Other books that might interest you

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  Shook - An Earthquake a...

  Jennifer Hull

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  Dave Hahn, a local of Taos, New Mexico, is a legendary figure in mountaineering. Elite members of the climbing community have likened him to the Michael Jordan, Cal Ripkin, or Michael Phelps of the climbing world. The 2015 expedition he would lead came just one short year after the notorious Khumbu Icefall avalanche claimed the lives of sixteen Sherpas. Dave and his team—Sherpa sirdar Chhering Dorjee, assistant guide JJ Justman, base-camp manager Mark Tucker, and the eight clients who had trained for the privilege to attempt to summit with Dave Hahn—spent weeks honing the techniques that would help keep them alive through the Icefall and the Death Zone. None of this could have prepared them for the earthquake that shook Everest and all of their lives on the morning of April 25, 2015. Shook tells their story of resilience, nerve, and survival on the deadliest day on Everest.

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  Alone - Lost Overboard in the...

  Brett Archibald

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  "Solitude is terrifying and awe-inspiring in Alone." —The Wall Street Journal 
  Alone is an intense audiobook that will push listeners to face their deepest fears and realize the human capacity for survival. 
  In April 2013, fifty-year-old Brett Archibald was on board a surf-charter boat, making a night-time crossing of the remote Mentawai Strait off Sumatra, Indonesia. In the middle of a storm, ill with severe food poisoning, he blacked out. When he came to, he found himself in the raging sea, sixty miles from shore. As Brett saw the lights of his boat disappearing into the darkness, it became clear that no one had seen him fall, and that no one would hear his shouts for help. He was alone in the ocean. 
  It would be eight hours before his friends realized he was missing. At that point a frantic search began for a single man somewhere in thousands of square miles of heaving waves. The rough weather meant that no planes or helicopters could assist in the search. According to the experts, he should have died within ten to fourteen hours. 
  Instead, Brett battled Portuguese man o' war and jellyfish, sharks, seagulls, and the stormy seas for more than 28 hours. Alone is the remarkable tale of his miraculous survival and rescue. It is also the story of what it takes to defy extraordinary odds and the incredible power of the human spirit.

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  Exploding the Phone - The Untold...

  Phil Lapsley

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  “A rollicking history of the telephone system and the hackers who exploited its flaws.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review   Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computers, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary “harmonic telegraph,” by the middle of the twentieth century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same.  Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of “phone phreaks” who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI.   The product of extensive original research, Exploding the Phone is a groundbreaking, captivating book that “does for the phone phreaks what Steven Levy’s Hackers did for computer pioneers” (Boing Boing).   “An authoritative, jaunty and enjoyable account of their sometimes comical, sometimes impressive and sometimes disquieting misdeeds.” —The Wall Street Journal   “Brilliantly researched.” —The Atlantic   “A fantastically fun romp through the world of early phone hackers, who sought free long distance, and in the end helped launch the computer era.” —The Seattle Times

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  Melinda Camber Porter in...

  Melinda Camber Porter, Wim Wenders

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  The conversation between Wim Wenders and Melinda Camber Porter (1953-2008), took place on location, in December 1983, while Mr. Wenders was shooting his first American film, Paris, Texas. America was a place of European immigrants, German immigrants, and a vast land stretching to California. Men and women were becoming disillusioned and seeking "that something," just out of reach.
  
  Melinda Camber Porter asked, "When you say men have certain expectations of women, what exactly do you mean?" Wim Wenders explains, "We still have to find out what we mean by that, because 'the character' hasn't really understood that yet [in shooting the film, Paris, Texas]. The character is getting ready to confront the issue. I do not work so a film is laid out and people can spell it out. I work much more on intuition ...Sometimes filmmaking is very much based on very subconscious choices or intuitions."
  
  Paris, Texas, directed by Wim Wenders and written by Sam Shepard, with adaptation by L.M. Kit Carson, and starring Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski, and Hunter Carson, among others. Melinda Camber Porter passed away from ovarian cancer in 2008 and left behind a significant body of work in art, journalism, and literature. With her background as a journalist for The Times of London, her interviews had a unique way of getting to the heart of the creative process used by the many widely acclaimed cultural figures, filmmakers, and writers, whom she spoke with.
  An Author's Republic audio production.

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  Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths...

  Stephen Greenhalgh

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  Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Blackburn and Hyndburn examines 10 detailed murder cases that encompass the late Victorian period up until 1927. They are equally as gruesome and instructive as the better known cases that inhabit the pages of any number of true crime anthologies. All these tales of murder, suspicious deaths and foul deeds form part of the local history. Some of the cases were recorded nationally, whilst others have remained uncovered until now. The appalling social conditions that prevailed during the period of these crimes inevitably coloured the stories of the men, women and children who played their part in them.Take a journey into the darker side of your area and let your spine tingle, as you read Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Blackburn and Hyndburn.

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  Foundations

  Karin Speedy

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  In Foundations, Karin Speedy takes us on a whirlwind journey through time and space as she navigates intersecting personal, local, family and global histories, stories that help her reckon with who she is and where she stands in this complicated (post)colonial world. If colonialism, slavery, violence and heartbreak feature heavily in her memoir so too do friendship, love, poetry, books, music, laughter and resistance. Warm, funny, quirky yet also confronting and, at times, shockingly brutal, her childhood and young adult memories bring to life the scenes and sounds of 70s, 80s and 90s New Zealand. At university, Karin's unquenchable thirst for knowledge and social justice see her embark on her first research project, a decolonial study of Louisiana Creole, research that cements her future as an anti-racist, activist scholar. Forever questioning the master narratives, digging deeper and peeling back layers to expose what lies hidden beneath and behind, Karin reminds us that history and trauma are all around us, ingrained in our lives, etched into our landscapes and at the very foundations of our cities and infrastructure. When she begins to examine her own family stories, rooted in colonisation and working-class struggle and embedded in the national histories of Aotearoa and Australia, she uncovers astonishing inter-generational palimpsests and starts to grasp the importance of listening to her ghosts. 
  About the Author 
  Karin Speedy is an interdisciplinary academic whose research weaves together her expertise in history, literature, linguistics and translation. She has published extensively on colonial and decolonial Pacific and Francophone history and literature, as well as on Creole languages, slavery and African and Indian Ocean diasporas in the Pacific. In 2013, she was awarded the John Dunmore Medal for research, recognising her major contribution to knowledge of French language and culture in the Pacific.

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