires of the Indus follows the river upstream and back in time, taking the reader on a voyage through two thousand miles of geography and more than five millennia of history redolent with contemporary importance.

    The talks ultimately resulted in failure for Labour amid recriminations on both sides and the accusation that the Lib Dems had conducted a dutch auction, inviting Labour to outbid the Tories on a shopping list of demands. Despite calls for him to give his own account of this historic sequence of events, Adonis has kept his own counsel until now. Published to coincide with the third anniversary of the general election that would eventually produce an historic first coalition government since the Second World War, 5 Days In May is a remarkable and important insider account of the dramatic negotiations that led to its formation. It also offers the author's views on what the future holds as the run-up to the next election begins. 5 Days in May presents a unique eyewitness account of a pivotal moment in political history.