A baby boy, a few hours old, is left by his mother, wrapped in nothing but two sheets of newspaper and hidden amongst the undergrowth by a canal bank. An hour later, a late-shift postman is walking wearily home when he hears a faint cry. He finds the newspaper parcel and discovers the newborn, white-cold and whimpering, inside.After being rushed to hospital and against all odds, the baby survives. He’s baptised by the hospital chaplain as Richard.Everything feels as though it’s looking up; Richard is put into local authority care and regains his health. However, after nearly five blissful years in a rural care home filled with loving friends, it soon unfolds that his turbulent start in life is only the beginning…Based on a devastating true story, this inspirational memoir follows Richard’s traumatic birth, abusive childhood, and search for the truth.

    For every incredible career high there was a hefty personal downside: divorce, drunkenness, and death seemed as synonymous with the Gibbs as falsetto harmonies, flares, and multi-platinum record sales.Not long before his death, Robin made it clear that he believed the Gibbs had been forced to pay the highest possible cost for their success. "All the tragedies my family has suffered . . . is a kind of karmic price we are paying for all the fame and fortune we've had." This is the story of the brothers' incredible careers and an examination of the Gibb 'curse'--an all-too-human look at the rollercoaster ride of fame.

    This striking book showcases the treasures from first ladies throughout history, ranging from Martha Washington's silk dress and dressing mirror to Michelle Obama's 2009 inaugural gown and jewelry. These and many other unforgettable objects--including gowns, tableware, and invitations from beloved first ladies such as Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, Barbara Bush, Hilary Clinton, and more--tell the story of the first ladies as public and private figures. They illustrate how these women, thrust into an influential and visible role by happenstance of marriage, adapted themselves and the role of first lady by taking on responsibilities as campaigners, hostesses, and policy advocates.The Smithsonian First Ladies Collection features many treasures not on view at the exhibit. Complete with an insider's look at the acquisition, conservation, and exhibition of the pieces as well as a timeline of all forty-six first ladies, this is a must-have for anyone fascinated by these incredible women and their roles in American culture and political life.

    Pablo Escobar lay dead, the Cali Cartel had taken over much of the global supply, and an avalanche of coke was poised to hit Europe. Now the British government wanted Chandler and his team to do the impossible: infiltrate the most powerful crime syndicates on earth and stop their drug shipments. It was a perilous assignment. The cartel bosses operated like a lethal multi-national, with armies of hitmen and myriad spies in ports, airports, police stations and government offices. Their intelligence systems flushed out turncoats and traitors, and they ruthlessly exterminated their enemies. Yet Chandler, an HM Customs investigator fluent in Spanish, knew he could only succeed by recruiting local informants, and went out into the field to find them. Within four years he had a network of fifty agents buried deep inside the trafficking organisations. The result was unprecedented. Their intel led to the arrest of hundreds of narcos and to the seizure of 300 tonnes of drugs, worth a staggering $3 billion. Chandler's web disrupted the Bogotá mafia, who controlled the main airport and boasted they could put anything on a plane, from drugs to bombs; penetrated the go-fast crews who raced coke-laden speedboats to the transit station of Jamaica; dismantled the 'rip-on' teams who smuggled through the coastal ports; and identified the so-called motherships, the largest method of bulk transit ever discovered. He faced appalling risks. Treacherous stool pigeons worked for both sides, and some of his Colombian law-enforcement colleagues were abducted, tortured and killed. Chandler too faced a grave threat when the crime lords learned he was responsible for a string of interdictions. Yet he persisted, driven to continue with the greatest series of sustained seizures ever made, until he finally burned out and his tour of duty came to an end. Two of his best sources were subsequently murdered, and his bosses dropped the entire overseas informant programme, with dire consequences. Narco Wars is an unflinching story of danger fear and stress, and of the tradecraft and unsung heroism of the agents and their handlers.

    

    When a new team of hand- picked, investigators, devised a different strategy to crack the genetic code that protected the Unabomber’s anonymity, the first task was to begin blasting away the layers of bureaucratic constraints that had plagued the earlier efforts to retrace the trail of crimes. As the rules broke and the bureaucratic restraints crumbled, the puzzle pieces of earlier bombings that the terrorist left behind were found and the puzzle collapsed around the Unabomber like a deck of cards. This is the story, told in the narrative, by the three FBI Agents who led the chase, of how, they broke the Bureau’s own rules and finally captured the notorious Unabomber who had led the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the longest chase in its century- old history.

    Using thousands of new interviews and recently discovered or declassified documents and tapes, Richard Reeves's President Nixon offers a surprising portrait of a brilliant and contradictory man. Even as he dreamed of presidential greatness, Nixon could trust no one. His closest aides spied on him as he spied on them, while cabinet members, generals, and admirals spied on all of them -- rifling briefcases and desks, tapping each other's phones in a house where no one knew what was true anymore. Reeves shows a presidency doomed from the start by paranoia and corruption, beginning with Nixon and Kissinger using the CIA to cover up a murder by American soldiers in Vietnam that led to the theft and publication of the Pentagon Papers, then to secret counterintelligence units within the White House itself, and finally to the burglaries and cover-up that came to be known as Watergate. President Nixon is the astonishing story of a complex political animal who was as praised as he was reviled and who remains a subject of controversy to this day.

