During WWII my father kept a diary during his 300 combat hours and 81 missions as a decorated P-47 fighter pilot in England. This book celebrates and honors my father and mother's participation in that difficult time. The screenplay Hunters in the Fog looks into the mysteries of luck and fate in war. Why is it certain pilots, regardless of their refined skills in war, fall victim to death, chopped short in youth? My father turns over that question in his diary. He notes the near misses to himself and other pilots, the mysterious accidents, the horror of fiery death and the strange beauty and suspense of aerial warfare. With his advice, and inspired in part by the classic characters of Dumas' The Three Musketeers, we fashioned a similar set of personalities who must survive 300 hours of deadly aerial combat to complete their tour of duty.
Winner of Killer Nashville’s 2019 Silver Falchion Award for Mystery and Edgar Finalist for Best First Novel, its audiobook won Audiofile Magazine’s Earphone Award for Mystery and Suspense. This debut novel is the first in a series starring the real-life author and suffragette Margaret Harkness, continued in Queen’s Gambit. “Ardent feminism and cerebral detection face down the Ripper in the fog-shrouded streets of London: a feast for lovers of historical crime!” —Laurie R. King, author of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice and Island of the Mad “Arthur Conan Doyle chasing after Jack the Ripper? Bradley Harper makes this irresistible pairing come alive. Ingenious in its premise and plotting, impressive in its unique forensic precision, infectious in its overflowing passion for the subject matter, A Knife in the Fog will be relished by fans of historical fiction, Sherlock Holmes, and Ripper literature. A debut novel worth falling for.” —Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Chamber Physician Arthur Conan Doyle takes a break from his practice to assist London police in tracking down Jack the Ripper in this debut novel and series starter. September 1888. A twenty-nine-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle practices medicine by day and writes at night. His first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, although gaining critical and popular success, has only netted him twenty-five pounds. Embittered by the experience, he vows never to write another "crime story." Then a messenger arrives with a mysterious summons from former Prime Minister William Gladstone, asking him to come to London immediately. Once there, he is offered one month's employment to assist the Metropolitan Police as a "consultant" in their hunt for the serial killer soon to be known as Jack the Ripper. Doyle agrees on the stipulation his old professor of surgery, Professor Joseph Bell--Doyle's inspiration for Sherlock Holmes--agrees to work with him. The two are joined by Miss Margaret Harkness, an author residing in the East End who knows how to use a Derringer and serves as their guide and companion. Pursuing leads through the dank alleys and courtyards of Whitechapel, they come upon the body of a savagely murdered fifth victim. Soon it becomes clear that the hunters have become the hunted when a knife-wielding figure approaches.
Nursed back to health by Arctic aborigines, a Canadian sailor finds his loyalties torn between his new people and the life he left behind—a novel full of “passion, strength, and beauty of a world we . . . have never understood” (Farley Mowat) John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor is left behind by his ship, stranded on the northeastern tip of Siberia. Having had his hands amputated, crippled with little hope of returning home, the Chukchi community decides to adopt this wounded stranger and teaches him to live as a true human being. From thinking of Chukchi as savages, John comes to know his new companions as real people who share the best and worst of human traits with his own kind. He begins to understand ehri community, respects them, and makes an effort to be accepted as one of them. Though crippled, John rises to the Chukchi view of a person. But how much longer will John commit to this newfound perspective when presented with the opportunity to return to his own past and family? Rytkheu’s empathy, humor, and provocative voice guide us across the magnificent landscape of the North and reveal all the complexity and beauty of a vanishing world. A Dream in Polar Fog is at once a cross-cultural journey, an ethnographic chronicle of the people of Chukotka, and a politically and emotionally charged adventure story.
In the summer of 1783, an unusual dry fog descended upon large parts of the northern hemisphere. The fog brought with it bloodred sunsets, a foul sulfuric odor, and a host of other peculiar weather events. Inspired by the Enlightenment, many naturalists attempted to find reasonable explanations for these occurrences. Between 8 June 1783 and 7 February 1784, a 27-kilometer-long fissure volcano erupted in the Icelandic highlands. It produced the largest volume of lava released by any volcanic eruption on planet Earth in the last millennium. In Iceland, the eruption led to the death of one-fifth of the population. The jetstream carried its volcanic gases further afield to Europe and beyond, where they settled as a fog, the origin of which puzzled naturalists and laypersons. "A Mist Connection" is an environmental history that documents the Laki eruption and its consequences for Iceland and the wider world. The book combines methods of historical disaster research, climate history, global history, history of science, and geology in an interdisciplinary approach. Icelandic flood lava eruptions of this scale have a statistical recurrence period of 200 to 500 years; it is crucial to understand their nature so that we can prepare for the next one. An eruption of this magnitude would surely be disastrous for our modern, globalized, and interconnected world.
When a young elephant is brutally orphaned by poachers, it is only a matter of time before he begins terrorising the countryside, earning his malevolent name from the humans he kills and then tenderly buries with leaves. Manu, the studious son of a rice farmer, loses his cousin to the Gravedigger and is drawn into the alluring world of ivory hunting. Emma is working on a documentary set in a Kerala wildlife park with her best friend. Her work leads her to witness the porous boundary between conservation and corruption and she finds herself caught up in her own betrayal. As the novel hurtles toward its tragic climax, these three storylines fuse into a wrenching meditation on love and revenge, fact and myth, duty and sacrifice. In a feat of audacious imagination and arrestingly beautiful prose, The Tusk That Did the Damage tells an original and heart-breaking story about how we treat nature, and each other.
The POTUS Chronicles is a merry romp through some of the most eventful times in the nation's political history. It's a sometimes-bumpy roller coaster ride, "prudently recreating" with George H. W. Bush, wondering what's next for "Bubba" Bill Clinton and his co-president wife, and "misunderestimating" George "Dubya" Bush. Like pages from a reporter's notebook, satirical glimpses of three administrations are captured with the freshness of today's headlines. Besides presenting a breezy account of war and peace and partying at the dawn of a new century, the pages of The POTUS Chronicles contain answers to many questions that trouble the minds of conscientious citizens, such as: Which president had to prove his identity to a skeptical third-grader? What advice did the Bush dog, Millie, give the Clinton cat, Socks? Whose presidential inauguration involved an official road kill patrol? Who is the former first lady who revealed she has conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt? How did the White House staff react when a president choked on a pretzel? What happened to Dick Cheney after a Republican senator switched parties? Relive a memorable era in the nations capital as seen through the lens of a seasoned Washington observer, tongues in cheek.
Tatar challenges the assumptions we make about childhood reading. By exploring how beauty and horror operate in children's literature, she examines how and what children read, showing how literature transports and transforms children with its intoxicating, captivating and occasionally terrifying energy.
