Vietnam Saga: Exploits of a combat helicopter pilot


Stan Corvin - 2017
    Army as a two-tour helicopter pilot in Vietnam. It is a true-life story of a pilot who fought for freedom and often his very life. Vietnams Saga is also a story about the meaning of life. Standing back from his war experience, Stan reflects on his ever-present faith and how it carried him through this challenging period of his life. Originally written as a legacy to Stan Corvin’s family- something that will be passed down for many generations-Vietnam Saga is now an opportunity for you to share in the legacy and the personal recollections, memories, thoughts, fears and shed tears of a decorated and dedicated American military pilot. The book also contains numerous photos.

Karachi Halwa


Prabhu Dayal - 2015
    Ambassador Prabhu Dayal shares his recollections of that period and keeps you laughing throughout his account of the bumpy ride of Pakistan’s domestic politics and its relationship with India. He tells you how a Sahiwal cow was brought into the equation, and where an elephant comes in.He says, ‘The past, the present and the future are in one continuous motion. Whatever I witnessed in Pakistan during Zia’s rule extends its long shadow not only over the present times but will do so well into the future also’. He poses the ultimate question whether the two South Asian giants can live as friends, offering his own suggestions.

A TASTE OF THE TRENCHES: The story of a soldier on the Western Front


D. Reitz - 2015
     Deneys Reitz was an unusual soldier. Having fought against the British in the Boer War, in 1917 he decided to go to London, in order to join the British Army. Presenting himself at a recruiting office in Chelsea, he enlisted as a private soldier. Shortly afterwards he was commissioned, and was sent to the Western Front in September 1917. Whilst on the Western Front, he witnessed the German spring offensive in 1918, and the allied counter-attack which followed. He was wounded twice as well as being gassed. Reitz experienced more than his fair share of the difficulties of trench warfare, from finding himself living in a trench whose sides were built out of sandbag-covered corpses, to being stretchered into a Casualty Clearing Station with serious wounds.

One of the Family


John George Pearson - 2003
    Moreover, he was as legendary a figure on the streets of New York as on the streets of London.Pearson persuaded the mysterious criminal leader to talk to him - and the result was a story even more extraordinary than that of the Kray twins. Here Pearson reveals the true story of the Englishman who became the adopted son of Joey Pagano, the head of one of the major New York crime families. Here the Englishman tells the story that no-one else dared to tell.

Cruise Ship Stories - 12 Years of Working on Cruise Ships, Behind the Crew Only Door, Getting Jobs on Ships, Life On Board


Guy Beach - 2013
    It could be you want to work on a cruise ships, you want to or have taken a cruise, maybe you are looking for tips on cruising or maybe you just like fun stories about cruise ships. If you are interested in any of those items I just listed, then this book is for you. Before we begin our journey, I guess I should tell you a little bit about myself and why I have written this book. For my cruise ship experience, I worked about 12 years on cruise ships around the world and 2 years working in shore side offices in Florida. I worked with 4 different cruise lines and worked as a scuba instructor/dive manager, shore excursion manager and then in the shore side offices as an IT geek, and finally a few years as an IT officer (yeah, I know, scuba instructor to computer geek, what can I say, it has been an interesting journey). Stories in this book include ones about: Getting a job on cruise ships Life on board ships On board romance Hurricanes Running aground Adrift at sea Kick backs Falling overboard Living on a tropical island Crazy things the crew and passengers do and much much more........................ I also have photos about my life at sea that can be seen at: www.cruiseshipstories.com Looking at these photos will bring my sea faring stories even more to life.

Castaway: The extraordinary survival story of Narcisse Pelletier, a young French cabin boy shipwrecked on Cape York in 1858


Robert Macklin - 2019
    He lives in Canberra. In 1858, fourteen-year-old French cabin boy Narcisse Pelletier was aboard the trader Saint-Paul when it was wrecked off the eastern tip of New Guinea. Scrambling into a longboat, Narcisse and the other survivors crossed almost 1000 kilometres of the Coral Sea before reaching the shores of Far North Queensland. If not for the local Aboriginal people, Narcisse would have perished. For seventeen years he lived with them, growing to manhood and participating fully in their Uutaalnganu world. Then, in 1875, his life was again turned upside down.Drawing from firsthand interviews with Narcisse after his return to France and other contemporary accounts of exploration and survival, and documenting the spread of European settlement in Queensland and the brutal frontier wars that followed, Robert Macklin weaves an unforgettable tale of a young man caught between two cultures in a time of transformation and upheaval.

