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  Conquering the Desert of Death -...

  Charles Blackmore

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  The ferocious Taklamakan desert, the harshest on earth, is known by the Chinese as the 'desert of death' or the 'place of no return' - you go in but you don't come out. It sustains no life and has taken the lives of many of those who have ventured in. Its unknown depths are said to be haunted by demons and spirits and legend has it that ancient cities filled with treasure lie lost and buried beneath its dunes. The only certainty is that no human being in history had ever crossed it from end to end. But, after five years of planning, Charles Blackmore together with a team of British, Chinese and Uyghurs and a caravan of thirty camels, set out to accomplish the seemingly impossible: they would cross the Taklamakan, west to east, directly through its unmapped, untrodden centre. "Conquering the Desert of Death" is at once a deeply personal journey and the story of an adventure that will go down in history as one of the great achievements of exploration. Hear the thrilling story narrated by an actual member of the expedition, Mark Kitto, writer and actor.

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  Memoirs of Pancho Villa

  Martín Luis Guzmán

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  “A frequently fascinating and probably fairly accurate insight into the most controversial character of the Mexican Revolution.” —Time   Martín Luis Guzmán, eminent historian of Mexico, knew and traveled with Pancho Villa at various times during the Revolution. When many years later some of Villa’s private papers, records, and what was apparently the beginning of an autobiography came into Guzmán’s hands, he was ideally suited to blend all these into an authentic account of the Revolution as Pancho Villa saw it, and of the General’s life as known only to Villa himself.   This is Villa’s story, his account of how it all began when as a peasant boy of sixteen he shot a rich landowner threatening the honor of his sister. This lone, starved refugee hiding out in the mountains became the scourge of the Mexican Revolution, the leader of thousands of men, and the hero of the masses of the poor.   The assault on Ciudad Juárez in 1911, the battles of Tierra Blanca, of Torreón, of Zacatecas, of Celaya, all are here, told with a feeling of great immediacy. This volume ends as Villa and Obregón prepare to engage each other in the war between victorious generals into which the Revolution degenerated before it finally ended.   The Memoirs were first published in Mexico in 1951, where they were extremely popular. This volume—translated by Virginia H. Taylor—was the first English publication.  “This biographical history presents as revealing a historical portrait of the Revolution as the author’s earlier historical novel, The Eagle and the Serpent.” —The Hispanic American Historical Review

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  Life Between the Lines - A Memoir

  John Izbicki

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  The Daily Telegraph correspondent tells his “fascinating history, not just of newspapers, but of his personal life, fleeing Nazi Germany, as a child” (The Independent). Berlin-born, John Izbicki lived through the horrors of Nazi persecution and, on the day after his eighth birthday, he witnessed the Kristallnacht, and the smashing of his parents’ shop windows. On the day Germany invaded Poland and Berlin experienced its first wartime blackout, the Izbickis escaped to Holland and from there on to England. The author describes what it feels like to have been a refugee, unable to speak or understand a single word of English, and how he was persuaded by a kind policeman to change his name from Horst to John. He also leads the reader along the remarkable journey he traveled from school to university, the first of his family to enter higher education, and through his adventurous time as a commissioned army officer during two years of national service spent in Egypt and Libya. But the best part of his life was yet to come when this young refugee decided to make journalism his profession. The boy who, not that many years earlier, could speak not a word of English, became the distinguished education correspondent of the country’s leading quality newspaper, the Daily Telegraph. After eighteen years in that responsible position, he was sent to Paris to head the Telegraph’s office there. When he left the newspaper to join the Committee of Directors of Polytechnics, he played a leading part in transforming the country’s polytechnics into its “new universities.”“From Nazi Germany to Fleet Street—the story of a charming survivor.” —The Guardian

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  Letters to Gwen John

  Celia Paul

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  Celia Paul's Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876–1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John spent much of her life in France, making art on her own terms and, like Paul, painting mostly women. John's reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John's life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public's reception of their work.Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters, and a writer/artist's daybook, describing Paul's first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband's diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic. Paul, who first revealed her talents as a writer with her memoir, Self-Portrait, enters with courage and resolve into new unguarded territory—the artist at present—and the work required to make art out of the turbulence of life.Contains mature themes.

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  Keanu Reeves: Book Of Quotes...

  Quotes Station

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  KEANU REEVES: BOOK OF QUOTES 
    
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  ABOUT KEANU REEVES 
  Keanu Charles Reeves (/kiˈɑːnuː/ born September 2, 1964) is a Canadian actor. Born in Beirut and raised in Toronto, Reeves began acting in theatre productions and in television films before making his feature film debut in Youngblood (1986). He had his breakthrough role in the science fiction comedy Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), and he later reprised his role in its sequels. He gained praise for playing a hustler in the independent drama My Own Private Idaho (1991), and established himself as an action hero with leading roles in Point Break (1991) and Speed (1994). 
    
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  QUOTES SAMPLES 
    
  “It’s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth.” 
    
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  “If you can make a woman laugh, you're seeing the most beautiful thing on God's Earth.” 
    
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  “I've made a lot of money, but I want to enjoy life and not stress myself building my bank account.” 
    
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  “I give lots away and live simply, mostly out of a suitcase in hotels. We all know that good health is much more important.” 
    
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  Falling in love and having a relationship are two different things.” 
    
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  “I try not to think about my life. I have no life. I need therapy.” 
    
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  “When I don't feel free and can't do what I want I just react. I go against it.”

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  On The Duty of Civil Disobedience

  David Thoreau

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  Thoreau wrote his famous essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, as a protest against an unjust but popular war and the immoral but popular institution of slave-owning.

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