"On January 1, 1943, First Lieutenant Pete Edris was transferred to the 306th Bomb Group, 369th Bomb Squad, and served under Col. Armstrong (who was portrayed by Gregory Peck in the movie, 'Twelve O'clock High'). This is Pete's story. It's a story of a twenty-two year old boy whose B-17 bomber was blown out of the sky over Rennes, France, on March 8, 1943. It's a story about the people who befriended him. And it's a testimonial to his irrepressible desire to survive one of Nazi Germany's most notorious prison camps, Stalag Luft III, from where 'The Great Escape' was based. It's a story about living to see another day...and reuniting with Doris Cooke, his soul mate...and the love of his life. It's a truly remarkable story about a rare World War II statistic: An infinitesimal twenty-three American soldiers were declared dead in World War II...and lived to tell about it. Pete Edris was one of those soldiers. And this is his unforgettable story." --Raymond Reid, Introduction, page v.
Winner of the 2017 J. Anthony Lukas PrizeShortlisted for the 2017 Hurston/Wright Foundation AwardFinalist for the 2017 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in JournalismLonglisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non Fiction On an average day in America, seven children and teens will be shot dead. In Another Day in the Death of America, award-winning journalist Gary Younge tells the stories of the lives lost during one such day. It could have been any day, but he chose November 23, 2013. Black, white, and Latino, aged nine to nineteen, they fell at sleepovers, on street corners, in stairwells, and on their own doorsteps. From the rural Midwest to the barrios of Texas, the narrative crisscrosses the country over a period of twenty-four hours to reveal the full human stories behind the gun-violence statistics and the brief mentions in local papers of lives lost. This powerful and moving work puts a human face-a child's face-on the "collateral damage" of gun deaths across the country. This is not a book about gun control, but about what happens in a country where it does not exist. What emerges in these pages is a searing and urgent portrait of youth, family, and firearms in America today.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Celebrate all the ways love makes us who we are with this enthralling and poignant follow-up to the New York Times bestseller Every Day--now a major motion picture. David Levithan turns his New York Times bestseller Every Day on its head by flipping perspectives in this exploration of love and how it can change you. Every day is the same for Rhiannon. She has accepted her life, convinced herself that she deserves her distant, temperamental boyfriend, Justin, even established guidelines by which to live: Don’t be too needy. Avoid upsetting him. Never get your hopes up. Until the morning everything changes. Justin seems to see her, to want to be with her for the first time, and they share a perfect day—a perfect day Justin doesn’t remember the next morning. Confused, depressed, and desperate for another day as great as that one, Rhiannon starts questioning everything. Then, one day, a stranger tells her that the Justin she spent that day with, the one who made her feel like a real person . . . wasn’t Justin at all.
From acclaimed classical historian, author of Ghost on the Throne (“Gripping . . . the narrative verve of a born writer and the erudition of a scholar” —Daniel Mendelsohn) and editor of The Landmark Arrian:The Campaign of Alexander (“Thrilling” —The New York Times Book Review), a high-stakes drama full of murder, madness, tyranny, perversion, with the sweep of history on the grand scale. At the center, the tumultuous life of Seneca, ancient Rome’s preeminent writer and philosopher, beginning with banishment in his fifties and subsequent appointment as tutor to twelve-year-old Nero, future emperor of Rome. Controlling them both, Nero’s mother, Julia Agrippina the Younger, Roman empress, great-granddaughter of the Emperor Augustus, sister of the Emperor Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Emperor Claudius. James Romm seamlessly weaves together the life and written words, the moral struggles, political intrigue, and bloody vengeance that enmeshed Seneca the Younger in the twisted imperial family and the perverse, paranoid regime of Emperor Nero, despot and madman. Romm writes that Seneca watched over Nero as teacher, moral guide, and surrogate father, and, at seventeen, when Nero abruptly ascended to become emperor of Rome, Seneca, a man never avid for political power became, with Nero, the ruler of the Roman Empire. We see how Seneca was able to control his young student, how, under Seneca’s influence, Nero ruled with intelligence and moderation, banned capital punishment, reduced taxes, gave slaves the right to file complaints against their owners, pardoned prisoners arrested for sedition. But with time, as Nero grew vain and disillusioned, Seneca was unable to hold sway over the emperor, and between Nero’s mother, Agrippina—thought to have poisoned her second husband, and her third, who was her uncle (Claudius), and rumored to have entered into an incestuous relationship with her son—and Nero’s father, described by Suetonius as a murderer and cheat charged with treason, adultery, and incest, how long could the young Nero have been contained? Dying Every Day is a portrait of Seneca’s moral struggle in the midst of madness and excess. In his treatises, Seneca preached a rigorous ethical creed, exalting heroes who defied danger to do what was right or embrace a noble death. As Nero’s adviser, Seneca was presented with a more complex set of choices, as the only man capable of summoning the better aspect of Nero’s nature, yet, remaining at Nero’s side and colluding in the evil regime he created. Dying Every Day is the first book to tell the compelling and nightmarish story of the philosopher-poet who was almost a king, tied to a tyrant—as Seneca, the paragon of reason, watched his student spiral into madness and whose descent saw five family murders, the Fire of Rome, and a savage purge that destroyed the supreme minds of the Senate’s golden age.
