Other books that might interest you

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  Love Sex and Murder? - The...

  Jens Söring

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  The Netflix series "Till murder do us part: Soering vs. Haysom" deals with the Haysom murders in detail, but the love affair between Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering comes up a little short. What was their relationship really like back then? How could Jens have fallen  so deeply in love with Elizabeth that he was willing to get involved in a double-murder?Jens wrote about this years ago in A far, far better thing (Lantern Books 2017). While the focus of that book is on the murders, seven chapters have almost nothing to do with the crime. Instead, they describe the passionate early months of Elizabeth's and Jens's affair, as well as the five months they spent together on the run in south-eastern Europe, Asia and Great Britain.In this audiobook, Jens reads these seven chapters from A far, far better thing himself. This material is  perfectly capable of standing on its own; listeners don't need to know anything about the murder case in order to be drawn into the romantic spell of the story.Was Elizabeth's and Jens's affair really just a nightmare of manipulation and deception? Or was it  perhaps also, at least for a time, something beautiful?

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  Prince of Darkness - The Untold...

  Shane White

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  In the middle decades of the nineteenth century Jeremiah G. Hamilton was a well-known figure on Wall Street. He was reportedly the richest African American man in the United States, possessing a fortune of $2 million, or in excess of $250 million in today's currency.In Prince of Darkness, a groundbreaking and vivid account, eminent historian Shane White reveals the larger-than-life story of a man who defied every convention of his time. He wheeled and dealed in the lily white business world, he married a white woman, he bought a mansion in rural New Jersey, he owned railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride, and generally set his white contemporaries teeth on edge when he wasn't just plain outsmarting them. An important contribution to American history, Hamilton's life offers a way into considering, from the unusual perspective of a black man, subjects that are usually seen as being quintessentially white, totally segregated from the African American past.

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  The Hungarian Who Walked to...

  Edward Fox

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  This is a delightful short biography of an eccentric Hungarian scholar who became one of the fathers of Western studies of the Tibetan language and culture. Educated at an austere Calvinist school until aged 31 where he demonstrated exceptional skills as a linguist, Csoma de Korös (1784-1842) finally set out alone on a pilgrimage to the East. His personal mission was to discover the roots of the Hungarian people, whom he and others of the time theorized to be descended from Attila the Hun.Due to a Chinese decree restricting foreign entry to Tibet he was sadly never to reach Yarkand in the Western plains of China, where he hoped to find linguistic proof of the Central Asian origins of the Hungarian race. However on his way, via many adventures, misfortunes and disguises, he expanded his repertoire to as many as 14 languages and became one of the first Europeans to enter Ladakh, Tibetan in language and culture, but politically part of India. Supported by the British vet and superintendent of the East India Company's Stud, William Moorcroft, Csoma was encouraged to use his extraordinary facility for languages to learn Tibetan, (largely unknown in the West), and produce the first English-Tibetan dictionary. He studied with Lama Sangye Phuntsog in a remote monastery in Zanskar. For 16 months the two men studied the Tibetan language and its vast religious canon in austere freezing conditions in a tiny nine-foot square cell. The fruits of this arduous but pioneering effort, the first reliable grammar and dictionary of Tibetan, was finally published in two volumes in 1834 - using a Tibetan font that had to be specially made. Csoma spent the last years of his life working for the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta, mastering Marathi, Bengali and Sanskrit, before dying of malaria on a final courageous attempt to travel across Tibet to Western China. Csoma's life-story and achievements gradually became known in Hungary, and he is now a revered national figure. A fascinating little book.

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  Wiretap

  PBS NewsHour

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  Wiretap Expansion 
  President Bush signed the Protect America Act on Sunday, expanding the authority of the National Security Agency to intercept phone calls and e-mails of foreigners. Judy Woodruff reports on the new surveillance program and speaks with guests including: Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a non-governmental organization that researches and advocates for civil liberties on national security issues; and, Bryan Cunningham, a former lawyer for the National Security Council in the Bush administration and at the CIA during the Clinton administration, who is now in private practice.

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  The Dead

  James Joyce

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  The main character in this short story is Gabriel Conroy and the entire short story takes place during his attendance at a holiday party, annually thrown by his aunts. Near the end of the party Gabriel sees his wife, Gretta, in a new and expanded way at the same moment when she is reminiscing on a song being sung at the party. Listen as James Joyce weaves harsh realities back into this story, as is characteristic with other stories in this series, "Dubliners".

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  Why this 13-year-old Rohingya...

  PBS NewsHour

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  Child marriage is common among the Rohingya, but for those who have fled terror in Myanmar, insecurity and poverty is pushing many families to marry off their daughters even earlier. Special correspondent Tania Rashid and videographer Phil Caller meet a girl who is about to become a bride.

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