Since Roald Amundsen completed the first successful crossing of the fabled Northwest Passage in 1906, only twenty-four pleasure craft have followed in his wake. Many more people have gone into space than have traversed the Passage, and a staggering number have died trying. From his home port of Newport, Rhode Island, through the Passage and around Alaska to Seattle, it would be an 8,500-mile trek filled with constant danger from ice, polar bears, and severe weather. What Theobald couldn't have known was just how life-changing his journey through the Passage would be. Reuniting his children and stepchildren after a bad divorce more than fifteen years earlier, the family embarks with unanswered questions, untold hurts, and unspoken mistrusts hanging over their heads. Unrelenting cold, hungry polar bears, and a haunting landscape littered with sobering artifacts from the tragic Franklin Expedition of 1845, as well as personality clashes that threaten to tear the crew apart, make The Other Side of the Ice a harrowing story of survival, adventure, and, ultimately, redemption.TO WATCH THE OFFICIAL HD TEASER FOR "The Other Side of The Ice" (book and documentary) PLEASE GO TO SPRAGUETHEOBALD.COM50 color illustrations

    A harrowing true tale of fraud, mutiny, shipwreck, and cannibalism on the desolate rock known as Boon Island.

    I figure it is eighty feet up to the sunlight. The walls above me climb up at about eighty degrees, then they go dead vertical, and then, higher up, they overhang. It is as if I am looking out from the belly of a beast, its jagged white teeth interlocking above me.” In June 1992, best friends Jim Davidson and Mike Price stood triumphantly atop Washington’s Mount Rainier, celebrating what they hoped would be the first of many milestones in their lives as passionate young mountaineers. Instead, their conquest gave way to catastrophe when a cave-in plunged them deep inside a glacial crevasse—the pitch-black, ice-walled hell that every climber’s nightmares are made of.An avid adventurer from an early age, Davidson was already a seasoned climber at the time of the Rainier ascent, fully aware of the risks and hopelessly in love with the challenge. But in the blur of a harrowing free fall, he suddenly found himself challenged by nature’s grandeur at its most unforgiving. Trapped on a narrow, unstable frozen ledge, deep below daylight and high above a yawning chasm, he would desperately battle crumbling ice and snow that threatened to bury him alive, while struggling in vain to save his fatally injured companion. And finally, with little equipment, no partner, and rapidly dwindling hope, he would have to make a fateful choice—between the certainty of a slow, lonely death or the seeming impossibility of climbing for his life.At once a heart-stopping adventure story, a heartfelt memoir of friendship, and a stirring meditation on fleeting mortality and immutable nature, The Ledge chronicles one man’s transforming odyssey from the dizzying heights of elation and awe to the punishing depths of grief and hard-won wisdom. This book’s visceral, lyrical prose sings the praises of the physical world’s wonders, while searching the souls of those willing, for better or worse, to fully embrace it.

    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.

    So He sent us His very strongest men and women." So begins the heartwarming story of Verna Mae and her father, Isom B. "Kitteneye" Slone, an extraordinary personal family history set in the hills around Caney Creek in Knott County, Kentucky.

    In simple but vivid detail, Velma Wallis depicts a landscape and way of life that are at once merciless and starkly beautiful. In her old women, she has created two heroines of steely determination whose story of betrayal, friendship, community and forgiveness "speaks straight to the heart with clarity, sweetness and wisdom" (Ursula K. Le Guin).

    For their trail horses, they adopted wild mustangs from the US Bureau of Land Management that were perfectly adapted to the rocky terrain and harsh conditions of desert and mountain travel. A meticulously planned but sometimes unpredictable route brought them face to face with snowpack, downpours, and wildfire; unrelenting heat, raging rivers, and sheer cliffs; jumping cactus, rattlesnakes, and charging bull moose; sickness, injury, and death. But they also experienced a special camaraderie with each other and with the mustangs. Through it all, they had a constant traveling companion—a cameraman, shooting for the documentary film Unbranded. The trip’s inspiration and architect, Ben Masters, is joined here by the three other riders, Ben Thamer, Thomas Glover, and Jonny Fitzsimons; two memorable teachers and horse trainers; and the film’s producers and intrepid cameramen in the telling of this improbable story of adventure and self-discovery.

    After his death, the contents of his studio, including thousands of glass negatives, were sold off for five dollars. For years the fragile negatives sat forgotten and deteriorating in cardboard boxes in an open carport. How did it happen, then, that the most implausible of events took place? That Disfarmer’s haunting portraits were retrieved from oblivion, that today they sell for upwards of $12,000 each at posh New York art galleries; his photographs proclaimed works of art by prestigious critics and journals and exhibited around the world? The story of Disfarmer’s rise to fame is a colorful, improbable, and ultimately fascinating one that involves an unlikely assortment of individuals. Would any of this have happened if a young New York photographer hadn't been so in love with a pretty model that he was willing to give up his career for her; if a preacher’s son from Arkansas hadn't spent 30 years in the Army Corps of Engineers mapping the U.S. from an airplane; if a magazine editor hadn't felt a strange and powerful connection to the work? The cast of characters includes these, plus a restless and wealthy young Chicago aristocrat and even a grandson of FDR. It’s a compelling story which reveals how these diverse people were part of a chain of events whose far-reaching consequences none of them could have foreseen, least of all the strange and reclusive genius of Heber Springs. Until now, the whole story has not been told.

