Possessed of great warmth, wit and, above all a humanity which informs every word in this extraordinary account of Jersey life during the German Occupation, he served the island community with unfailing resourcefulness and not a little courage for five long and stressful years. However, despite the awfulness of the time, Dr Lewis infuses his account of it with an irrepressible joie de vivre which is utterly delightful. It is an uplifting story of winning against the odds, by turns hysterically funny and then unbearably sad. Above all it has an immediacy which takes the reader right into the heart of the Occupation, you can smell the fear, feel the pain, suffer the loss, sense the victory as do the characters in this history and they are many and varied. You will meet the good Jersey folk like the brave and tragic Mrs Gould from St Ouens and the not so good Jersey folk in the shape of the collaborators and informers or the “Jerry bags” like the exotic Ginger Lou. Here too you will meet some of the most wretched victims of the war, the Russian Todt workers who were hidden and helped by the locals and of course the many sorts of Germans who made up the occupying force. It is a story of compelling interest.I had the good fortune to meet John Lewis and his wife in 1991 at his lovely Jersey home. He talked for hours that seemed like minutes of his life during the war years. He was just as I’d hoped he would be - endlessly kind, witty and understanding. I came away from that meeting feeling happy, elated and much wiser, as you will surely do after reading of the Doctor’s Occupation. John Nettles

    This compilation includes A Country Doctor, The Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, and Metamorphosis.

    He first saw conflict on Crete in May 1941, during the only large-scale parachute invasion in wartime history. Just four days later, Bill was wounded and eventually captured.Twice he tried to escape his internment — with horrific consequences. He suffered greatly but found courageous support from his fellow prisoners.His new wife Myra and his large family thought he was dead until news of his capture finally reached them.Back home, Myra too was a prisoner of sorts, with her own secrets. Then, fifty years after the war, unhealed wounds unexpectedly opened for Bill and Myra, testing them once again.Private Bill is a classic heart-warming story — as told by their son — of how a loving couple prevailed over the adversities of war to live an extraordinarily ordinary, happy life.

    Based on more than three decades of practical Bible teaching, these readings draw from the riches of God's Word and the compelling experiences of Mr. Carter's own life. Whether through fascinating glimpses into behind-the-scenes activity at the White House, or insightful remembrances of his career in the U.S. Navy, Mr. Carter never ceases to connect the wisdom of Scripture with your own crucial place on the stage of life. Frank, honest, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, and always relevant, Through the Year with Jimmy Carter challenges readers to be more Christ-like every day of their lives.

    

    Whether fictionalizing his dramatic exploits as a Royal Air Force pilot during World War II or concocting the ingeniously plotted fables that were dramatized on television as Tales of the Unexpected, Dahl was brilliant at provoking in his readers the overwhelming desire to know what happens next—and at satisfying that desire in ways that feel both surprising and inevitable.In this collection:-A Fine Son-Death of an Old Man-Parson’s Pleasure-Poison-The Hitch-Hiker-The Wish-Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat-Dip in the Pool-The Landlady-Skin-Lamb to the Slaughter-Man from the South-The Way Up to Heavan-The Umbrella Man-Taste-The Swan-William and MaryFilled with devilish plot twists, his tales display a tantalizing blend of macabre humor and the absurdly grotesque. Dahl’s creations amuse and shock us in equal measure, gleefully reminding us of what might lurk beneath the surface of the ordinary.

    The daughter of a beloved local football coach, her seemingly senseless murder sparked intense scrutiny that lingers today. Award-winning author Blaine Pardoe and his daughter, Victoria Hester, crack open three decades of material on this mysterious tragedy, exposing dark secrets and political in-fighting that tore at the Battle Creek legal system for years. Compiled from documents, videos and interviews, this book presents the facts and clues of the case to the public for the first time.

    This book looks afresh at the conflict in Northern Africa, focusing for the first time on the involvement of the US and the way this early collaboration to defeat shaped the whole Anglo-American axis for the rest of the war in Europe.

