Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Novels by Yann Martel, Life of Pi, Self, the Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ISBN 0-15-602732-1 (US paperback edition) ISBN 1-565-11780-8 (audiobook, Penguin Highbridge)Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel written by Yann Martel. The story was inspired by Martel's childhood friend Eleanor and her adventures in India. In the story, the protagonist Piscine "Pi" Molitor Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck, while stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean. Martel brought the idea of rituals many times throughout the novel as well as storytelling. Rituals give structure to abstract ideas and emotionsin other words, ritual is an alternate form of storytelling. It was rituals and storytelling that kept Pi Patel sane. The novel was first published by Knopf Canada in September 2001, and the UK edition won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction the following year. It was chosen for CBC Radio's Canada Reads 2003, where it was championed by author Nancy Lee. It won the 2003 Boeke Prize, a South African novel award. Its French translation, L'Histoire de Pi, was also chosen in the French version of the reading competition, Le combat des livres. Life of Pi has three parts. The first one is where the main character, Pi, being an adult now, looks back upon his childhood. How he was named after a swimming pool, being named Piscine Molitor Patel. How he dramatically changed his name to Pi when he started to attend secondary school, because he was tired of being mistakenly called "Pissing Patel." How he was born as a Hindu, but as a fourteen-year-old, came into contact with Christianity and Isla...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=41907

    By the time he died in 1991 he was truly the king of his remarkable wilderness, and internationally celebrated for his unique lifestyle.

    Possessed of an unshakeable sense of entitlement and a boundless sense of self-worth, assured of the adoration of all, Matilda can break men's hearts for fun. Agnes-diffident, careworn and poor-can only gape in astonishment at the figure her pupil cuts in the world. Employed to lead and form her, she is instead buffeted about in Matilda's tumultuous wake. She loves her young student-it is impossible not to. But it is hard not to wonder if Matilda's good fortunes will ever end.

    

    Paris is an extraordinary, lyrical love letter to the city, taking the reader on an imaginative journey around its secret stairways, courtyards, alleys and hidden places. Whether evoking the cool of a deserted church on a hot summer's day, remembering Notre Dame in a winter storm in 1940, describing chestnut trees lit up at night like 'Japanese lanterns' or lamenting the passing of street cries and old buildings, his book is filled with unforgettable imagery. It is a meditation on getting lost and wasting time, and on what it truly means to know a city.

    . .nor with mouth open; go not upon the toes nor in a dancing fashion." George Washington was known as a remarkably modest and courteous man. Humility and flawless manners were so ingrained in his character that he rarely if ever acted without them. The "Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior" that governed Washington's etiquette were by turns practical, inspirational and curious. These rules are as instructive and invaluable today as they were hundreds of years ago. George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior includes the complete text of the rules, as well as famous Washington writings such as: -Farewell to the Armies speech-Inaugural Address-Retirement Address-Address at the End of His Presidency

    The Second World War has gone on too long. Shops are closed ‘for the duration’. Trains run a restricted service ‘for the duration’. Life has paused, for the duration. A little girl, Pamela, is growing up fast. A young Englishman, Rupert Blundell, vows there’ll be no more wars. Both are waiting for their lives to begin.Then comes Hiroshima. Finally, devastatingly, the war is over.1962. Rupert is now strategic advisor to Lord Mountbatten, and his close confidant. Pamela is eighteen and has moved to London, eager for love and experience of every kind. There’ll be parties at Cliveden, Christine Keeler, Stephen Ward, the Astors. Life is a whirlwind.But beneath the glamour lies quiet, desperate terror, as the Cuban missile crisis unfolds and the world spins ever closer to nuclear war.Reckless is a gripping novel set against the world in crisis, by a superb novelist at the height of his powers.

    

    

    A significant figure in French society and literary circles, whose close friends included Madame de La Fayette and La Rochefoucauld, she reflected on both significant historical events and personal issues, and in this selection of the most significant letters, spanning almost fifty years, she is by turns humorous and melancholic, profound and superficial. Whether describing the new plays of Racine and Moliere, speculating on court scandals including the intrigues of the King's mistresses or relating her own family concerns, Madame de Sevigne provides throughout an intriguing portrait of the lost age of Le Roi Soleil.

    Coles. Two orphaned sisters, facing a future of want and loneliness, quarrel when the older sister, responsible for her dependent teenage sibling, repudiates her sister's affair with a political activist--older and unacceptable--she bonds with on the internet. Can adolescent love ever transcend innocently ignored incompatibility to evolve into a valued family relationship in rural southern America? Can a sister forced into a role of a surrogate parent convince her sister to denounce her attraction for a rouge male religiously, socially, and historically unsuited for marriage without a destructive severance of duty and caring?