    Love him or hate him, Pierre Trudeau has marked us all. The man whose motto was "reason over passion"managed to arouse in Canadians the fiercest of passions of every hue, ones that even today cloud our view of him and of his place in history. Acclaimed novelist Nino Ricci takes as his starting point the crucial role Trudeau played in the formation of his own sense of identity to look at how Trudeau expanded us as a people, not in spite of his contradictions but because of them.

    These speeches−by kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, freedom fighters and political leaders, dictators and writers−have made a mark in world history. These speeches not only give us an insight into the past, but also inspire us with their demands for equality, cries of freedom, a call to arms, rooting for the cause of the individual or the nation.Learn from the inspirational words of King Charles, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Mohandas K. Gandhi, George Washington, Rabindranath Tagore, Anne Besant, Theodore Roosevelt and Subhas Chandra Bose, among many others.

    Never one to be shy of the spotlight, Dusty broke the mould as the first female entertainer to publicly admit she was bisexual, and was famously deported from South Africa for refusing to play to segregated audiences during apartheid in 1964, just a year after the launch of her solo career. Combining brand-new material, meticulous research and frank interviews with friends, lovers, employees and confidants, journalist Karen Bartlett reveals sensational new details about the soul diva’s unconventional upbringing, tumultuous relationships and unbridled addictions, including a lifelong struggle to come to terms with her sexuality. Named one of the Sunday Times’s best musical biographies of 2014, this is the intimate portrait of an immensely complicated and talented woman – the definitive account of one of music’s most legendary figures.

    Surveys the full history of the American Indians, examining Indian personal, social, religious, and cultural characteristics and conduct, their relationships with whites, and emerging new roles, identities, and goals.

    Had they known what a fickle muse Clio would prove to be, they might have been more anxious. The making of myths and legends, complete with a hagiology and demonology, is inherent in the process of evolution toward nationhood. Consequently, individual actors in the original drama have often been consigned by History to roles they did not actually play, and the most important of them have played shifting roles, being heroes in one generation and villains in the next. It is therefore not surprising that Alexander Hamilton—along with Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison—has had his ups and downs at the hands of historians.

    After the Turner thesis which celebrated the frontier as the source of American freedom and democracy, and the iconoclasm of the new western historians who dismissed the idea of the frontier as merely a mask for conquest and exploitation, David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly take a third approach to the subject. They share with Turner the idea of the westward movement as a creative process of high importance in American history, but they understand it in a different way.Where Turner studied the westward movement in terms of its destination, Fischer and Kelly approach it in terms of its origins. Virginia's long history enables them to provide a rich portrait of migration and expansion as a dynamic process that preserved strong cultural continuities. They suggest that the oxymoron "bound away"--from the folksong Shenandoah--captures a vital truth about American history. As people moved west, they built new societies from old materials, in a double-acting process that made America what is today.Based on an acclaimed exhibition at the Virginia Historical society, the book studies three stages of migration to, within, and from Virginia. Each stage has its own story to tell. All of them together offer an opportunity to study the westward movement through three centuries, as it has rarely been studied before.Fischer and Kelly believe that the westward movement was a broad cultural process, which is best understood not only through the writings of intellectual elites, but also through the physical artifacts and folkways of ordinary people. The wealth of anecdotes and illustrations in this volume offer a new way of looking at John Smith and William Byrd, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Dred Scott, and scores of lesser known gentry, yeomen, servants, and slaves who were all "bound away" to an old new world.

    In this study of a miraculous healing ministry that spanned a half a century you will:Read about the countless thousands who were healed in her presence--often without her ever laying a hand on them.Learn all about her vitality and victory, her tragedies and triumphs, and how she used them all to draw her ever closer to Jesus.Find out how she was able to allow the Holy Spirit to become her best Friend and greatest Teacher--and how you can, too.

    Even though the past two years have witnessed the Red Sox' finally putting an end to the Curse of the Bambino and the White Sox' bringing a championship to the South Side of Chicago for the first time in eighty-seven years, the sad truth is that the 2005 and 2006 seasons may be remembered as much for the league's scandals and blockbuster free-agent signings as they are for historic accomplishments on the field. Something has gone horribly wrong with the game, and according to Schmidt, it's time to do something about it.Clearing the Bases is a much-needed call to arms by one of baseball's most respected players. Drawing on his experiences as a third baseman, a manager, and, most recently, a fan, Schmidt takes on everything from skyrocketing payrolls, callous owners, and unapproachable players to inflated statistics, and, of course, ersatz home run kings. With bold and spirited counsel, Schmidt offers his own prescription for restoring integrity to the game and bringing baseball back, once and for all, to its rightful place.More than just an old-timer's screed against the modern game, however, Clearing the Bases goes beyond the BALCO investigation and never-ending free-agent bonanzas that dominate the back pages. It also examines all that's right -- and what still needs work -- with our national pastime, including interleague play, expansion, and, most surprisingly, better all-around hitters.Riveting, wise, and illuminating, Clearing the Bases is a Hall of Famer's look at how Major League Baseball has lost its way and how it can head back home.