Crushed: An Amazing True Story of Determination and Survival


Kathryn Mann - 2013
    Crushed and left with broken ribs, a punctured lung, and compression fractures in his chest, spine, and pelvis, Bob pushed his arms forward, dug his fingers into the freezing mud and dragged his mostly paralyzed body forward. Saturated to the skin in freezing rain, far from help, and with the night fast approaching, Bob refused to give up.This includes photographs, documentation, and inspirational verses.This amazing true story was featured on the It's a Miracle series hosted by Richard Thomas. It aired on PAX Television as Chain Reaction in 1999.

Hugh Glass


Bruce Bradley - 2015
     BOOK EXCERPT: By the time Hugh Glass reached Fort Tilton it was well into November. A foot of snow lay across the countryside. Fort Tilton was a small fort that belonged to the Columbia Fur Company. It had been built by William P. Tilton and boasted a garrison of only five men. As it sat near the site of another Mandan village, the Mandans who escorted Hugh dropped him off, then immediately went to visit their cousins. Hugh went to see Tilton, where he learned right away that any hopes of finding a boat to continue his journey were in vain. “Mr. Glass,” Tilton told Hugh, “I’d like to help you but I can’t. I’ve got five men here, besides myself. I can’t spare any of them. We’re under danger of attack here night and day by the Arikaras. I need every man I have to keep them away. Even if I could spare anyone, I doubt they would go. We’re watched constantly. I had one man who left the fort for only a few minutes. From out of nowhere, that devil Stanapat rode up and killed him, practically on our doorstep. If you hadn’t had the Mandans escorting you, don’t think for a moment that you would have made it in here. Those damn Arikaras would have gotten you before you even came within sight of the fort.” Disappointed, Hugh exhaled heavily. “Stanapat,” he said ruefully. “—The Little Hawk With The Bloody Hand…” Tilton looked at him. “You speak Arikara?” he asked Hugh. “Pawnee,” Hugh said absently. “The two languages are almost identical.” Tilton continued to stare at him. Slowly, a look of dread came over his features. “Oh no,” Tilton said. “Oh, Christ, I should have known by your scars—you’re the one the Indians call White Bear.” Hugh gave him a puzzled look. “How did you know?” “Mister, you’re the talk of the plains. BIG medicine. Went one on one with a grizzly, left for dead by two white men and still managed to crawl to Fort Kiowa. The Arikaras have tried to kill you and can’t, that’s what they say. Oh, I know all about you. So does every tribe from here to the Rockies. As soon as Stanapat finds out you’re here—and he will—he’ll tear this place down to get to you. New travels real fast in these parts, mister, and the news here is that the Arikaras want you real bad!” PRAISE FOR "HUGH GLASS" by Bruce Bradley-- "--The kind of book you hate to put down!" Fraser Whitbread - Muzzle Blasts Magazine "This recent book by Bruce Bradley is a great read and should be added to the library of those who have interest in the (Fur Trade) period or are an over-all student of early American History." - On the Trail Magazine "A very readable telling of an amazing story!" —Bob Griffith-Amazon.com

North To South: A man, a bear and a bicycle


James Brooman - 2014
    He was a guy who rarely cycled or had an adventure, a guy who was scared of the fairground rides as a child. But one day he changed; he became a guy with a quest. Armed with a bicycle, a toy bear and some optimism he flew to the north of Alaska and for the next two years rode it to the southern tip of South America in Argentina. This is his tale.

The Names of My Mothers


Dianne Sanders Riordan - 2013
    In 1942 Elizabeth Bynam Sanders was a young woman who left home under false pretenses and travelled to Our Lady of Victory, a home for unwed mothers in upstate New York. Shortly after surrendering her daughter for adoption, she returned to her life in Johnston County, North Carolina. She never married and never had another child of her own. This powerful and moving memoir speaks of the profound need for connection. It is a story about identity, the hunger we feel for a sense of belonging and the ineffable significance of blood.