American Legends: The Life of James Cagney


Charles River Editors - 2013
    *Includes Cagney's own quotes about his life and career. *Includes a bibliography for further reading. *Includes a table of contents. "You don't psych yourself up for these things, you do them...I'm acting for the audience, not for myself, and I do it as directly as I can." – James Cagney A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history’s most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors’ American Legends series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of America’s most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known. When the American Film Institute assembled its top 100 actors of all time at the close of the 20th century, one of the Top 10 was James Cagney, an actor whose acting and dancing talents spawned a stage and film career that spanned over 5 decades and once compelled Orson Welles to call him "maybe the greatest actor to ever appear in front of a camera." Indeed, his portrayal of “The Man Who Owns Broadway”, George M. Cohan, earned him an Academy Award in the musical Yankee Doodle Dandy, and as famed director Milos Forman once put it, "I think he's some kind of genius. His instinct, it's just unbelievable. I could just stay at home. One of the qualities of a brilliant actor is that things look better on the screen than the set. Jimmy has that quality." Ultimately, it was portraying tough guys and gangsters in the 1930s that turned Cagney into a massive Hollywood star, and they were the kind of roles he was literally born to play after growing up rough in Manhattan at the turn of the 20th century. In movies like The Public Enemy (which included the infamous “grapefruit scene”) and White Heat, Cagney convincingly played criminals that brought Warner to the forefront of Hollywood and the gangster genre. Cagney also helped pave the way for younger actors in the genre, like Humphrey Bogart, and he was so good that he found himself in danger of being typecast. While Cagney is no longer remembered as fondly or as well as Bogart, he was also crucial in helping establish the system in which actors worked as independent workers free from the constraints of studios. Refusing to be pushed around, Cagney was constantly involved in contract squabbles with Warner, and he often came out on top, bucking the conventional system that saw studios treat their stars as indentured servants who had to make several films a year. American Legends: The Life of James Cagney examines the life and career of one of Hollywood’s most iconic actors. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Cagney like never before, in no time at all.

The Queen's Pirate: Sir Francis Drake


Kevin Jackson - 2016
     But Drake’s exploits in his earlier years, though less well known, are even more remarkable. Born into a poor, obscure family, he worked his way rapidly up in the maritime world to his first captaincy. Before long, he was the most successful of all English pirates, admired by his countrymen, hated and feared by the Spanish. Queen Elizabeth and her ministers saw the potential in this rough-mannered but enterprising young man, and gave him their blessing for the first British venture into the Pacific Ocean. This success of this voyage, which lasted for three years, exceeded their wildest hopes. Not only did Drake come home with a vast treasure of captured gold, silver and jewels; he became the first man ever to circumnavigate the globe in a single mission, and bring most of his crew home alive and well. Soon after his triumphant return, Elizabeth knighted this newly rich adventurer, and gave her blessing to his acts of pillage. It was a gesture that made war with Spain inevitable. And Drake’s part in the coming war changed the course of world history. SIR FRANCIS DRAKE: THE QUEEN’S PIRATE tells the extraordinary story of Drake’s early years and his journey around the world on his famous ship, the Golden Hind.

Demon of the Waters: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe


Gregory Gibson - 2002
    At the centre of the mutiny was a young man raised in a staunch Nantucket Quaker family, Samuel Comstock, one of the most bizarre and frightening figures who ever went to sea. This is an account of the legendary mutiny, packed with incident and detail.

A Glorious Way to Die: The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato, April 1945


Russell Spurr - 1981
    Chosen as a Main Selection of the Military Book Club.