    D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, he was stalked by besotted fans, would-be biographers, and pushy journalists. In this collection of rare and revealing encounters with the elusive literary giant, Salinger discusses sometimes willingly, sometimes grudgingly what that onslaught was like, the autobiographical origins of his art, and his advice to writers. Including his final, surprising interview, and with an insightful introduction by New York Times journalist David Streitfeld, these enlightening, provocative, and even amusing conversations reveal a writer fiercely resistant to the spotlight but powerless to escape its glare."

    The Bletchley Park Trust has embarked on a plan to transform the previously ramshackle and poorly organized site, restoring the historic huts and creating a multi-million pound visitors' center which will open in June. One hundred and fifty thousand people visit Bletchley Park every year and it is estimated that the new museum will increase this number to a quarter of a million.Amid all this enthusiasm and interest, one major area of Bletchley Park has so far received less focus than it deserves. At the peak of Bletchley's success, a total of twelve thousand people worked there of whom nine thousand were women. Their roles ranged from some of the leading codebreakers, cracking German messages that others could not break, through the debutantes who chauffeured the codebreakers to and from work, to women like Baroness Trumpington who were employed as filing clerks, to the mass of girls from ordinary working families who operated machines or listed endless streams of figures, largely unaware of the major impact their work was having on the war.The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories tells the stories of these women, how they came to be there, the lives they gave up to do 'their bit' for the war effort, and the part they played in the vital work of 'Station X'. The central protagonists are a Debutante who was an indexer in the Naval Section alongside Baroness Trumpington; a Student of German literature who broke off her studies at the age of nineteen to go to Bletchley and went on to become one of Britain's leading code breakers; a Foreign Office Clerk who was the personal assistant to the head of Bletchley Park; a Wren who worked on the 'Bombes', the incredible machine designed by Alan Turing which helped break the Enigma ciphers; a Stripper, one of the women who worked on the Japanese codes, writing out endless streams of numbers to assist in stripping off the ciphers; and a Teleprinter Operator who has never seen her work as being as important as that of the 'real people' who worked at 'Station X', even though like all these women she was an essential cog in a very large machine and without her and her colleagues the code breakers' intelligence would never have reached the commanders who used it to help to win the war.They are an incredible set of women, and this is their story.

    Although SAS activity has been extensively documented, the SBS has remained in the state it prefers - a shadowy silhouette, with identities protected and missions kept from public view. Formed during the Second World War, when they took part in many daring raids (one of which was filmed as The Cockleshell Heroes), they were active in the jungle campaigns in the Far East, in the Falklands, the Gulf War and Bosnia. Since this seminal book was published in 1997, John Parker has been privy to much more inside information about the SBS's original operations and he brings the book right up to date with accounts of their exploits in East Timor, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo and most recently in Iraq.