Call Me Sister: District Nursing Tales from the Swinging Sixties


Jane Yeadon - 2013
    Staff nursing in a ward where she's challenged by an inventory driven ward sister, she reckons it's time to swap such trivialities for life as a district nurse.Independent thinking is one thing, but Jane's about to find that the drama on district can demand instant reaction; and without hospital back up, she's usually the one having to provide it. She meets a rich cast of patients all determined to follow their own individual star, and goes to Edinburgh where Queen Victoria's Jubilee Institute's nurse training is considered the cr me de la cr me of the district nursing world.Call Me Sister recalls Jane's challenging and often hilarious route to realizing her own particular dream.

Killer Children: Horrifying True Stories of Kids Who Kill (Killer Kids Book 1)


Danielle Tyning - 2020
    Names like Bundy, Gacy, and Gein come to mind, alongside the many other murderous people out there who've gained notoriety because of their evil. When you're envisioning the unthinkable and heinous acts that are carried out in this world, it's unlikely you imagine a youngster as being a perpetrator of evil.Killer children, although rare, do exist. The thought alone is terrifying; we see children as being vulnerable and pure, which makes it harder to comprehend them wanting to inflict pain and suffering on another being. The correlation of a child and unthinkable acts of murder is undeniably tricky to compute.The children in this book carried out acts of savage murder - even just typing that sentence feels wrong. Some of these murders are sexually motivated; some are carried out for revenge; others are part of an occult ritual. Regardless of the motivation for these children to commit unspeakable acts of cruelty, they are all disturbing.This book was written to give you some food for thought, to allow you to digest some of the heinous crimes committed by youngsters and consider why they'd carry out such horrific acts. This book will open up a world of questions, many of which I've likely pondered upon myself. While I do offer up my own opinion throughout this book, I do need to (as much as possible) stick to the facts to let you make your own mind up.With that in mind, let's delve into some of the despicably horrific murders that were carried out by children.

Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior


Mark Rathbun - 2013
    This autobiographical history of Scientology is told by one of L. Ron Hubbard’s staunchest defenders.

Sikhs: The Untold Agony Of 1984


Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay - 2015
    She claimed the police had inserted a stick inside her… Swaranpreet realised that she had been cruelly violated; He spoke a single sentence but repeated it twice in chaste Punjabi: ‘Please give me a turban? I want nothing else…’ These are voices begging for deliverance in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in October-November 1984 in which 2,733 Sikhs were killed, burnt and exterminated by lumpens in the country. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay walks us through one of the most shameful episodes of sectarian violence in post Independent India and highlights the apathy of subsequent governments towards Sikhs who paid a price for what was clearly a state-sponsored riot. Poignant, raw and most importantly, macabre, the personal histories in the book reveal how even after three decades, a community continues to battle for its identity in its own country.

CLOUGH GOLD


Dave Armitage - 2014
    Ex-players, close friends, journalists, managers and former colleagues reveal their astonishing brushes with the greatest football manager England never had. The stories are cherry-picked from two acclaimed books - 150BC: Cloughie the Inside Stories and Clough: Confidential. An additional 242 stories can be found in these two volumes. So, enter the whirlwind world of Old Big 'Ead and prepare to be entertained.

