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  Aaliyah

  Tim Footman

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  In this biography of Aaliyah, Tim Footman tells the story of her short life, detailing her childhood in Detroit, where she attended stage school and became an assured performer, performing in Las Vegas by the age of 11 and securing a record deal at the age of 12. By age 15, Aaliyah had her first No. 1 hit and had become involved with her mentor, R&B producer R Kelly. A series of award winning hit albums and singles followed, including the album One in a Million, which went platinum, and the single 'Try Again', for which she won a Grammy. The book also covers Aaliyah's career as an actress, winning lead roles in blockbusters such as Romeo Must Die, and Queen of the Damned, plus her other hugely successful contributions to film soundtracks. The events leading to her death in 2001 are also covered, plus the subsequent impact of this loss on her fans and the music industry. Aaliyah's aura of mystery and her iconic status are discussed throughout the book.

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  Elizabeth Bishop - A Very Short...

  Jonathan F.S. Post

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  Elizabeth Bishop has been described as the "best-loved" poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century. This Very Short Introduction explores the ninety or so published poems that are at the core of her remarkable canon of verse. Drawing on biographical and critical material, Jonathan Post also makes frequent use of Bishop's letters and commentary by fellow poets, including Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and James Merrill to illuminate her writing and contemporary landscape.Throughout, Post places Bishop's lyric poetry alongside her other poetic genres, short stories, and translations within the context of her life and aesthetic values, showing how these shaped her work. Ranging across her poems, the book covers a wide range of core themes, including Bishop's powerful use of description, the environment, balance, and ideas of love and loss, as well as looking at Bishop's interest in the visual arts.

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  Three Sisters - A True Holocaust...

  Celia Clement, Eva Heyman,...

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  Three young Jewish sisters from Leipzig, Germany huddle together in the cold darkness of night waiting for their smugglers to rescue them and bring them to freedom in Belgium. Their mother, in a state of shock following Kristallnacht, is left behind, sedated in a psychiatric hospital. November 1938 begins the four year ordeal of the seven member Kroch family who endure unfathomable conditions in their fight for survival: imprisonment in French internment camps, hiding in a tiny tool shed, and adapting to the deplorable conditions of a Nazi prison. The memoirs of Alexandra, age eleven, and her sisters, fifteen year old Eva and fourteen year old Judith, interweave as they recount the true story of their escape from the Nazis.Leaving behind their life of luxury, the girls describe unimaginable hunger, deprivation, and fear. Family love, music, and the close friendship of strangers are the essential ingredients that sustain them through the hardships they face. A narrative backdrop threads through the story, providing the socio-political context. From a historical perspective and from the three sisters' witness accounts, the listener will come to understand the progression of antisemitism in Germany and France, the course by which Hitler dismantled democracy, the role France adopted as Nazi collaborators, and how the Swiss policies towards Jews were executed.This audiobook includes supplemental material in printable PDF format.

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  Beyond the Secret Garden - The...

  Ann Thwaite, Jacqueline Wilson

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  Frances Hodgson Burnett's favorite theme in her fiction was the reversal of fortune, and she herself knew extremes of poverty and wealth. Born in Manchester in 1849, she emigrated with her family to Tennessee because of the financial problems caused by the cotton famine. From a young age she published her stories to help the family make ends meet. Only after she married did she publish Little Lord Fauntleroy that shot her into literary stardom.On the surface, Frances' life was extremely successful: hosting regular literary salons in her home and travelling frequently between properties in the United Kingdom and America. But behind the colorful personal and social life, she was a complex and contradictory character. She lost both parents by her twenty-first birthday, Henry James called her "the most heavenly of women" although avoided her; prominent people admired her and there were many friendships as well as an ill-advised marriage to a much younger man that ended in heartache. Her success was punctuated by periods of depression, in one instance brought on by the tragic loss of her eldest son to consumption.Ann Thwaite creates a sympathetic but balanced and eye-opening biography of the woman who has enchanted numerous generations of children.

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  Buffalo Bill From Prairie To Palace

  John M. Burke

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  Advance man, press agent, and publicist extraordinaire, John M. Burke (1842–1917) was instrumental in turning William F. Cody into the iconic persona of Buffalo Bill. And with this biography, published in 1893, Burke put the finishing touches on the legend that persists to this day. This new, definitive edition includes the full text and all the photographs and line drawings of Burke’s original, while providing critical background details on the literary sources, historical characters, and events that figure in the work. 
   
  With “a few plain truths, unadorned,” Burke purported to give a frank account of Buffalo Bill’s life. Hostile Indians, gunfights, cattle stampedes: Cody’s Wild West was fraught with peril at every turn. This “Chevalier Bayard of American Bordermen” exemplified courage and daring while often narrowly escaping certain death and he earned the respect and admiration of not only his fellow frontiersmen but also European royalty. Burke recounts Cody’s duel with Chief Yellow Hand; his role as army scout, buffalo hunter, Pony Express rider, and international celebrity; and his associations with well-known figures like Kit Carson, Sitting Bull, General Phil Sheridan, and Queen Victoria. A brilliant instance of mythmaking by a true believer, Burke’s portrait of Buffalo Bill Cody as frontiersman and hero is a tribute to the romance of the Wild West and a canonical volume in the American story.

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  From Pole to Pole - Roald...

  Garth James Cameron

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  Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) was the most successful polar explorer of his era using sledges, dogs, ski and ships. He is mainly remembered for being the first man to reach the South Pole on 14 December 1911. What is less often remembered is that he was also the first man to reach the North Pole on 12 May 1926 as the leader of the Amundsen- Ellsworth-Nobile expedition in the airship Norge. His involvement in aviation from 1909 to his death in 1928, has not been the subject of a detailed study until now.This book explores Amundsen's enthusiasm for flight from the moment he read about Bleriot's flight across the English Channel in an aeroplane on 25 July 1909. From that moment onwards he saw the potential of aircraft as vehicles to explore portions of the globe that remained unexplored in the first quarter of the 20th century. The man-lifting kites built by Einar Sem-Jacobsen took the life of his second in command, Ole Engelstad and were carried, but not used, during his 1910-1912 expedition to the South Pole. He saw aeroplanes flying in America and Germany in 1913 and in 1914 he was taught to fly by Sem-Jacobsen. He passed his flight test on a Farman Longhorn biplane on 1 June 1914 and in mid-1915 was issued with the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (Norge) aeroplane pilot's certificate number one. He bought a Farman biplane to take with him on an expedition to the North Polar Sea but the outbreak of the Great War stopped the Expedition and Amundsen gave his Farman to the Norwegian government. After the war he acquired a Curtiss Oriole biplane and two Junkers F13's then in 1925 he embarked on a flight, which he barely survived, to the North Pole in two Dornier Wal flying boats. 1926 brought long delayed success when the Norge flew to the Pole and on to Alaska. On 18 June 1928 he and five companions took off from Tromso on a search and rescue flight for the missing airship Italia and were never seen again.

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