"Lucille Clifton is one of the four or five most authentic and profound living American poets."--Denise Levertov

    A portrayal of the reality behind the rhetoric, her essays also chronicle the consequences of these regimes: The Berlin Wall may have fallen, but ideology cannot be dismantled so quickly, and a lifetime lived in fear cannot be so easily forgotten.Many of the pieces focus on the intense connection Drakulic discovers between material things and the expression of one’s spirit, individuality, and femininity—an inevitable byproduct of a lifestyle that, through its rejection of capitalism and commoditization, ends up fetishizing both. She describes the moment one man was able, for the first time in his life, to eat a banana: He gobbled it down, skin and all, enthralled by its texture. Drakulic herself marvels at finding fresh strawberries in N.Y.C. in December, and the feel of the quality of the paper in an issue of Vogue.As Drakulic delves into the particular hardships facing women—who are not merely the victims of sexism, but of regimes that prevent them from having even the most basic material means by which to express themselves—she describes the desperate lengths to which they would go to find cosmetics or clothes that made them feel feminine in a society where such a feeling was regarded as a bourgeois affectation. There is small room for privacy in communal housing, and the banishment of many time-saving devices, combined with a focus on manual labor, meant women were slaves to domestic responsibility in a way that their Western peers would find unfathomable. From this vantage point, she provides a pointed critique of Western feminism as a movement borne out of privilege.How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed is a compelling, brilliant account of what it was really like to live under Communist rule and its inevitable repercussions.

    Along the way we meet the people who shaped him and shared his journey—a Who’s Who of 20th century spiritual America: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Merton and Pete Seeger.... A valuable master class on faith and life.” — San Francisco Chronicle Book ReviewAs Stephen Hawking is to science; as Peter Drucker is to economics; and as Joseph Campbell is to mythology; so Huston Smith is to religion. Tales of Wonder is the personal story of the author of the classic The World’s Religions, the man who taught a nation about the great faiths of the world, and his fascinating encounters with the people who helped shape the 20th century.

    "What the ice gets," replied Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition's unflappable leader, "the ice keeps." It did not, however, get the ship's twenty-five crew members, all of whom survived an eight-hundred-mile voyage across sea, land, and ice to South Georgia, the nearest inhabited island. First published in 1931, Endurance tells the full story of that doomed 1914-16 expedition and incredible rescue, as well as relating Worsley's further adventures fighting U-boats in the Great War, sailing the equally treacherous waters of the Arctic, and making one final (and successful) assault on the South Pole with Shackleton. It is a tale of unrelenting high adventure and a tribute to one of the most inspiring and courageous leaders of men in the history of exploration.

    Her gaze swoops vertiginously too; from a countryside of cells beneath a hospital microscope, to killer whales rounding a headland, to the constellations of satellites that belie our sense of the remote. Written with her hallmark precision and delicacy, and marked by moments in her own life, Sightlines offers a rare invitation to pause and to pay heed to our surroundings.

    House of Representatives for fifty-nine consecutive years, from December 13, 1955 to January 3, 2015—the longest tenure of anyone in Congressional history. The son of a Congressman, Dingell worked in his father’s office from childhood and became a house page in 1938, when he was just eleven years old. Retiring from Congress at eighty-nine, he has witnessed some of the most significant events that have shaped our nation and the world.In The Dean, Dingell looks back at his life at the center of American government and considers the currents that have reshaped our Congress and America itself, from his childhood memories of wartime Washington during the FDR administration, through the Reagan Revolution, to the election of the first black president, Barack Obama.Rife with a wisdom that literally only Dingell can possess, The Dean is the inspiring story of some of the greatest congressional achievements, of which Dingell was an integral part, and of the tough fights that made them possible. Dingell offers a persuasive defense for government, explaining how it once worked honorably and well—in defeating Hitler, sending us to the moon, ending segregation, and providing for the common good of all our citizens. He argues that to secure our future and continue our progress, we must work together once again—lessons desperately needed today.

    Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her parents divorced, leaving her a lonely only child ferrying between two worlds that only seemed to grow further apart, Rebecca was no longer sure what she represented. In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define herself as a soul instead of a symbol—and offers a new look at the challenge of personal identity, in a story at once strikingly unique and truly universal.