Sacred Summits


Peter Boardman - 1982
    In one climbing year Peter Boardman visited three very different sacred mountains. He began in the New Year, on the South Face of the Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea. This shark's fin of steep limestone walls and sweeping glaciers is the highest point between the Andes and the Himalaya, and one of the most inaccessible, rising above thick jungle inhabited by warring Stone Age tribes. During the spring Boardman was on more familiar, if hardly more reassuring, ground, making a four-man, oxygen-free attempt on the world's third highest peak, Kangchenjunga. Hurricane-force winds beat back their first two bids on the unclimbed North Ridge, but they eventually stood within feet of the summit - leaving the final few yards untrodden in deference to the inhabiting deity. In October, he was back in the Himalaya and climbing the mountain most sacred to the Sherpas: the twin-summited Gauri Sankar. Renowned for its technical difficulty and spectacular profile, it is aptly dubbed the Eiger of the Himalaya and Boardman's first ascent of the South Summit took a committing and gruelling twenty-three days. Three sacred mountains, three very different expeditions, all superbly captured by Boardman in Sacred Summits, his second book, first published shortly after his death in 1982. Combining the excitement of extreme climbing with acute observation of life in the mountains, this is an amusing, dramatic, poignant and thought-provoking book, amply fulfilling the promise of Boardman's first title, The Shining Mountain, for which he won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in 1979. Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker died on Everest in 1982, whilst attempting a new and unclimbed line. Both men were superb mountaineers and talented writers. Their literary legacy lives on through the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, established by family and friends in 1983 and presented annually to the author or co-authors of an original work which has made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature. For more information about the Boardman Tasker Prize, visit: www.boardmantasker.com

Tragedies of Cañon Blanco: A Story of the Texas Panhandle (1919)


Robert Goldthwaite Carter - 1919
    Carter would participate in a number of expeditions against the Comanche and other tribes in the Texas-area. It was during one of these campaigns that he was brevetted first lieutenant and awarded the Medal of Honor for his "most distinguished gallantry" against the Comanche in Blanco Canyon on a tributary of the Brazos River on October 10, 1871. He became a successful author in his later years writing several books based on his military career, including On the Border with Mackenzie (1935), as well as a series of booklets detailing his years as an Indian fighter on the Texas frontier. Carter writes: "IT IS nearly fifty years since these tragedies occurred. There are few survivors. The writer is, perhaps, the only one. This is written in the vague hope that this chronicle of the events of that period may possibly prove of some lasting and, perhaps, historical value to posterity. "The country all about the scene of these tragical events—the Texas Panhandle—was then wild, unsettled, covered with sage brush, scrub oak and chaparral, and its only inhabitants were Indians, buffalo, lobo wolves, coyotes, jack-rabbits, prairie-dogs and rattlesnakes, with here and there a few scattered herds of antelope. The railroad, that great civilizing agency, the telegraph, the telephone, and the many other marvelous inventions of man, have wrought such a wonderful transformation in our great western country that the American Indian will, if he has not already, become a race of the past, and history alone will record the remarkable deeds and strange career of an almost extinct people. With these miraculous changes has come the total extermination of the buffalo—the Indians' migratory companion and source of living—and pretty much all of the wild game that in almost countless numbers freely roamed those vast prairies. Where now the railroads girdle that country the nomadic redman lived his free and careless life and the bison thrived and roamed undisturbed at that period— where are now the appliances of modern civilization, and prosperous communities, then nothing but desolation reigned for many miles around. "In the expansion and peopling of this vast country, our little Army was most closely identified. In fact, it was the pioneer of civilization. The life was full of danger, hardships, privations, and sacrifices, little known or appreciated by the present generation. "Where populous towns, ranches and well-tilled farms, grain fields, orchards, and oil "gushers" are now located, with railroads either running through or near them, we were making trails, upon which the main roads now run, in search of hostile savages, for the purpose of punishing them or compelling them to go into the Indian reservations, and to permit the settlers, then held back by the murderous acts of these redskins, to advance and spread the civilization of the white man throughout the western tiers of counties in that far-off western panhandle of Texas."

The Wright Brothers: by David McCullough | Summary & Analysis


aBookaDay - 2015
    The Wright Brothers is an historical narrative that draws on extensive archival materials, personal journals, and public records to tell the story of the Wright brothers as men of incredible character and determination along the road towards their significant contributions to aviation history. The summary parallels the structure of the book which is divided into three parts. The first part explores the period of the boys’ childhood through their work on flight testing various models of gliders. The second part picks up with the addition of the engine to the Wright planes and traces the brother’s work through the early stages of powered flight, roughly 1903 to 1908. Part three follows the brothers, now globally famous, through the years when they captured the most attention for their accomplishments. A central aspect of this historical account is the development of Orville and Wilbur Wright as individuals who showed fierce determination in the face of relentless setbacks. It also sheds light on their private nature and their deep bond as brothers. McCullough is a two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for other historical works, Truman and John Adams. He also won the National Book Award twice and is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His educational background includes a degree in English Literature from Yale University. He is also a well-known narrator, as well as previous host of American Experience. Read more....