    It is more musical than verbal, and it is the characteristic signature of a person, of a soul.” “[Raymond Chandler] did not write about crime or detection. He wrote about the corruption of the human spirit.”—George V. Higgins   Raymond Chandler never wrote a memoir or autobiography. The closest he came to writing either was in—and around—his novels, shorts stories, and letters. There have been books that describe and evaluate Chandler’s life, but to find out what he himself felt about his life and work, Barry Day, editor of The Letters of Noël Coward (“There is much to dazzle here in just the way we expect . . . the book is meticulous, artfully structured—splendid” —Daniel Mendelsohn; The New York Review of Books), has cannily, deftly chosen from Chandler’s writing, as well as the many interviews he gave over the years as he achieved cult status, to weave together an illuminating narrative that reveals the man, the work, the worlds he created. Using Chandler’s own words as well as Day’s text, here is the life of “the man with no home,” a man precariously balanced between his classical English education with its immutable values and that of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War, and the changing vernacular of the cultural psyche that resulted. Chandler makes clear what it is to be a writer, and in particular what it is to be a writer of “hardboiled” fiction in what was for him “another language.” Along the way, he discusses the work of his contemporaries: Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, W. Somerset Maugham, and others (“I wish,” said Chandler, “I had one of those facile plotting brains, like Erle Gardner”). Here is Chandler’s Los Angeles (“There is a touch of the desert about everything in California,” he said, “and about the minds of the people who live here”), a city he adopted and that adopted him in the post-World War I period . . . Here is his Hollywood (“Anyone who doesn’t like Hollywood,” he said, “is either crazy or sober”) . . . He recounts his own (rocky) experiences working in the town with Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and others. . .We see Chandler’s alter ego, Philip Marlowe, private eye, the incorruptible knight with little armor who walks the “mean streets” in a world not made for knights (“If I had ever an opportunity of selecting the movie actor who would best represent Marlowe to my mind, I think it would have been Cary Grant.”) . . . Here is Chandler on drinking (his life in the end was in a race with alcohol—and loneliness) .  .  . and here are Chandler’s women—the Little Sisters, the “dames” in his fiction, and in his life (on writing The Long Goodbye, Chandler said, “I watched my wife die by half inches and I wrote the best book in my agony of that knowledge . . . I was as hollow as the places between the stars.” After her death Chandler led what he called a “posthumous life” writing fiction, but more often than not, his writing life was made up of letters written to women he barely knew.) Interwoven throughout the text are more than one hundred pictures that reveal the psyche and world of Raymond Chandler. “I have lived my whole life on the edge of nothing,” he wrote.  In his own words, and with Barry Day’s commentary, we see the shape this took and the way it informed the man and his extraordinary work.

    Louis suburb and starts a devastating chain reaction. But the disabled power grid was only the beginning of a national nightmare as their vehicles and cell phones won’t function either. A series of building explosions rock downtown, leading to a mandatory evacuation. Amid the chaos, the young couple must make a decision on where to go. A possible solution emerges when a self-proclaimed survivalist offers them refuge in his remote cabin far from the city and away from the chaos. But James and Marla soon discover that survival isn’t as clear as they think, and that escape can lead to dangers all its own.

    But who would have thought that the slim and pale looking boy would become one of the most successful fighter pilots of the war? Almost unknown outside the RAF, Sgt. Pilot J.H. Lacey shot down more enemy aircraft in the Battle of Britain than any other fighter pilot. He shot down the Heinkel 111 which had just bombed Buckingham Palace and had the highest score (twenty-three) of enemy aircraft destroyed, as late as 1941. Thereafter commissioned, early in 1941, he was for a time an instructor at an operational training unit, passing on to others the knowledge that he had won in the toughest series of air battles ever fought. Returning to operations, he served under another fabulous air fighter, ‘Paddy’ Finucane; then was posted to rocket (airborne weapons) development, a task almost as dangerous as combat flying. Later he commanded a famous fighter squadron in the Far East. and shot down the first Japanese he encountered. Unorthodox, autocratic in his command but resentful of unreasonable interference from those above him, Ginger Lacey was a boyish-looking figure with a fantastic gift for leadership, and sharp eyes, bravery and an innate sense of timing. He died in 1989, but his amazing story was recorded by an experienced writer who was a fellow officer in the RAF until 1951 and knew him well. It is a memorable and stirring biography. ‘The best all action war story yet produced.’ - Yorkshire Post ‘A top-scoring story.’ - Evening Standard ‘Fast-moving biography.’ - Sunday Times ‘The best biography of a fighter pilot ever written.’ - Yorkshire Evening Post Richard Townsend Bickers volunteered for the RAF on the outbreak of the second world war and served, with a Permanent Commission, for eighteen years. He wrote a range of military fiction and non-fiction books, including ‘Torpedo Attack’, ‘My Enemy Came Nigh’, ‘Bombing Run’, ‘Fighters Up’ and ‘Summer of No Surrender’. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.

    In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Dirk finds himself on the trail of a gruesome murderer who is somehow involved with the works of Coleridge, quantum physics, and the enigmatic study of the Cambridge Professor of Chronology. Ultimately, the stakes of the case are far greater than a single murder, but go to the fate of life on Earth. Confused? Don't be - everything is connected.