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  Ernest Shackleton and Robert...

  Editors Charles River

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  An earlier wave of explorers led to the opening of the New World, and early polar expeditions saw ancient ships of various nations sail along the coastlines of Greenland and within reach of the Arctic and Antarctic continents. Many 19th century figures approached the polar region with an eye to traversing it. Most notable among them was British explorer Sir James Clark Ross, who took the Erebus and the HMS Terror to the southernmost coastlines of the planet.  
  Some of the explorers who were involved became household names around the world, including British explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton and Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Perhaps the one that has become most closely associated with this period is Robert Falcon Scott. Widely referred to as “Scott of the Antarctic,” Captain Scott became an icon of tenacity in the face of incredible adversity, and his final expedition to the South Pole lives on as an example of the nobility of the human spirit, even in the face of utter disaster. A monument to Scott’s persistence still stands at Observation Point, inscribed with the last line of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” 
  Inevitably, as time passed, modern historians further removed from the romanticization of the expeditions began to more closely (and objectively) scrutinize the explorers and their missions. However, in the case of Scott, that has only furthered his renown, because historians still have wildly different opinions of him, from his personality and leadership to the results of his missions, especially his ill-fated final one. Likewise, Shackleton’s place in history is not the one he set out to make, but his extraordinary deeds have made his contributions to early exploration of Antarctica indelible. Despite the victor’s wreath eventually going to another, Shackleton’s name is essential to any discussion of Antarctic exploration.

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  Shepherd's Sight - A Farming Life

  Barbara McLean

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  A restorative and resonant memoir of a year in the life of an aging shepherd 
   
   
   
  For fifty years, Barbara McLean has tended a flock of Border Leicester sheep on her small Ontario farm, Lambsquarters. In Shepherd's Sight she shares the crises, pleasures, and challenges of farm life over the course of a year. Now in her seventies, McLean faces a new problem: how much longer she can continue with the physically taxing work that is her central source of meaning and satisfaction. 
   
   
   
  Through her unsentimental gaze, we witness the highs and heartbreaks of delivering and rearing lambs, the shearing and spinning of wool, the wildlife in the woods (and occasionally in the house), and the garden produce moving from seed to harvest to table. Even after half a century on this land, McLean is still making fresh observations, and she shares them in evocative, elegant prose. As she moves through the calendar year, she also reflects on years past, offering a long view on climate, stewardship, and agriculture. 
   
   
   
  With its vivid description and absorbing storytelling, Shepherd's Sight offers an unforgettable glimpse of a life lived on the land.

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  The Life Crime and Capture of...

  George Alfred Townsend

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  On the night of April 14, 1865, the nation reeled in horror as President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre by the famed actor John Wilkes Booth. In this gripping 19th-century account, journalist George Alfred Townsend delivers a detailed and chilling narrative of Booth’s descent into infamy, the conspiracy that rocked the nation, and the relentless manhunt that followed. 
  Townsend captures the atmosphere of the capital in mourning, the calculated nature of Booth’s crime, and the tragic unraveling of his fate and that of his fellow conspirators. With vivid prose and a journalist’s eye for detail, this is not just a retelling—it’s an immersive chronicle of one of America’s most shocking and consequential crimes. 
  Perfect for listeners fascinated by true crime, Civil War history, or political intrigue, this audiobook brings one of the darkest chapters in American history to life.

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  American Legends of the Sky

  Editors Charles River

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  The lives of Wilbur and Orville Wright are quintessential American stories. Growing up in America’s heartland, the boys lived very ordinary lives with 5 other siblings and worked in printing jobs and repair jobs that involved tinkering with tools and bicycles. But at the end of the 20th century, one of the brothers’ passions became an obsession, especially for Wilbur. In December 1903, the brothers had done enough scientific work with concepts like lift to help their aeronautical designs, and they had the technical know-how to work with engines. On December 17, the brothers took turns making history’s first successful powered flights.  
  In 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first to make a nonstop Transatlantic solo flight, forever earning him fame and the moniker "Lucky Lindy". Two years later, Earhart was the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a plane, and her uncanny resemblance to Lindbergh earned her the nickname "Lady Lindy". Together they became America's most famous aviators, and their stories were inextricably interwoven by their lives, careers, and ill-fated destinies. 
  By the mid-1930s, Amelia Earhart had set a multitude of altitude and distance records, but she wanted to attempt a circumnavigation of the world. After an ill-fated first attempt, Earhart and Fred Noonan set off on another attempt, creating one of the 20th century’s most enduring mysteries. Earhart and Noonan were to land on Howland Island, 1700 miles southwest of Hawaii, but radio transmissions ceased between the plane and authorities on the ground the morning of July 2, 1937. Earhart and Noonan had disappeared, never to be seen again, despite one of the nation’s largest and costliest manhunts to date. Unfortunately, the speculation over exactly what happened to Earhart and the mystery of her disappearance have come to overshadow and obscure her many accomplishments.