     A self-taught geographer, hydrographer and navigator, Dampier was also a keen natural historian who showed his contemporaries then-unknown regions of the world, and vividly described the exotic creatures and plants that inhabited them without exaggeration. Impressing the Admiralty with his book, A New Voyage round the World, Dampier was given command of the infamous Roebuck expedition and became the first Englishman to explore parts of Australia. But Dampier's past reared its head when he employed acquaintances from his buccaneering days, and numerous problems beset him along the way; upon his eventual return Dampier was court-martialled for cruelty. Though he lived and worked like a buccaneer Dampier filled in blank spaces on the map, and in pioneering the seaways he opened up the oceans for exploration, thus laying the foundations for the British Empire. Although lauded in his day and going on to influence many in both literary and scientific spheres, Dampier died in obscurity and his name, associated with piracy, disappeared for many years. Comprehensive and compellingly told, Anton Gill's biography charts the life and endeavours of William Dampier, his successes and his failings, and reinstates him into the pantheon of great explorers. Anton Gill has been a freelance writer since 1984, specialising in European contemporary history but latterly branching out into historical fiction. He is the winner of the H H Wingate Award for non-fiction for 'The Journey Back From Hell'. He is also the author of 'Into Darkness', 'Dance Between the Flames' and 'An Honourable Defeat'. 'The Devil's Mariner' was his first biography.

    a towering tale of dreams unfettered, of mustangs running free, and of young men riding hell-bent-for-leather into Indian country for no other reason than they were young, brave and wild.By 1900 the Old West was vanishing, but the man many called its fastest gun was still alive.  By then Car Brules had shut himself and his secrets away in a cabin on Colorado's Lone Cone Peak.  Only one person knew his real story, a boy of eleven who became his friend and heard his extraordinary tales in 1909.  The Scout is that unforgettable story, just as young Steven Cartwright heard it, just as Brules told it: hard and gritty, wry with a cowboy's humor, and true to the spirits of all those who loved the west--and died for it--from Custer to Crazy Horse.Many hard, hurting things had driven Cat Brules to become the man he was.  The death of his beloved Shoshone bride, Wild Rose, was one of them.  Months after Brules lost her--brutally and far too soon--Wild Rose still came to him in his dreams.  With a void in his heart and a reckless spirit, Brules signed on as a Scout for General George Crook, whose cavalry was headed into the Badlands. Then, the U.S. Army still didn't know that there were fifteen thousand Sioux and Cheyenne in those Wyoming foothills, and under chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, every one of them was willing to fight to the death to live free.Brules's account of the violence that ensued, told with eyewitness immediacy and chilling authenticity, is one of courage and shame as he rides the trail toward the Little Big Horn and the battles that followed.  Seeing for himself the dying of a way of life, Brules tells a searing truth about America's history: the betrayal of Custer to the Sioux, the hunting of Geronimo, and the U.S. Army's cruel pursuit of Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce.  And here too are the women who loved Brules: White Antelope, the gentle Indian maiden who wanted what Brules felt he could never give again--and Melisande, the saucy Mormon girl who might be too much for even Cat Brules to handle.Debunking the myths of the Old West and the romanticism of movies, renowned Western writer Harry Combs creates a vision at once more complex, magnificent and genuine--from the make of the rifle to the caliber of the bullet that cut Custer down.  A novel unmatched in excitement and adventure, The Scout lets you smell the cordite, feel a man's hard need for a woman, and discover that the real flesh and blood inhabitants of those legendary days were tougher, bolder and more fascinating than we ever dared to imagine.

    While Roxane is in love with the beautiful but inarticulate Christian.Cyrano's generous offer to act as go-between sets in motion a poignant and often hilarious love-triangle, in which each character is torn between the lure of physical attraction and the seductive power of words.Martin Crimp's adaptation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac premiered at the Playhouse Theatre, London, in November 2019.

    *** Volume 1 plays a key role in the plot of the US movie Sex and the City. *** This Volume 2 includes love poems written by Matthew Arnold, Alfred Austin, Samuel Alfred Beadle, William Blake, Christopher Brennan, Lord Byron, Robert Burns, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Constable, William Cowper, Michael Drayton, George Eliot, Thomas Ford, Stephen Foster, Robert Frost, Thomas Frost, Norman Rowland Gale, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alfred P. Graves, Robert Herrick, Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Jonson, John Keats, Richard Lovelace, Pablo Neruda, Edgar Allen Poe, and William Shakespeare.