The Prize of All the Oceans: Commodore Anson's Daring Voyage Triumphant Capture sp treasGalleon


Glyn Williams - 1999
    His secret mission#58; to seize the legendary Spanish galleon on her yearly voyage from Acapulco to Manila laden with Peruvian silver, "the prize of all the oceans." It was to be four years of hardship, disaster, mutiny, and, finally, heroism.brbr Historian Glyn Williams's iThe Prize of All the Oceans/i shapes Anson's dramatic voyage into a powerful narrative threaded with incisive analysis and commentary, giving readers a vivid portrait of an intrepid commander who never wavered in his resolve to capture the prize and return home triumphant. Glyn Williams tells the full story for the first time in a book that will rivet history buffs and armchair survivalists alike. PAuthor Biography#58; Glyn Williams is emeritus professor of history at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. He has published numerous books on the history of Britain and the history of exploration.

Arctic Rescue: A Memoir of the Tragic Sinking of HMS Glorious


Ronald Healiss - 2020
    Ideal for readers of Evan Mawdsley, Max Hastings and Iain Ballantyne.On the 8th June 1940, the Nazi battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau opened their guns on the aircraft-carrier HMS Glorious.Within minutes the Glorious was taking on water and the order was given to abandon ship.Hundreds of men leapt into the icy waters of the Norwegian Sea. They hoped and prayed that nearby ships would have heard their distress signal and send help.Yet, they did not come. Men were left to tread water, hold onto small inflatables or clamber onto overcrowded lifeboats. The situation looked bleak for the few who survived the first twenty-four hours; there was nothing to eat and men resorted to drinking saltwater and their own urine to slake their thirst, but the effects of hypothermia and delirium began to take their toll.Over 1,200 men lost their lives as a result of this tragedy.Only forty men survived this ordeal, one of which was Royal Marine Ronald “Tubby” Healiss, who served as a member of a 4.7 gun crew on the Glorious. His award-winning account is a true and terrible record of suffering, which uncovers one of the greatest undocumented naval stories of the Second World War.

The Mighty Hood


Ernle Bradford - 1977
     Launched in 1918, she spent the interwar years cruising the oceans of the world, the largest vessel afloat and a proud symbol of the Royal Navy. ‘The greatest and most graceful ship of her time, perhaps of any time, she was the last of the Leviathans — those mighty ships, whose movement upon the high seas had determined policy since the last quarter of the 19th century. A generation of British seamen had been trained in her. To millions of people she had represented British sea power and imperial might. With her passed not only a ship, but a whole era swept away on the winds of the world.’ Bradford tells the fascinating story of two ships coming out — the new Prince of Wales, and the old, world-famous Hood, whose history remained in the memories of all those who sailed on her. Their silhouettes visible now against the lines of the sea and the islands: the long sweep of their foredecks, the banked ramparts of their guns, and the hunched shoulders of bridges and control towers. We shall never see their like again, but no one who has ever watched them go by will forget the shudder that they raised along the spine. The big ships were somehow as moving as the pipes heard a long way off in the hills. There was always a kind of mist about them, a mist of sentiment and of power. Unlike aircraft, rockets, or nuclear bombs, they were a visible symbol of power allied with beauty — a rare combination. The thrilling history of a ship who battled the infamous Bismarck, inspired alliances and revenge in a time of great uncertainty and went out with a bang when her one fatal flaw was exploited... Ernle Bradford (1922-1986) was an historian who wrote books on naval battles and historical figures. Among his subjects were Lord Nelson, the Mary Rose, Christopher Columbus, Julius Caesar and Hannibal. He also documented his own voyages on the Mediterranean Sea.

Wreck of the Medusa: The Tragic Story of the Death Raft


Alexander McKee - 1975
    Forced to abandon ship, 150 men and women embarked on an overloaded makeshift raft. After twelve days of riots, mutiny, murder, and, ultimately, cannibalism, only fifteen were alive.

The Galapagos Affair


John Treherne - 1983
    The tales were of nudism, free love communes, stainless steel dentures - a latter-day Garden of Eden. But the truth was even stranger. Friedrich Ritter, an eccentric German intellectual, and his long-suffering companion Dora Strauch, were the first arrivals. Once established, they were soon joined by others. Most bizarre and dangerous was the self-styled Baroness Wagner-Bosquet. She ruled her three young male lovers with a riding crop, a pearl-handled revolver and insatiable sexual demands - terrorising other settlers. Her mysterious disappearance and the discovery of unidentified bodies on a nearby island perplexed the world. Now The Galapagos Affair unravels the whole incredible story.