Stanley's Coat


Peedie William - 2015
    I lived through and beyond horrific child abuse. This book tells of my brutal beginnings, starting when I was only four years old when my mother went in to hospital to have baby number three. My clothing was stripped off by my father, who hung me upside down naked on a hook on the inside of a cupboard door by the ankles. He beat me with his huge hands, then only took me down once I stopped screaming. He then plunged me into a pre prepared bath full of cold water, where I almost drowned. Even although he was holding me under the water, and I was thrashing about and fighting my young life, I could hear my drunken father laughing at me. My abuse and ridicule follows me through my school years, and has a major impact on my mental health. My family grew until I had six siblings all living with me in a two bedroom cottage. I was never acknowledged as a son by my violent father, I was the outcast, the one who brought shame to the family, and I was the devils child. This is the true story of a childhood lost, and the struggles to overcome the mental anguish afflicted on me throughout my young life. This story will take the reader on a painful journey as I move with my siblings around Scotland, from house to house, and school to school, always just evading the authorities who could have helped me. This story leaves nothing to the readers’ imagination. There are some lighter moments throughout the book which will make the reader laugh, but my story will make you wonder how I survived, and what does happen behind closed doors. Even although I am now over 60 years old, I often sometimes mourn my stolen childhood, it is like a limb has been pulled off, I can feel where it was supposed to be but it is just not there, it is a part of me which I will never get back, it was taken away without my consent and is now lost forever. Sometimes it just hits me out of nowhere, an overwhelming sadness and emptiness rushes over me. I get disheartened and I feel hopeless, sad, and hurt, and once again I feel numb to the world.

The Comeback: How Larry Ellison's Team Won the America's Cup (Kindle Single)


G. Bruce Knecht - 2016
    New Zealand needed just one more win. Oracle ultimately beat back the odds in what's been called the greatest comeback in sport. But was it? G. Bruce Knecht set out to investigate how Oracle turned things around and, most particularly, the source of extra horsepower that seemed to come from nowhere during the final races. What he discovered was that the team was using a sailing technique that was prohibited under the rules. The Comeback is a pulse-pounding account of Oracle's desperate stop-at-nothing campaign.G. Bruce Knecht, a former staff reporter and foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, is the author of three books, including The Proving Ground: The Inside Story of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Race. Larry Ellison was a major character in that book as well and it explains how his experience in the race led to his pursuit of the America's Cup. A sailor himself, Knecht raced across the Atlantic in 2005 on the yacht that broke the 100-year-old transatlantic race record.Cover design by Charles Rue Woods.

Neil Armstrong Biography for Kids Book: The Apollo 11 Moon Landing, With Fun Facts & Pictures on Neil Armstrong (Kids Book About Space)


Jacob Smith - 2014
    This informative kids book includes well chosen words & great pictures to help children learn more about one of America's most beloved and iconic heroes, Neil Armstrong. Aside from the interesting facts and images Mr Smith presents in his Neil Armstrong for Kids Book he also covers some interesting insights about Neil Armstrong's background, his humble beginnings & how he first got started with flying. Kids will also learn about his many accomplishments, his influences on mankind today and more interesting facts. The pictures within this book are accompanied by small bits of easy to understand text while making it an exciting read about The life of Neil Armstrong. Therefore, Neil Armstrong Biography for Kids Book is a great educational book for kids ages 8 years and older (or for parents that want to read this book with their children). Currently set at a wonderfully low promotional price, this book on "Neil Armstrong for Kids" can be easily downloaded from the Amazon Kindle Store by any young readers that love to read on their own, as well as by parents who will read to younger children that are still learning to read.