    In search of new Arctic hunting grounds, Albanov's ship, the Saint Anna, was frozen fast in the pack ice of the treacherous Kara Sea-a misfortune grievously compounded by an incompetent commander, the absence of crucial nautical charts, insufficient fuel, and inadequate provisions that left the crew weak and debilitated by scurvy.For nearly a year and a half, the twenty-five men and one woman aboard the Saint Anna endured terrible hardships and danger as the icebound ship drifted helplessly north. Convinced that the Saint Anna would never free herself from the ice, Albanov and thirteen crewmen left the ship in January 1914, hauling makeshift sledges and kayaks behind them across the frozen sea, hoping to reach the distant coast of Franz Josef Land. With only a shockingly inaccurate map to guide him, Albanov led his men on a 235-mile journey of continuous peril, enduring blizzards, disintegrating ice floes, attacks by polar bears and walrus, starvation, sickness, snowblindness, and mutiny. That any of the team survived is a wonder. That Albanov kept a diary of his ninety-day ordeal-a story that Jon Krakauer calls an "astounding, utterly compelling book," and David Roberts calls "as lean and taut as a good thriller"-is nearly miraculous.First published in Russia in 1917, Albanov's narrative is here translated into English for the first time. Haunting, suspenseful, and told with gripping detail, In the Land of White Death can now rightfully take its place among the classic writings of Nansen, Scott, Cherry-Garrard, and Shackleton.

    Publisher's NoteIntroductionTranslator-Editor's NoteEarly CareerParty work in MoscowThe terror Return to the UkrainePrelude to the war The great patriotic warFamine in the Ukraine Stalin's last years Succession The fraternal countriesThe Korean War Burying the hatchet with TitoThe Geneva SummitVisit to London Restoring order in Hungary Nasser, Suez & the Aswan Dam The Berlin crises Mao Tse-tung & the schismHo Chi Minh & the war in Vietnam Fidel Castro & the Caribbean crisisDefending the socialist paradiseAppendicesIndex

    Originally published in 1906, the book captures Eager’s years as governess to the four daughters of the Emperor and Empress Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna: the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia. All of whom would be executed during the Russian civil war just over a decade later.This first-person account provides a fascinating insight into what was everyday life for the Romanov family. From religious celebrations and family illness to assassination attempts and life during the war; Eager’s central role gained her access to some of the family’s most precious and testing times. In addition to documenting the time spent with her royal employers, Eager also reveals intriguing aspects of Russian society as whole. Through a series of anecdotal references she includes recollections of her time in Russia regarding such things as the tough life of the peasantry, criminal activity and even the national post service.This classic, written from the unsuspecting eyes of a foreign nanny, shows early twentieth century Russia and the last Russian royal family like you’ve never seen before. Margaret Eager (1863-1936) left the Russia in 1904 and returned to Ireland where she received a pension from the Russian government for her time as a nurse. She kept in contact with the family she had known so well right up to their brutal deaths in 1918. Eager’s family stated that she never fully recovered from the news.Albion Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

    They wanted to escape civilization & live strictly according to nature. Without medical supplies, they came within inches of losing their lives, but they also found the serenity they were seeking. They built a bamboo cabin & lived off the land, struggling against myriad diseases. They lived to tell of hazardous inter-island voyages, their idyllic month-long stay with the last surviving Polynesian cannibal, their mixed relations with the islanders, their failures & successes in an entirely natural world. Fatu-Hiva was a turning point in Heyerdahl's life. It was there that he began to pick up a trail that would lead to the Kon-Tiki expedition. Ancient stone figures, the presence of such flora as the pineapple & local legends all pointed to an early migration from South America. At the time, this theory was considered outrageous. Heyerdahl would later prove it not only possible, but likely.List of IllustrationsFarewell to CivilizationBack to NatureWhite Men, Dark ShadowsExodusTabooOcean EscapeOn HivaoaIsland of Ill OmenIn the Cannibal ValleyCave DwellersIndex

    ‘Why you not stay with me tonight—in my cave.’ He seemed enthusiastic. And we were looking for adventure." Thus begins the story of how Marguerite van Geldermalsen—a New Zealand-born nurse—became the wife of Mohammad Abdallah Othman, a Bedouin souvenir-seller of the Manaja tribe, and lived with him and their children in a community of 100 families in the ancient caves of Petra in Jordan. Marguerite and a friend were traveling through the Middle East in 1978 when she met the charismatic Mohammad and decided that he was the man for her. Their home was a lofty 2,000 year-old cave carved into the red rock of a hillside. She became the resident nurse and learned to live like the Bedouin—cooking over fires, hauling water on donkeys, and drinking sweet black tea—and over the years she became as much of a curiosity as the cave-dwellers to tourists. This is her extraordinary story.

    All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” From these fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist and professor of ecology J. Drew Lanham.Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.”By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a remarkable meditation on nature and belonging, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today.

    Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country—and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, “a broken heart . . . A one-hundred-year-old relationship.”Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on America’s place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation—a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.

    Drawing from the private archives of the poet's estate and numerous interviews, Alexis De Veaux demystifies Lorde's iconic status, charting her conservative childhood in Harlem; her early marriage to a white, gay man with whom she had two children; her emergence as an outspoken black feminist lesbian; and her canonization as a seminal poet of American literature.