In 1943 250 men belonging to the South Lancashire Regiment volunteered to become paratroopers and assault Europe. Jumping on D-Day they fought across France, suffered the cold of the Ardennes in the Battle of the Bulge (yes, the British was there too) and marched across Germany. This is the story of the veterans themselves.
Max Gunther's lost classic, now in a new Classics edition. Some people think you're either born lucky or not. But what if you could actively get lucky? As Max Gunther shows in this page-turning classic, some people really are luckier than others - and not by accident. Lucky people arrange their lives in characteristic patterns. They tend to position themselves in the path of onrushing luck; they tend to go where events are moving fastest and where they can find their lucky break Lucky people take risks but not silly ones. They stick with a cause, a job, or a partner, but not when all hope is lost. In short, they move with life, not against it. This book gives you 13 different techniques by which you can discover and take advantage of life's good breaks, while minimising the effects of its bad ones.
It can't be you.. When Colonel Belliappa, Indian Army (Retd), a highly decorated war hero is found dying one night frothing at the mouth in anguish, there is no one else at home. Other than his immediate family. His wife, his daughter and his son. Did he, who killed so many, kill himself to bury something dreadful from his past? Or, was he killed? His death sets the clock back to his life as a career officer in the Indian Army. He fights with great valour in the 1971 war against Pakistan which leaves him physically and psychologically scarred for life. Years later, his aggression and maniacal bravery leads to a secret assignment. He is handpicked to command a crack team of Indian Army snipers as an irregular force to fight intruders and militants in the Kashmir Valley from 1989. Today, he is a partner in a flourishing and successful armaments firm. The Colonel finds himself in a series of conflicts with his family, amongst others. Standing to gain from his death, they plan to kill him for their own reasons, quite unknown to each other. Do Colonel Belliappa and his family pay the ultimate price? For the spiral of vengeance he himself triggered some decades ago.
This collection of instructions for more than 65 card games and variations that can be played by one person includes Klondike, Canfield, Hit or Miss, Intrigue, and more. Color illustrations.
Lucky. The one adjective used to describe my entire hockey career. I prefer to call it hard work, at least I did until my game went to complete crap. I haven’t scored in eight games and the team owner is talking about trading me. I’ve never believed in superstitions. Never needed one. I suppose I was “lucky” in that way. But now the best way to refer to me is desperate. I’d wear the same socks for an entire year just to be the high-scoring center I used to be. Imagine my surprise when after spending New Year’s Eve with a woman, I score a hat trick in the next game—that’s three goals in one game for you non-hockey lovers. Now, I have to track her down and bribe her to do it again before every game. Get your mind out of the gutter, I’m not talking about it. I find her and when I get to know her better, I end up spending more time thinking about her than my game, but she’s made it clear she wants no part of me. She’s going to learn that I didn’t become a professional hockey player without having to fight for what I want.
The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements: You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world, or you can join the service. Andrew chooses to enlist in the armed forces. But as he starts a career of supposed privilege, he soon learns that good food and decent health care come at a steep price.
“I don't know when I've been so wowed by a new author” –Chip Health, co-author of The Power of Moments and Switch A talented journalist reveals the hidden patterns behind what we call "luck" -- and shows us how we can all improve outcomes despite life’s inevitable randomness. "Do you believe in luck?" is a polarizing question, one you might ask on a first date. Some of us believe that we make our own luck. Others see inequality everywhere and think that everyone’s fate is at the whim of the cosmos. Karla Starr has a third answer: unlucky, "random" outcomes have predictable effects on our behavior that often make us act in self-defeating ways without even realizing it. In this groundbreaking book, Starr traces wealth, health, and happiness back to subconscious neurological processes, blind cultural assumptions, and tiny details you're in the habit of overlooking. Each chapter reveals how we can cultivate personal strengths to overcome life’s unlucky patterns. For instance: • Everyone has free access to that magic productivity app—motivation. The problem? It isn’t evenly distributed. What lucky accidents of history explain patterns behind why certain groups of people are more motivated in some situations than others? • If you look like an underperforming employee, your resume can't override the gut-level assumptions that a potential boss will make from your LinkedIn photo. How can we make sure that someone’s first impression is favorable? • Just as people use irrelevant traits to make assumptions about your intelligence, kindness, and trustworthiness, we also make inaccurate snap judgments. How do these judgments affect our interactions, and what should we assume about others to maximize our odds of having lucky encounters? We don’t always realize when the world's invisible biases work to our advantage or recognize how much of a role we play in our own lack of luck. By ending the guessing game about how luck works, Starr allows you to improve your fortunes while expending minimal effort.
THIRTEEN IS MY LUCKY NUMBER is a vividly detailed memoir of a native Pole who was in high school when the Nazis invaded his country. Author Biega worked with the underground to harass the Germans, an activity that culminated in a 63-day uprising against the Nazi occupiers in 1944. It ultimately was crushed because the Soviets refused to help. He was wounded in a skirmish, & sent to a POW camp in eastern Germany. After the war ended, he walked three days to freedom. His language skills allowed him to work as a translator for the Americans & a liaison officer with the Polish army in exile in London. For four years he lived with his wartime bride through the scarcity of postwar London, working & waiting for a precious immigration visa to the United States. When it came, Biega joyfully became a part of a stream of immigrants that worked very hard to achieve success. The second part of this book is a portrait of a growing family in 1950s America, remembering their Polish roots but profoundly grateful for their American opportunity. It's a fascinating look at an aspect of World War II few Americans are familiar with, & a study of how hard work, optimism & luck can bring great rewards. To order Syrena Press, P.O. Box 490, Plainsboro, NJ 08536-9998 or Professional Press, 1- 800-277-8960, P.O. Box 4371, Chapel Hill, NC 27515-4371.
Hailed a “Best Book of the Year” by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Vulture, and the New York Public Library, Some Trick is now in paperback Finalist for the Saroyan Prize for Fiction For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most far-reaching dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even in the face of situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.”
