Other books that might interest you

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  Carrier Pilot

  Norman Hanson

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  In 1942 Norman Hanson learned to fly the Royal Navy's newest fighter: the U.S.-built Chance Vought Corsair. Fast, rugged, and demanding to fly, it was an intimidating machine. But in the hands of its young Fleet Air Arm pilots it also proved to be a lethal weapon.Posted to the South Pacific aboard HMS Illustrious, Hanson and his squadron took the fight to the Japanese. Facing a desperate and determined enemy, Kamikaze attacks, and the ever-present dangers of flying off a pitching carrier deck, death was never far away.Brought to life in vivid, visceral detail, Carrier Pilot is one of the finest aviators' memoirs of the war; an awe-inspiring, thrilling, sometimes terrifying account of war in the air.

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  The New Granta Book of Travel

  Albino Ochero-Okello

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  A collection of travel writing by some of the genre’s finest authors, from Paul Theroux to Sara Wheeler, voyaging from Mississippi to Malawi and Thailand.  The New Granta Book of Travel Writing represents a sea change in writers’ approaches to the craft. The 1980s were the culmination of a golden age, when writers including Bruce Chatwin, James Hamilton-Paterson and James Fenton set out to document life in largely unfamiliar territory, bringing back tales of the beautiful, the extraordinary and the unexpected.   By the mid 1990s, travel writing seemed to change, as a younger generation of writers appeared in the magazine, making journeys for more complex and often personal reasons. Decca Aitkenhead reported on sex tourism in Thailand, and Wendell Steavenson moved to Iraq as a foreign correspondent. What all these pieces have in common is a sense of engagement with the places they describe, and a belief that whether we are in Birmingham or Belarus, there is always something new to be discovered.</

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  Bringing Down the Mob - The War...

  Thomas Reppetto

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  The riveting, often bloody account of how the fifty-year attack by the federal government virtually extinguished the nation's most powerful crime syndicateIn the critically acclaimed American Mafia, Thomas Reppetto narrated the ferocious ascendancy of organized crime in America. In this fascinating sequel, he follows the mob from its peak into a shadowy period of decline as the government, no longer able to deny its existence, made subduing the Mafia a matter of national priority.Reppetto draws on a lifetime of field experience to tell the stories of the Mafia's twentieth-century leadership, showing how men such as Sam Giancana and John Gotti became household names. Crusaders like Robert Kennedy led concerted—if sometimes sporadic—attacks against organized crime. As the battles between the feds and the Mafia moved from the streets to the courtrooms, Reppetto describes how it came to resemble a conflict between sovereign powers.In direct, shoot-from-the-hip prose, Reppetto chronicles a turning point in American Mafia history, and offers the provocative theory that, given the right formula of connections and shrewd business, a new generation of multinational criminals may be poised to take up the Mafia's mantle.

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  My Life in Seventeen Books - A...

  Jon M. Sweeney

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  A memoir for the bookish-inclined, using personal stories to demonstrate how books have a magical way to move a person from one stage of life to the next."This is a small gem of a book, tender, humble, loving." —Mary Gordon"Sweeney makes a charming companion, telling stories in joyful reflection." —Jeff Deutsch, author of In Praise of Good BookstoresFormer bookseller, longtime publisher, and author Jon M. Sweeney shows—with history and anecdotes centering around books such as Thoreau's Journal, Tagore's Gitanjali, Martin Buber's Hasidic Tales, and Tolstoy's Twenty-three Tales—what it means to be carried by a book. He explores the discovery that once accompanied finding books, and books finding us. He ponders the smell of an old volume, its heft, and why bibliophiles carry them around even without reading them. He demonstrates how and why there is magic and enchantment that takes place between people and books.

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  There's An Egg in my Soup - and...

  Tom Galvin

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  Five years in the Polish wilderness.
  Queues for groceries, unfathomable bus timetables, inexplicable traditions and truly bizarre soup – this is Poland in the mid-1990s, where Tom Galvin innocently went as a trainee teacher.
  Without a word of Polish, he is plunged into a strange and rapidly changing culture, as the country shakes off its troubled and complex past and faces the challenges of being a part of modern Europe.
  Tom spent five years dealing with long and freezing winters, lack of good food, loneliness and hardship, as he discovered the misery as well as the joy of Polish life. He returned in 2007, to find surprising changes to the country that had been his home for the first years of his working life.
  An interesting and amusing account of living and working abroad, which documents a unique period of Polish history.

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  The Ruin of J Robert Oppenheimer...

  Priscilla J. McMillan

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  This groundbreaking Cold War history reveals the government conspiracy to bring down America’s most famous scientist. 
   
  On April 12, 1954, the nation was astonished to learn that J. Robert Oppenheimer was facing charges of violating national security. Could the man who led the effort to build the atom bomb really be a traitor? In this riveting book, Priscilla J. McMillan draws on newly declassified U.S. government documents and materials from Russia, as well as in-depth interviews, to expose the conspiracy that destroyed the director of the Manhattan Project. 
   
  This meticulous narrative recreates the fraught years from 1949 to 1955 when Oppenheimer and a group of liberal scientists tried to head off the cabal of air force officials, anti-Communist politicians, and rival scientists, who were trying to seize control of U.S. policy and build ever more deadly nuclear weapons. Retelling the story of Oppenheimer’s trial, which took place in utmost secrecy, she describes how the government made up its own rules and violated many protections of the rule of law.  
   
  McMilliam also argues that the effort to discredit Oppenheimer, occurring at the height of the McCarthy era and sanctioned by a misinformed President Eisenhower, was a watershed in the Cold War, poisoning American politics for decades and creating dangers that haunt us today.

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