With 16 pages of illustrations and 3 maps.One of the greatest non-fiction books I've ever read . . . Hughes brings us an entire world. --Los Angeles Times

    It was "the perfect storm"--a tempest that may happen only once in a century--a nor'easter created by so rare a combination of factors that it could not possibly have been worse. Creating waves ten stories high and winds of 120 miles an hour, the storm whipped the sea to inconceivable levels few people on Earth have ever witnessed. Few, except the six-man crew of the Andrea Gail, a commercial fishing boat tragically headed towards its hellish center.

    The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Many years later, after returning to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir that has become, in the words of author and journalist Roy MacGregor, "an undiscovered Canadian classic."Reluctant Pioneer provides a brooding sense of adventure and un- sentimental realism to deliver a powerful account of pioneer life where tragedies arrive as naturally as rain and where humour resides in irony.

    Their globe-spanning travels and side-splitting adventures are recounted in Blown Away, a sort of Swiss Family Robinson by way of the Marx Brothers.

    Best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin illustrates how American colonists at first supported these outrageous pirates in an early display of solidarity against the Crown, and then violently opposed them. Through engrossing episodes of roguish glamour and extreme brutality, Dolin depicts the star pirates of this period, among them towering Blackbeard, ill-fated Captain Kidd, and sadistic Edward Low, who delighted in torturing his prey. Also brilliantly detailed are the pirates’ manifold enemies, including colonial governor John Winthrop, evangelist Cotton Mather, and young Benjamin Franklin. Upending popular misconceptions and cartoonish stereotypes, Dolin provides this wholly original account of the seafaring outlaws whose raids reflect the precarious nature of American colonial life.

    Everest. This intimate and inspiring book tells the full story of Sir Edmund Hillary's extraordinary life, from his expeditions to remote corners of the world to his humanitarian activities serving the Sherpa people. Drawing on Sir Ed's personal archives, it is a portrait of a revered yet modest man who lived life to the full—surviving personal tragedies as well as achieving historic triumphs, earning worldwide fame and displaying tireless philanthropy. Ranging from the roof of the world to the frozen extremes of the South Pole, Sir Edmund Hillary: An Extraordinary Life is a fitting and revealing tribute to a great man.

    What he lacked in experience and expertise, he made up for in enthusiasm. Or so he hoped.When the family arrived on a lonely hill in northern New South Wales, they had no electricity, no running water, no telephone and no choice but to make that tangle of bush their home. From Angela Wales, eldest of the five kids, comes this extraordinarily vivid and evocative account of the next ten years as they tried to tame six thousand acres and navigate the challenges of country life.Filled with drama and hilarity, joy and back-breaking toil, Barefoot in the Bindis portrays a childhood spent in the bush, and is a sensational picture of Australia past.

    Though he never left Italy, his inventions and discoveries were heralded around the world. Most sensationally, his telescopes allowed him to reveal a new reality in the heavens and to reinforce the astounding argument that the Earth moves around the Sun. For this belief, he was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy, and forced to spend his last years under house arrest. Of Galileo's three illegitimate children, the eldest best mirrored his own brilliance, industry, and sensibility, and by virtue of these qualities became his confidante. Born Virginia in 1600, she was thirteen when Galileo placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Her loving support, which Galileo repaid in kind, proved to be her father's greatest source of strength throughout his most productive and tumultuous years. Her presence, through letters which Sobel has translated from their original Italian and masterfully woven into the narrative, graces her father's life now as it did then. Galileo's Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion. Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was being overturned. In that same time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, one man sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope. With all the human drama and scientific adventure that distinguished Longitude, Galileo's Daughter is an unforgettable story.

    Soon after, winter had begun, they were blown off course by polar storms, the ship became imprisoned in ice, and the expedition was abandoned by its leader. Hundreds of miles from civilization, the castaways had no choice but to find solid ground as they struggled against starvation, snow blindness, disease, exposure--and each other. After almost twelve months battling the elements, twelve survivors were rescued, thanks to the heroic efforts of their captain, Bartlett, the Ice Master, who traveled by foot across the ice and through Siberia to find help. Drawing on the diaries of those who were rescued and those who perished, Jennifer Niven re-creates with astonishing accuracy the ill-fated journey and the crews desperate attempts to find a way home.

    Both are newly-weds; Dulcie has a baby girl and Fran is expecting a baby. But there the similarities end.Fran is a Detroit city girl enjoying modern conveniences. Dulcie is a pineapple farmer’s wife enduring the extremes of Australia. Bushfires, floods, cyclones, droughts, dingo attacks and accidents are all too common. Regardless, Dulcie’s optimism shines through, revealing her love of the land and fascination for the wild creatures that share her corner of Queensland.Each book purchased will help support Careflight, an Australian aero-medical charity that attends emergencies, however remote.

    Purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking the Allies were planning to attack Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed & the Allies ultimately chose. Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 & the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu were very different. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. A perfect team, they created an ingenious plan: equip a corpse with secret (but false) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would hopefully take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (007's creator). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis & help bring victory.Filled with spies, double agents, rogues, heroes & a corpse, the story of Operation Mincemeat reads like an international thriller. Unveiling never-before-released material, Macintyre goes into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles & spies, & the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness & yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley & Montagu & their improbable feats into an adventure that saved thousands & paved the way for the conquest of Sicily.

    

    But much about the real-life woman and her family was left untold.Here, Baroness Maria Augusta Trapp tells in her own beautiful, simple words the extraordinary story of her romance with the baron, their escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, and their life in America.Now with photographs from the original edition.

    They plotted. They schemed. They unleashed chaos.Australia lost two prime ministers in three years in a period of political bloodshed that took the nation's government to the brink of collapse - until an extraordinary election changed everything.Venom is the secret history of the brutal power play to lead the government. It sheds new light on the fall of Tony Abbott, the rise of Malcolm Turnbull and the electrifying leadership spill that brought parliament to a halt in August 2018. In a day-by-day account, it reveals the strategy Scott Morrison used to defeat his opponents and claim ultimate authority.David Crowe reported these events for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age as they unfolded. Using more than one hundred interviews with the participants, he tells an epic story of revenge, hatred and the ruthless pursuit of power. And he asks whether the future holds any peace when the past is so full of poison.PRAISE'David Crowe is both wise guide and sage interpreter in this gripping journey through the angry years of Australian politics' Chris Uhlmann'David Crowe writes with precision and clarity - dissecting the characters, deep rivalries and ideological wars that churned through three Liberal Prime Ministers' Patricia Karvelas'A compelling read about a time of Liberal madness' Michelle Grattan'Crowe's book is as good a piece of modern political history as you'll find. It has some failings' Dennis Atkins, The Australian'... a 21st-century contribution to the [revenge tragedy] genre' Jeff Sparrow, Sydney Morning Herald / The Age

    After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until now, the full story of what happened, what it tells us about human nature and about America's westward expansion, remained shrouded in myth.Drawing on fresh archaeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband, a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. But Rarick resists both the gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner party as well as later attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. The Donner Party, Rarick writes, is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity.A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, A Desperate Hope casts new light on one of America's most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.