Skeletons on the Zahara

Skeletons on the Zahara

Author: Dean King

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2004-02-16

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0759509697

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b.A masterpiece of historical adventure, ISkeletons on the Zahara The western Sahara is a baking hot and desolate place, home only to nomads and their camels, and to locusts, snails and thorny scrub -- and its barren and ever-changing coastline has baffled sailors for centuries. In August 1815, the US brig Commerce was dashed against Cape Bojador and lost, although through bravery and quick thinking the ship's captain, James Riley, managed to lead all of his crew to safety. What followed was an extraordinary and desperate battle for survival in the face of human hostility, starvation, dehydration, death and despair. Captured, robbed and enslaved, the sailors were dragged and driven through the desert by their new owners, who neither spoke their language nor cared for their plight. Reduced to drinking urine, flayed by the sun, crippled by walking miles across burning stones and sand and losing over half of their body weights, the sailors struggled to hold onto both their humanity and their sanity. To reach safety, they would have to overcome not only the desert but also the greed and anger of those who would keep them in captivity. From the cold waters of the Atlantic to the searing Saharan sands, from the heart of the desert to the heart of man, Skeletons on the Zahara is a spectacular odyssey through the extremes and a gripping account of courage, brotherhood, and survival.


Cadillac Desert

Cadillac Desert

Author: Marc Reisner

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1993-06-01

Total Pages: 674

ISBN-13: 1440672822

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“I’ve been thinking a lot about Cadillac Desert in the past few weeks, as the rain fell and fell and kept falling over California, much of which, despite the pouring heavens, seems likely to remain in the grip of a severe drought. Reisner anticipated this moment. He worried that the West’s success with irrigation could be a mirage — that it took water for granted and didn’t appreciate the precariousness of our capacity to control it.” – Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times, January 20,2023 "The definitive work on the West's water crisis." --Newsweek The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruption and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecological and economic disaster. In his landmark book, Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the competition to transform the West. Based on more than a decade of research, Cadillac Desert is a stunning expose and a dramatic, intriguing history of the creation of an Eden--an Eden that may only be a mirage. This edition includes a new postscript by Lawrie Mott, a former staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, that updates Western water issues over the last two decades, including the long-term impact of climate change and how the region can prepare for the future.


Pirate Passions. A Gay Erotic Novel

Pirate Passions. A Gay Erotic Novel

Author: Robert Bringston

Publisher: Bruno-Books

Published: 2013-05-07

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 3867875502

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Stormy Adventures on the High Seas: Plymouth, 1586. After his parents' untimely death, Tom is sent by his uncle on a long sea journey. He's soon inducted into the erotic rituals of the men of the British fleet. When pirates attack the ship, Tom is taken captive-only to learn that pirates, too, have their masculine rituals. Tom becomes a brother in the band of pirates, but there's something that keeps him yearning for the boys in His Majesty's service ...


The Sudden Appearance of Hope

The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Author: Claire North

Publisher: Redhook

Published: 2016-05-17

Total Pages: 537

ISBN-13: 0316335975

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The World Fantasy Award-winning thriller about a girl no one can remember, from the acclaimed author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and 84K. My name is Hope Arden, and you won't know who I am. But we've met before -- a thousand times. It started when I was sixteen years old. A father forgetting to drive me to school. A mother setting the table for three, not four. A friend who looks at me and sees a stranger. No matter what I do, the words I say, the crimes I commit, you will never remember who I am. That makes my life difficult. It also makes me dangerous. The Sudden Appearance of Hope is a riveting and heartbreaking exploration of identity and existence, about a forgotten girl whose story will stay with you forever.


The White Darkness

The White Darkness

Author: David Grann

Publisher: Doubleday

Published: 2018-10-30

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 0385544588

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From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager, a thrilling and powerful true story of adventure and obsession in the Antarctic, lavishly illustrated with color photographs. "[Grann is] one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."—New York Magazine Henry Worsley was a devoted husband and father and a decorated British special forces officer who believed in honor and sacrifice. He was also a man obsessed. He spent his life idolizing Ernest Shackleton, the nineteenth-century polar explorer, who tried to become the first person to reach the South Pole, and later sought to cross Antarctica on foot. Shackleton never completed his journeys, but he repeatedly rescued his men from certain death, and emerged as one of the greatest leaders in history. Worsley felt an overpowering connection to those expeditions. He was related to one of Shackleton's men, Frank Worsley, and spent a fortune collecting artifacts from their epic treks across the continent. He modeled his military command on Shackleton's legendary skills and was determined to measure his own powers of endurance against them. He would succeed where Shackleton had failed, in the most brutal landscape in the world. In 2008, Worsley set out across Antarctica with two other descendants of Shackleton's crew, battling the freezing, desolate landscape, life-threatening physical exhaustion, and hidden crevasses. Yet when he returned home he felt compelled to go back. On November 13, 2015, at age 55, Worsley bid farewell to his family and embarked on his most perilous quest: to walk across Antarctica alone. David Grann tells Worsley's remarkable story with the intensity and power that have led him to be called "simply the best narrative nonfiction writer working today." Illustrated with more than fifty stunning photographs from Worsley's and Shackleton's journeys, The White Darkness is both a gorgeous keepsake volume and a spellbinding story of courage, love, and a man pushing himself to the extremes of human capacity. Look for David Grann’s latest bestselling book, The Wager!


Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2010-08-11

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0307762521

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25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.


Sophie's World

Sophie's World

Author: Jostein Gaarder

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2007-03-20

Total Pages: 599

ISBN-13: 1466804270

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A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.


Casey Agonistes

Casey Agonistes

Author: Richard M. Mckenna

Publisher: Gateway

Published: 2012-12-07

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 0575132078

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This fascinating collection from the Nebula Award-wining author contains the stories: Casey Agonistes, Hunter Come Home, The Secret Place, Mine Own Ways, Fiddler's Green


The Dead Lands

The Dead Lands

Author: Benjamin Percy

Publisher: Hachette+ORM

Published: 2016-01-05

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1455528226

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In Benjamin Percy's new thriller, a post-apocalyptic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark saga, a super flu and nuclear fallout have made a husk of the world we know. A few humans carry on, living in outposts such as the Sanctuary-the remains of St. Louis-a shielded community that owes its survival to its militant defense and fear-mongering leaders. Then a rider comes from the wasteland beyond its walls. She reports on the outside world: west of the Cascades, rain falls, crops grow, civilization thrives. But there is danger too: the rising power of an army that pillages and enslaves every community they happen upon. Against the wishes of the Sanctuary, a small group sets out in secrecy. Led by Lewis Meriwether and Mina Clark, they hope to expand their infant nation, and to reunite the States. But the Sanctuary will not allow them to escape without a fight.