"Dirty money, tax havens and the offshore system describe the ugliest and most secretive chapter in the history of global economic affairs. Tax havens have declared war on honest, law-abiding people around the world. Wealthy individuals hold over ten trillion dollars offshore. Tax havens are the most important single reason why poor people and poor countries stay poor. Britain and the United States are the world's two most important tax havens. Tax havens now lie at the very heart of the global economy. Over half of world trade, and most international lending, is processed through them. Tax havens have been instrumental in nearly every major economic event, in every big financial scandal, and in every financial crisis since the 1970s, including the latest global economic crisis. "Treasure Islands" show how this happens and reveal what the economics text books will not tell you."
A young slacker decides to live her life according to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure: “A rollicking tale, shameless, funny and intelligent” (The New York Times). When a college graduate with a history of hapless jobs (ice cream scooper, gift wrapper, laziest ever part-time clerk at The Pet Library) reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. When had she ever dreamed a scheme? When had she ever done a foolish, overbold act? When had she ever, like Jim Hawkins, broken from her friends, raced for the beach, stolen a boat, killed a man, and eliminated an obstacle that stood in the way of her getting a hunk of gold? Convinced that Stevenson’s book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its Core Values: boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing. Accompanied by her mother, her sister, and a hostile Amazon parrot that refuses to follow the script, our heroine embarks on a domestic adventure more frightening than anything she’d originally planned. Treasure Island!!! is the story of a ferocious obsession, told by an original voice—“insane, hilarious, and irreverent” (Alice Sebold). “Highly original . . . will keep you entertained in spite of (or more accurately, because of) its toxic narrator.” —Library Journal “A hoot.” —Kirkus Reviews
This ebook includes a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island! A rip-roaring sequel to Treasure Island—Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved classic—about two young friends and their high-seas adventure with dangerous pirates and long-lost treasure. It's almost forty years after the events of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island: Jim Hawkins now runs an inn called the Hispaniola on the English coast with his son, Jim, and Long John Silver has returned to England to live in obscurity with his daughter, Natty. Their lives are quiet and unremarkable; their adventures have seemingly ended. But for Jim and Natty, the adventure is just beginning. One night, Natty approaches young Jim with a proposition: return to Treasure Island and find the remaining treasure that their fathers left behind so many years before. As Jim and Natty set sail in their fathers' footsteps, they quickly learn that this journey will not be easy. Immediately, they come up against murderous pirates, long-held grudges, and greed and deception lurking in every corner. And when they arrive on Treasure Island, they find terrible scenes awaiting them—difficulties which require all their wit as well as their courage. Nor does the adventure end there, since they have to sail homeward again... Andrew Motion’s sequel—rollicking, heartfelt, and utterly brilliant—would make Robert Louis Stevenson proud.
Author and former literary agent Nathan Bransford shares his secrets for creating killer plots, fleshing out your first ideas, crafting compelling characters, and staying sane in the process. Read the guide that New York Times bestselling author Ransom Riggs called "The best how-to-write-a-novel book I've read."
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH From the New York Times bestselling author of Loving Frank comes a much-anticipated second novel, which tells the improbable love story of Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and his tempestuous American wife, Fanny. At the age of thirty-five, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne has left her philandering husband in San Francisco to set sail for Belgium—with her three children and nanny in tow—to study art. It is a chance for this adventurous woman to start over, to make a better life for all of them, and to pursue her own desires. Not long after her arrival, however, tragedy strikes, and Fanny and her children repair to a quiet artists’ colony in France where she can recuperate. Emerging from a deep sorrow, she meets a lively Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, ten years her junior, who falls instantly in love with the earthy, independent, and opinionated “belle Americaine.” Fanny does not immediately take to the slender young lawyer who longs to devote his life to writing—and who would eventually pen such classics as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In time, though, she succumbs to Stevenson’s charms, and the two begin a fierce love affair—marked by intense joy and harrowing darkness—that spans the decades and the globe. The shared life of these two strong-willed individuals unfolds into an adventure as impassioned and unpredictable as any of Stevenson’s own unforgettable tales. Praise for Under the Wide and Starry Sky “A richly imagined [novel] of love, laughter, pain and sacrifice . . . Under the Wide and Starry Sky is a dual portrait, with Louis and Fanny sharing the limelight in the best spirit of teamwork—a romantic partnership.”—USA Today “Powerful . . . flawless . . . a perfect example of what a man and a woman will do for love, and what they can accomplish when it’s meant to be.”—Fort Worth Star-Telegram “Horan’s prose is gorgeous enough to keep a reader transfixed, even if the story itself weren’t so compelling. I kept re-reading passages just to savor the exquisite wordplay. . . . Few writers are as masterful as she is at blending carefully researched history with the novelist’s art.”—The Dallas Morning News “A classic artistic bildungsroman and a retort to the genre, a novel that shows how love and marriage can simultaneously offer inspiration and encumbrance.”—The New York Times Book Review
Squire trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the begin ning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treas ure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year Of grace 17 and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn, and the brown Old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof. I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea chest following behind him in a hand-barrow a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails and the sabre cut across one cheek.
While going through the possessions of a deceased guest who owed them money, the mistress of the inn and her son find a treasure map that leads to a pirate fortune as well as great danger.
First published as a serialized children's story in 1881-1882, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island has become an enduring classic. It has all the elements of a great adventure story: a plot full of twists and turns, an escalating sense of treachery and impending disaster, and a quintessential villain. Teenager Jim Hawkins finds a map titled "Treasure Island" in the belongings of a stricken lodger at the Admiral Benbow Inn in 1750s England. He soon finds himself aboard the schooner Hispaniola with a crew of disguised pirates headed to the Caribbean on a quest to find buried treasure. Long John Silver, the peg-legged cook, is the leader of this wretched crew. He is both engaging and ruthless, feared by even his barbarous accomplices, and a shape-shifter, pretending to be Jim's good friend and enemy, secretly plotting a mutiny. When mutiny begins, Jim must save the day. This beloved adventure story is pure fiction--but fiction well grounded in historical and geographical reality. In The Annotated Treasure Island, editor and researcher Simon Barker-Benfield meticulously and lovingly annotates this voyage, offering crucial factual information, a sociopolitical context, and clear technical explanations that bring you closer to the action. Lavishly illustrated with pictures of nautical equipment, parts of ships, and period maps, The Annotated Treasure Island brings the seafaring vernacular to life. You'll learn about "blocks," "backstays," and "shrouds." And you'll see Jim and the crew handle the Hispaniola, whether it's the "simple" chore of raising the anchor--which in a similar, real vessel could require three hours'-worth of hauling in a very slimy cable six inches at a time--or the difficulty and meaning of "warping" and "putting a man in the chains" in order to take depth soundings. The story illustrations by Louis Rhead (1857-1926) deftly draw out the escalating dramatic tension. Would all the risk and hardship have been worth it? Just how much treasure was the crew after? What could one have bought with 700,000 pounds sterling in the 1700s? Even that question is answered in this newly annotated edition: it would have been enough to buy and outfit a fleet of eleven 104-gun battleships of the period. Seven hundred thousand pounds sterling was serious money, enough money that some men would do almost anything to get it.