Novels by Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time. Hägglund gives them another reading entirely: fear of time and death is generated by investment in temporal life. Engaging with Freud and Lacan, he opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.
When danger becomes a temptation, when every move brings you closer to the edge, when you live each day like it's your last, there's a surprise around every curve.
In 1975, Angola was tumbling into pandemonium; everyone who could was packing crates, desperate to abandon the beleaguered colony. With his trademark bravura, Ryszard Kapuscinski went the other way, begging his was from Lisbon and comfort to Luanda—once famed as Africa's Rio de Janeiro—and chaos.Angola, a slave colony later given over to mining and plantations, was a promised land for generations of poor Portuguese. It had belonged to Portugal since before there were English-speakers in North America. After the collapse of the fascist dictatorship in Portugal in 1974, Angola was brusquely cut loose, spurring the catastrophe of a still-ongoing civil war. Kapuscinski plunged right into the middle of the drama, driving past thousands of haphazardly placed check-points, where using the wrong shibboleth was a matter of life and death; recording his imporessions of the young soldiers—from Cuba, Angola, South Africa, Portugal—fighting a nebulous war with global repercussions; and examining the peculiar brutality of a country surprised and divided by its newfound freedom.Translated from the Polish by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand.
“A must-read for anyone interested in moving from inspiration to action.” —Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You Most of us fill our days with frantic activity, bouncing from task to task, scrambling to make deadlines and chase the next promotion. But by the end of each day we’re often left wondering if any of it really mattered. We feel the ticking of the clock, but we’re unsure of the path forward. Die Empty is a tool for people who aren’t willing to put off their most important work for another day. Todd Henry explains the forces that lead to stagnation and introduces practices that will keep you on a true and steady course. The key is embracing the idea that time is finite, so you should focus on the unique contribution to the world that only you can make. Henry shows how to sustain your enthusiasm, push through mental barriers, and unleash your best work each day.
'The Da Vinci Code meets post-Independence India. I'd be surprised if I read a better book this year' M. W. CRAVEN 'This is a crime novel for everyone; for those who love traditional mysteries there are clues, codes and ciphers, but it also had a harder edge and a post-war darkness. Brilliant' ANN CLEEVES A priceless manuscript. A missing scholar. A trail of riddles. For over a century, one of the world's great treasures, a six-hundred-year-old copy of Dante's The Divine Comedy, has been safely housed at Bombay's Asiatic Society. But when it vanishes, together with the man charged with its care, British scholar and war hero, John Healy, the case lands on Inspector Persis Wadia's desk. Uncovering a series of complex riddles written in verse, Persis - together with English forensic scientist Archie Blackfinch - is soon on the trail. But then they discover the first body. As the death toll mounts it becomes evident that someone else is also pursuing this priceless artefact and will stop at nothing to possess it . . . Harking back to an era of darkness, this second thriller in the Malabar House series pits Persis, once again, against her peers, a changing India, and an evil of limitless intent. Gripping, immersive, and full of Vaseem Khan's trademark wit, this is historical fiction at its finest. 'A delicious treat of a historical crime novel' OBSERVER 'Thoroughly enjoyable' DAILY MAIL *** Book one in this series, Midnight at Malabar House, won the CWA Sapere Books Historical Dagger and is an international ebook bestseller. *** 'A wonderful, pacy, literary mystery with a brilliant female protagonist. Vaseem writes books that are good for the soul' STEVE CAVANAGH 'A hugely entertaining, devilishly clever and immersive murder mystery. Inspector Persis Wadia is a brilliant creation and The Dying Day is a triumph. This is my favourite new crime series, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Treat yourself!' ANTONIA HODGSON 'In The Dying Day, Vaseem Khan paints an extraordinarily vivid picture of a Bombay in 1950 still reeling from the aftermath of Partition and suffering the legacy of Empire. Every single element of this complex and compelling story slots together perfectly in the most brilliant and gripping of riddles ... A masterclass in historical crime fiction' CHRIS LLOYD