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  Destination; Remarkable -...

  Mary Grothe

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  Few that know Mary Grothe today would guess that her childhood was traumatic. That she was raised by an alcoholic mother and abusive father in a filthy house, where tar dripped down the walls from the profusion of cigarette smoke. That at fourteen she watched her childhood auctioned off beneath a big top before fleeing town as a result of her parents’ criminal mistakes. Or that dance, her original love and ticket to freedom, would be taken from her in an instant. That four whole years of darkness followed. That she briefly married a man so toxic that she had to plot a secret escape to free herself. 
   
  What many people do know is that, in spite of all the above, she discovered, to her own astonishment and that of everyone around her, that she was something of a sales prodigy. That her success was meteoric. That her name was synonymous with number one. 
   
  Until now, most also don’t know that all of this “success” led her straight back down into the darkness. Into alcoholism, and from there into the front porch of her neighbors’ house, behind the wheel of one of her two cars. Or that years of healing, and grinding away in the trenches, would only bring her straight back to her knees. That finally, one fateful Christmas morning, from the pit of the bottom, she found Jesus. That again, she thought she’d forever changed her life, only to learn that doing so is easier said than done. 
   
  And that’s just the first half of this book. 
  But this isn’t an ordinary business book, or an ordinary autobiography. It’s not merely a rollercoaster, either, but an entire theme park full of them: of being a daughter, a partner, a wife, a mother, a Christian, a founder, and a CEO.

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  The Prison Angel - Mother...

  Kevin Sullivan, Mary Jordan

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  The winners of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting tell the astonishing story of Mary Clarke. At the age of fifty, Clarke left her comfortable life in suburban Los Angeles to follow a spiritual calling to care for the prisoners in one of Mexico's most notorious jails. She actually moved into a cell  
  to live among drug king pins and petty thieves. She has led many of them through profound spiritual transformations in which they turned away from their lives of crime, and has deeply touched the lives of all who have witnessed the depth of her compassion. Donning a nun's habit, she became Mother  
  Antonia, renowned as "the prison angel," and has now organized a new community of sisters—the Servants of the Eleventh Hour—widows and divorced women seeking new meaning in their lives. "We had never heard a story like hers," Jordan and Sullivan write, "a story of such powerful goodness." 
   
  Born in Beverly Hills, Clarke was raised around the glamour of Hollywood and looked like a star herself, a beautiful blonde reminiscent of Grace Kelly. The choreographer Busby Berkeley spotted her at a restaurant and offered her a job, but Mary's dream was to be a happy wife and mother. She raised  
  seven children, but her two unfulfilling marriages ended in divorce. Then in the late 1960s, in midlife, she began devoting herself to charity work, realizing she had an extraordinary talent for drumming up donations for the sick and poor.  
   
  On one charity mission across the Mexican border to the drug-trafficking capitol of Tijuana, she visited La Mesa prison and experienced an intense feeling that she had found her true life's work. As she recalls, "I felt like I had come home." Receiving the blessings of the Catholic Church for her mission, on  
  March 19, 1977, at the age of fifty, she moved into a cell in La Mesa, sleeping on a bunk with female prisoners above and below her. Nearly twenty-eight years later she is still living in that cell, and the remarkable power of her spiritual counseling to the prisoners has become legendary. 
   
  The story of both one woman's profound journey of discovery and growth and of the deep spiritual awakenings she has called forth in so many lost souls, The Prison Angel is an astonishing testament to the powers of personal transformation.

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