Other books that might interest you

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  Atrocity on the Atlantic -...

  Nate Hendley

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  How a German submarine sank a Canadian military hospital ship during the First World War and sparked outrage. 
   
   
   
  On the evening of June 27, 1918, the Llandovery Castle—an unarmed, clearly marked hospital ship used by the Canadian military—was torpedoed off the Irish Coast by U-Boat 86, a German submarine. 
   
   
   
  Sinking hospital ships violated international law. To conceal his actions, the U-86 commander had the submarine deck guns fire on survivors. One lifeboat escaped with witnesses to the atrocity. Global outrage over the attack ensued. 
   
   
   
  The sinking of the Llandovery Castle was adjudicated at the Leipzig War Crimes Trials, an attempt to establish justice after hostilities ceased. The Llandovery Castle case resulted in a historic legal precedent that guided subsequent war crime prosecutions, including the Nuremberg Trials. 
   
   
   
  Atrocity on the Atlantic explores the Llandovery Castle sinking, the people impacted by the attack, and the reasons why this wartime atrocity was largely forgotten.

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  Joke Farming - How to Write...

  Elliott Kalan

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  The winner of four Emmys, a Peabody, and two Writers Guild Awards (all of which badly need dusting) explains his process for writing comedy without going insane. 
    
  Philosophers may debate the meaning of comedy (thankfully keeping them too busy to fall into a life of crime), but the rest of us are more likely to wonder how we can make an audience laugh—or at least, how to entertain our friends and followers. According to award-winning comedy writer Elliott Kalan, we need to stop staring out the window, waiting for hilarious bits to stroll into view, fully formed. What we need is a process to plant their premises, tend to their structure and wording, and ultimately harvest them as funny material. In short, a farm. But for jokes. 
    
  In Joke Farming, Kalan explains that it’s easier to write jokes when you have a dependable method for doing so. All jokes, he argues, are built from the same elements: structure, premise, voice, tone, wording, and audience—and these elements can be applied to any comedic genre, from stand-up to sitcoms to satire. Kalan analyzes examples from his own career—including jokes that he wrote (and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote . . . ) as head writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart—as well as material from a diverse array of comedians, writers, and filmmakers, highlighting the phrasing, rhythm, and precise details that make their work so dang funny. 
    
  Drawing on his experiences in professional writers’ rooms as well as episodes from everyday life, Kalan’s guide to jokes will appeal to aspiring writers, their mentors, comedy fans, and anyone who has to speak at a wedding. Joke Farming points the way toward a writing process that lessens stress and agony and yields more reliable rewards: a surprising tagline, a hilarious word choice, and—most importantly—a bigger laugh from the audience, whoever they may be.

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  Shakespeare's Greatest Love

  David Medina

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  Relying on historical and literary evidence hidden in plain sight, Shakespeare's Greatest Love tells the true, uncensored love story of William Shakespeare and Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.
  "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate."
  
  —­Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, written for and about Southampton.
  Leaving behind a wife and three young children in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare moved to London for its thrilling theater scene, where everyone mixed freely across ages, classes, and ranks.
  It was through their mutual passion for the theater that the handsome twenty-seven-year-old playwright first met and fell deeply in love with the effeminate seventeen-year-old earl who beguiled men and women alike and avowed that 'desire and pleasure [should] sometimes triumph over reason.'
  Author David Medina demonstrates that Shakespeare wrote more of his plays and poems for and about Southampton than anyone else—works that are sexually charged, romantic, and homoerotic. He also chronicles the evidence that Southampton provided Shakespeare the support he needed to secure his acting company share, coat of arms, family residence, royal commission, life portrait, and funerary bust.
  Shakespeare and Southampton's personal and professional relationship evolved privately and publicly over a quarter century against the backdrop of a national anti-sodomy law, multiple plague outbreaks, unexpected pregnancies, rushed and possibly forced marriages, a failed rebellion, and political imprisonments.
  Shakespeare's Greatest Love challenges us all to recognize Southampton as the individual who had the most significant impact on Shakespeare's life, literature, and legacy.

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  Gnosis

  Philip Gardiner

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  This audiobook has been recorded using Text to speech (TTS). 
   
  Gnosis means knowledge of the most esoteric kind. 
   
  This is the story that has been kept from the ears of mankind for too long, it is a truth hidden beneath the layers of religious deceit for centuries. 
   
  This is the truth behind the world’s most infamous secret societies including the knights Templar, it is the revelation of the archaeon secrets of mankind and the amazing discovery of the secret of Solomon’s temple, and you cannot live life until you have Gnosis.

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  The Rory's Stories Guide to...

  Rory O'Conor

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  THE PARENTING 'GUIDE' YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR!
  Sleep deprivation, stray Lego underfoot, mashed potato on the walls, missing spoons and the unmatched pride that comes with being a father!
  From the social media sensation, this is a hilarious and painfully accurate look at what parenting really entails – in all its messy glory.

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  Pauline Cushman: The Life of the...

  Charles River Editors

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  Given the necessity of spies to hide in plain sight, on some level it is perfectly sensible that women played a larger and more decisive role in espionage operations, because during the Civil War, women were not taken seriously as threats. They openly moved through areas that men in uniform could not easily penetrate, and they were able to publicly receive callers, visit prisoners, manage households, carry on the ordinary commerce of social life, and cross lines that military authorities maintained without bringing any attention upon themselves.  Ironically, both sides used several women as spies precisely because they drew less suspicion, yet neither the Union nor Confederates took potential women spies seriously.  
  	In some ways, Pauline Cushman was able to take advantage of the fact she was a woman, but unlike regular civilians who could blend in, she had the disadvantage of being a recognizable actress. Near the end of the war, she was photographed by Matthew Brady, who had documented the Civil War's battlefields, generals, and, most memorably, casualties. In the photograph, Cushman is wearing a military uniform with a sword at her side, and her gaze is fixed beyond the frame with the composed confidence of someone who had seen worse things than a camera. She was 31 at the time and had recently been sentenced to hang. 
  	By the time Brady pointed his lens at her, she was famous as the “Spy of the Cumberland,” making her the greatest heroine of the year. Major Cushman was a woman whose story was being told in newspapers from Boston to San Francisco with the breathless enthusiasm of a nation that needed heroes and found in her something it could not quite categorize. She had done a soldier's work, faced a soldier's death, and survived to tell.  
  	However, Cushman’s story was not just about being a spy, but also about what it cost to be a woman who wanted to be of use to her country in a time when her country had no official way to acknowledge her contribution.

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