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

    

    The first of these came out in 1946: the ever famous "How to be an Alien." Later he enlarges the picture with "How to be inimitable" and "How to be Decadent." All three books were illustrated by the master of the cartoonists' art, the late Nicolas Bentley. Here they are, all in one volume, which will make life much easier for today's would-be Brits than it was for those who pervaded them. It is said that a few of the latter actually failed to become indistinguishable from the genuine British article because they found it too tiresome to seek out three separate books: a misfortune that need never again occur to anyone.

    E. Rölvaag lyrically chronicles the experiences of Nils Vaag, a young Norwegian immigrant. Abandoning the life of a fisherman in Nordland, a region poor but full of mystical beauty, Nils emigrates to the New World in 1912. There he sweeps saloons, lives in a boardinghouse called "Babel" for the many languages used by its residents, and begins to find his way among the people of the city.The Boat of Longing was Rölvaag's favorite of all his books and the only one set in urban America. When it was first published in English in 1933, it received wide praise from American critics. This edition includes an introduction by Einar Haugen, professor emeritus of Scandinavian and Linguistics at Harvard University and author of a critical study of Rölvaag.

    . .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

    Sophia Elaine Hanson is the author of the critically acclaimed chapbook hummingbird as well as the #1 bestselling young adult series the Vinyl Trilogy. She resides in New York City and loves pigeons and Star Wars.

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

    This probing of the changes in the American psyche through the 1970s is carried forward in the second part, Landscapes of Living Dying (1979)—a work originally hailed by Library Journal as "Ferlinghetti's strongest work since his 1957 A Coney Island of the Mind. . . . [He] pursues his disheveled muse with the innocent passion of a young beatnik, hiding his authentic erudition behind a comfortable guise of spontaneous composition."

    

    Both heartbreaking and haunting, his words will stay with you like that 'forever September morning.'" --Meredith Vieira, NBC's  Today Tom Flynn brings to his subject three invaluable attributes: the eye of a seasoned journalist, the soul of a poet, and his stunning, first-hand experience of that horrific day." --David Friend, Vanity FairFrom Bikeman:The dead from hereare my forever companionsI am their pine box,their marble reliquary,their bronze urn,the living, breathing coffin they never had,their final resting place without a stone.I move on at peace.Modeled on Dante's Inferno, veteran journalist Thomas Flynn's Bikeman chronicles the morning of September 11, 2001 like no other published work. Flynn delivers a personal account of his experiences beginning with the first strike on the World Trade Center when he decided to follow his journalist's instinct and point his bike's handlebars in the direction of the north tower. His story continues as he transitions from reporter to participant hoping to survive the fall of the south tower. Now Flynn, as both journalist and now survivor, must come to terms with the harrowing ordeal and somehow find peace in the very act of surviving.Part journalist's record, part survivor's eulogy, Flynn writes:Survival is the absence of death.It is a subdued, a hushed existence. . .I live to talk about it,to relate the tale as it happens,not only its extremities and cruelty,but also the goodness that flourishes too.

    

    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 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.

    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?