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

    It is primarily a story to share with family and friends about my personal involvement in the conflict and the turbulent decade of the 60s and does not attempt to question the politics of the era. It begins with a brief description of my quest to gain admittance to the United States Air Force Academy, my four years at the Academy, and the subsequent year of pilot training. I flew three different types of aircraft in combat and the book provides insight into the training that took place for the C-130 Hercules, the F-105 Thunderchief, and the A-1 Skyraider. Each of the three tours in combat over Laos and Vietnam is described with emphasis on the more memorable flights including a bailout in the A-1 and the final crash on takeoff that ended my active duty Air Force career. My time in various hospitals is described at the end of the book and the epilogue tells briefly of my life after retirement from the United States Air Force. The book has been described as a combination of Band of Brothers, Top Gun, and Forrest Gump.

    Peter Stark offers a harrowing saga in which a band of explorers battled nature, starvation, and madness to establish the first American settlement in the Pacific Northwest and opened up what would become the Oregon trail, permanently altering the nation's landscape and its global standing.Six years after Lewis and Clark began their journey to the Pacific Northwest, two of the Eastern establishment's leading figures, John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson, turned their sights to founding a colony akin to Jamestown on the West Coast and transforming the nation into a Pacific trading power. Author and correspondent for Outside magazine Peter Stark recreates this pivotal moment in American history for the first time for modern readers, drawing on original source material to tell the amazing true story of the Astor Expedition.Unfolding over the course of three years, from 1810 to 1813, Astoria is a tale of high adventure and incredible hardship in the wilderness and at sea. Of the more than one hundred-forty members of the two advance parties that reached the West Coast—one crossing the Rockies, the other rounding Cape Horn—nearly half perished by violence. Others went mad. Within one year, the expedition successfully established Fort Astoria, a trading post on the Columbia River. Though the colony would be short-lived, it opened provincial American eyes to the potential of the Western coast and its founders helped blaze the Oregon Trail.

    Because it was extremely difficult to verbalize the events to her own children years later, her adult family knew very little of the details until 30 years after her passing in 1967. That is when her granddaughter discovered her writings and promised to tell the story of what she endured.

    After being freed at the age of 57, she begins a tireless search for her only remaining family member, her daughter Eliza Jane. What Clara accomplishes in her 28 years of freedom will simply astound you! I first wrote about Clara Brown in my book Unbreakable Dolls, Too. This single story eBook is the expanded version, with much more information and 9 photos.

    To be more precise many of these stories are hers—authentic memories written by an amazing woman. Pearl Bragg Laska Chamberlain was the first woman to fly her own plane from the Lower 48 up the Alaska Highway to Alaska. She worked as a flight instructor, bush pilot, cryptographer for the Pentagon, flew in five Powder Puff Derbies, and was also a WASP trainee and famous “99er.” Pearl was a member of the UFO’s (United Flying Octogenarians), and the mayor of Fairbanks actually declared a “Pearl Laska Chamberlain Day.” Pretty impressive, eh? I am very excited to bring you this fabulous collection of “Braggin’ Rights” stories that begin in the early 1900s on Chestnut Mountain in Summers County, West Virginia. Tales about bootleggin’ and learning to fly in the Appalachians are followed by adventures to exotic places. Narratives about living in the polar region and escapades of an aviatrix are accompanied by heartfelt memories of real-life victories and the sorrows of a lifetime. So settle down into the cockpit, buckle your seatbelt and get ready for an astonishing and amazing flight.

    He is the founder of Infosys, a global software consulting company which he started with six other professionals and a seed capital of Rs. 10,000 in 1981. Not only did NRNM lead it to become a top ranking Information Technology company in the world, he also showed that it is possible to do business ethically and achieve success without bending any laws or making compromises.This book takes you through the fascinating journey of a seventeen year old who had to sacrifice his entry into the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology because his father did not have money to pay his fees, and who ultimately came up in life to head a global Information Technology company. NRN Murthy had no money, no family backing, but just a quiet gritty determination, and faith in what he believed was the future of business. The one constant factor throughout his life journey has been the adherence to the values he imbibed from his family, which he has personally and professionally lived by-hard work, fairness, decency, honesty, transparency, striving for excellence and belief in meritocracy. It is on the bedrock of these values that Infosys continues to stand firm and prosper despite the fact that NRN stepped down as CEO in 2002.Iconic leader, living legend, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time-NRN is all this and more. A man who set new standards of business growth and corporate governance. Written by Ritu Singh, the author of President Pratibha Patil, this book will surely inspire all the readers.