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  Surgeon with the Kaiser's Army

  Stephen Kurt Westmann

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  The Author gave up his medical studies at Freiburg University in 1914 to enlist in the German Army. He was soon involved in bloody hand-to-hand fighting against the French before moving to the Russian front.Promoted to medical officer, despite being unqualified and barely into his twenties he is given command of an ambulance train on the Western Front. He treats and operates on wounded of all nationalities and ranks and rescues British and German soldiers after gas attacks on the trenches of the Somme. As medical officer to the German Air Force (von Richthofen Circus) Westmann sees the dangers and effects of aerial combat at first hand. He witnesses the British tank attacks at Cambrai.His writing graphically illustrates life and death in the front line, the carnage and humour that sustained soldiers of all nationalities. Westmann's insights into the social, political, religious, economic and medical aspects of war time life are particularly revealing.The text is enhanced by contemporary photographs.

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  In Bayswater - One family is...

  Mary Butts

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  Mary Frances Butts was born on 13th December 1890 in Poole, Dorset. 
   
  Her early years were spent at Salterns, an 18th-century house overlooking Poole Harbour.  Sadly in 1905 her father died, and she was sent for boarding at St Leonard's school for girls in St Andrews. 
   
  Her mother remarried and, from 1909, Mary studied at Westfield College in London, and here, first became aware of her bisexual feelings.  She was sent down for organising a trip to Epsom races and only completed her degree in 1914 when she graduated from the London School of Economics.  By then Mary had become an admirer of the occultist Aleister Crowley and she was given a co-authorship credit on his ‘Magick (Book 4)’. 
   
  In 1916, she began the diary which would now detail her future life and be a constant reference point for her observations and her absorbing experiences. 
   
  During World War I, she was doing social work for the London County Council in Hackney Wick, and involved in a lesbian relationship.  Life changed after meeting the modernist poet, John Rodker and they married in 1918. 
   
  In 1921 she spent 3 months at Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Sicily; she found the practices dreadful and also acquired a drug habit.  Mary now spent time writing in Dorset, including her celebrated book of short stories ‘Speed the Plough’ which saw fully develop her unique Modernist prose style. 
   
  Europe now beckoned and several years were spent in Paris befriending many artists and writing further extraordinary stories.   
   
  She was continually sought after by literary magazines and also published several short story collections as books. Although a Modernist writer she worked in other genres but is essentially only known for her short stories.  Mary was deeply committed to nature conservation and wrote several pamphlets attacking the growing pollution of the countryside. 
   
  In 1927, she divorced and the following year her novel ‘Armed with Madness’ was published.  A further marriage followed in 1930 and time was spent attempting to settle in London and Newcastle before setting up home on the western tip of Cornwall.  By 1934 the marriage had failed. 
   
  Mary Butts died on 5th March 1937, at the West Cornwall Hospital, Penzance, after an operation for a perforated gastric ulcer. She was 46. 
   
  Her story ‘In Bayswater’ grippingly describes a man’s friendship with a dysfunctional family he rents a room from.  As each facet reveals itself his opinion and decisions change, back and forth, this way and that….

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  The Comeback

  Daniel De Visé

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  In July of 1986, Greg LeMond stunned the sporting world by becoming the first American to win the Tour de France, the world's pre-eminent bicycle race, defeating French cycling legend Bernard Hinault. Nine months later, LeMond lay in a hospital bed, his life in peril after a hunting accident, his career as a bicycle racer seemingly over. And yet, barely two years after this crisis, LeMond mounted a comeback. In 1989, he once again won the Tour-by the almost impossibly narrow margin of eight seconds over another French legend, Laurent Fignon. It remains the closest Tour de France in history. The Comeback chronicles the life of this great American athlete, from his roots in Nevada and California to the heights of global fame. With the kind of narrative drive that propels books like Moneyball and a fierce attention to detail, Daniel de Vise reveals the dramatic, ultra-competitive inner world of a sport rarely glimpsed up close, building a compelling case for LeMond as its great American hero.

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  Reports from Hell

  Chas Smith

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  A gonzo ride through war-torn Yemen as only Chas Smith, the award-winning author of Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell and Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfing's Greatest Love Affair, could provide. Follow Smith and his misfit band of merrymakers as they search for the true origins of Al Qaeda and endeavor to ride the unsurfed waves of Yemen all while exploring the slim opportunities for fun in the margins of our global war on terror and at what cost—even if it means eventual kidnapping by Hezbollah.

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  Let's Take the Long Way Home - A...

  Gail Caldwell

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  In Let's Take the Long Way Home, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gail Caldwell offers a powerful and moving memoir about her coming-of-age in mid-life and her extraordinary friendship with Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story.In her younger years, Caldwell defined herself by rebellion and independence, a passion for books, and an aversion to intimacy and a distrust of others. Then, while living in Cambridge in her early forties, Caldwell adopted a rambunctious puppy named Clementine. On one of their bucolic walks, she met Caroline and her dog, Lucille, and both women's lives changed forever.Though they are more different than alike, these two fiercely private, independent women quickly relax into a friendship more profound than either of them expected, a friendship that will thrive on their shared secrets, including parallel struggles with alcoholism and loneliness. They grow increasingly inseparable until, in 2003, Caroline is diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. In her signature exquisite prose, Caldwell mines the deepest levels of devotion and grief in this wise and affecting account about losing her best friend. Let's Take the Long Way Home is also a celebration of life and all the little moments worth cherishing-and affirms why Gail Caldwell is rightly praised as one of our bravest and most honest literary voices.

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  Wink

  Ed Hotaling

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  "After a number of up-the-track finishes by authors trying to emulate the success of Laura Hillenbrand's bestselling Seabiscuit: An American Legend, a worthy successor has at last broken out of the pack . . .Winkfield's story is so incredible you'll find yourself wondering why you've never heard it before." --MSNBC      "One of the most extraordinary stories in sports history is also one of its least known. Jimmy Winkfield was a gifted jockey and a remarkably intrepid man, and his life was a singular adventure. His is a story of persistence, hardship, and triumph, and it should be long remembered."—Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit: An American Legend   
  "In the entire sweep of American sports, from the days of a roistering John L. Sullivan in the 19th Century through the Tiger Woods phenomenon of the 21st, no figure made a bolder and more original odyssey of his life than Jimmy Winkfield, the poor son of former slaves whose brilliance as a jockey bore him from the winner's circle at the Kentucky Derby to the royal courts of Czarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and from Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany to the salons of Paris. In Wink, author Ed Hotaling skilfully reports and chronicles Winkfield's battles against racism in the New World--his courage and daring in escaping that most implacable of foes--and his success and rise to glory as a rider and then a trainer in the Old World. The tale of Wink is an illuminating and inspiring read."      —William Nack, author of Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, and My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money and the Sporting Life   
  "It is phenomenal enough that Jimmy Winkfield became a dominant force in American horse racing half a century before Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers. But this two-time Kentucky Derby–winner's adventures after leaving to race overseas make his story all the more compelling. Ed Hotaling has a marvelous tale to tell. This is the stuff of great nonfiction."—Douglas Brinkley, author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War   
  "In this fine book, Ed Hotaling adds the texture of a rich individual life to what his previous work has already told us about the great black jockeys of a century ago."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., bestselling author, Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University

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