An inspirational true story of a 4 year old girl who fell into the power of a man whose evil knew no bounds. She encountered terrifying mental and physical torture from her psychopathic stepfather for a period of 17 years until she managed to break free, her spirit still unbrokenJane Elliott fell into the hands of her sadistic and brutal stepfather when she was 4 years old. Her story is both inspiring and horrifying. Kept a virtual prisoner in a fortress-like house and treated to daily and ritual abuse, Jane nonetheless managed to lose herself in a fantasy world which would keep her spirit alive.Equally as horrifying as the physical abuse Jane suffered, were the mental games her tormentor played—getting his kicks from seeing Jane humiliated, confused, crushed and defeated at every turn.Her family and neighbourhood were all terrified of Jane’s stepfather so no-one held out a rescuing hand. So Jane had to help herself. When she was 21 she ran away with her baby daughter and boyfriend to start a new life in hiding. Several years on she found the courage to go to the police. A court case followed where Jane bravely stood up against the unrepentant aggressor she so feared. He was jailed for 17 years. Jane’s family took his side.

Slavomir Rawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer. On 19 November 1939 he was arrested by the Russians and after brutal interrogation he was sentenced to 25 years in the Gulags. After a 3-month journey to Siberia in the depths of winter he escaped with 6 companions, realising that to stay in the camp meant almost certain death. In June 1941 they crossed the trans-Siberian railway and headed south, climbing into Tibet and freedom 9 months later in March 1942 after travelling on foot through some of the harshest regions in the world, including the Gobi Desert. First published in 1956, this is one of the world's greatest true stories of adventure, survival and escape.

The sinking of the Titanic has captured the imagination of the public like no other tragedy of the modern age. Lawrence Beesley’s eyewitness account of the disastrous voyage stands as one of the most carefully written and authoritative books on the subject, despite the fact that it was published only months after the event. Beesley was uniquely qualified to write this book, having himself been a second class passenger aboard the SS Titanic. He gives a detailed description of his personal experiences aboard the doomed luxury liner, setting the record straight on many topics, as well as presenting the event from a variety of other perspectives. Rich in both narrative detail and compassion, The Loss of the S.S. Titanic should be the first port of call for anyone interested in the famous ship.[Contain a table.]

From Publishers WeeklyJam-packed with critical insights and historical context, this discussion of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia from Miller’s double perspectives-as the wide-eyed child who first read the books and an agnostic adult who revisits them-is intellectually inspiring but not always cohesive. Finding her distrust of Christianity undermined by her love of Lewis’s indisputably Christian-themed world, Salon.com cofounder and staff writer Miller seeks to “recapture [Narnia’s] old enchantment.” She replaces lost innocence with understanding, visiting Lewis’s home in England, reading his letters and books (which she quotes extensively) and interviewing readers and writers. Lengthy musings on Freudian analysis of sadomasochism, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Anglo-Saxon nationalism and taxonomies of genre share space with incisive and unapologetic criticism of Lewis’s treatment of race, gender and class. The heart of the book is in the first-person passages where Miller recalls longing to both be and befriend Lucy Pevensie and extols Narnia’s “shining wonders.” Her reluctant reconciliation with Lewis’s and Narnia’s imperfections never quite manages to be convincing, but anyone who has endured exile from Narnia will recognize and appreciate many aspects of her journey. (Dec. 3)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.From The New YorkerIn this powerful meditation on ‘the schism between childhood and adult reading,’ Miller recounts her tumultuous relationship with the favorite books of her youth, C. S. Lewis’s ‘Chronicles of Narnia.’ Filled from an early age with a distrust of the Catholic faith in which she was raised, Miller didn’t notice the Christian subtext, and when she learned of it, as a teen-ager, she felt ‘tricked, cheated.’ Combining memoir, criticism, and biography, Miller takes Lewis to task for his ‘betrayals,’ including the racial stereotyping and ‘litism that, she argues, inform the books. Yet her respect for Lewis’s talent remains; scrupulously placing him in his historical context, she crafts a nuanced portrait of the author as a sensitive curmudgeon and comes to the realization that ‘a perfect story is no more interesting or possible than a perfect human being.’Copyright ©2008 The New Yorker

Знаете ли вы, через какие сложности и препятствия приходится пройти футбольным лидерам, чтобы привести свою команду к победе? Что помогает им сохранять спокойствие под невероятным давлением?В этой книге, впервые в истории, 30 самых успешных руководителей футбольных команд раскрывают свои секреты. Это менеджеры и тренеры, за каждым шагом, словом, успехами и неудачами которых следят миллионы фанатов. Они расскажут о жизненных уроках, которые вынесли за свой долгий профессиональный путь, а также о принятых ими спорных решениях и своих взглядах на лидерство. Секретами лидерства делятся: Жозе Моуринью («Челси»), сэр Алекс Фергюсон («Манчестер Юнайтед»), Андре Виллаш-Боаш («Зенит»), Дэвид Платт («Манчестер Сити»), Рой Ходжсон (сборная Англии), Карло Анчелотти («Реал Мадрид») и многие другие титулованные тренеры современного футбола.

"Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun, looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him…" A poetic and impressionistic tribute to those who perished in World War I-and those who lived, haunted by their memories. "Brilliant-the Great War book of our time."-Observer.

In a frank expose of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman’s mission to the world’s poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish is to serve God. He asks whether Mother Teresa’s good works answer any higher purpose than the need of the world’s privileged to see someone, somewhere, doing something for the Third World. He unmasks pseudo-miracles, questions Mother Teresa’s fitness to adjudicate on matters of sex and reproduction, and reports on a version of saintly ubiquity which affords genial relations with dictators, corrupt tycoons and convicted frauds.

An acclaimed novelist's riveting memoir about what it means to be adopted and how all of us construct our sense of self and family.Before A.M. Homes was born, she was put up for adoption. Her birth mother was a twenty-two- year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with children of his own. The Mistress's Daughter is the story of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her.Homes, renowned for the psychological accuracy and emotional intensity of her storytelling, tells how her birth parents initially made contact with her and what happened afterward (her mother stalked her and appeared unannounced at a reading) and what she was able to reconstruct about the story of their lives and their families. Her birth mother, a complex and lonely woman, never married or had another child, and died of kidney failure in 1998; her birth father, who initially made overtures about inviting her into his family, never did.Then the story jumps forward several years to when Homes opens the boxes of her mother's memorabilia. She had hoped to find her mother in those boxes, to know her secrets, but no relief came. She became increasingly obsessed with finding out as much as she could about all four parents and their families, hiring researchers and spending hours poring through newspaper morgues, municipal archives and genealogical Web sites. This brave, daring, and funny book is a story about what it means to be adopted, but it is also about identity and how all of us define our sense of self and family.

A deathbed promise leads a daughter on an incredible journey to write about her grandfather who was a famous war hero. But this journey had a terrible destination: the discovery that he was a Nazi war criminal.

Silvia Foti’s mother was dying. Wanting to preserve family history, Silvia’s mother asks her to write a book about Foti’s grandfather, Jonas Noreika, a famous WWII hero. Foti’s grandmother tries to intervene—begging her granddaughter not to write about her husband. “Just let history lie,” she whispered.

Foti had no idea that in keeping her promise to her mother, her discoveries would bring her to a personal crisis, unearth Holocaust denial, and expose an official cover-up by the Lithuanian government that resulted in an internationally-followed lawsuit.

Jonas Noreika was a Lithuanian known as General Storm. He led an uprising that won the country of Lithuania back from the communists, only to have it fall under Nazi control. He was an official during the Holocaust and chief of the second largest region in the country during the Nazi occupation, yet he became a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. Foti set out to write a heroic biography about her famous grandfather. But as she dug ever deeper, she “encountered so much evidence proving my flesh and blood ‘hero’ was a Jew-killer, even I could no longer believe the lie.”

The Nazi’s Granddaughter is Foti’s first-hand account of her journey, which began as an act of family pride and ended with uncovering the secret her family, and an entire nation, had kept hidden for 79 years.

It addresses:

• How should our family’s past, shameful or noble, shape our identity?

• How could one man be revered as a hero, having a grammar school named after him, and yet be a villain responsible for the deaths of thousands?

• Why are some European countries still in denial about their role in the Holocaust?

• How was this kept secret until now?

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A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees.Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.

The heroic, real-life personal account of Chris Ryan's most famous mission, The One That Got Away, is now reworked for a new generation.Some authors just write about it. Chris Ryan has been there, done it — and here is the gripping real-life tale…During the Gulf War in 1991, Chris Ryan became separated from the other members of the SAS patrol, Bravo Two Zero. Alone, he beat off an Iraqi attack and set out for Syria. Over the next seven days he walked almost 200 miles, his life constantly in danger.Of the eight SAS members involved in this famous mission, only one escaped capture. This is his story…

From Publishers Weekly Bestselling novelist Sheldon's memoir is reminiscent of his colorful novels, a rags-to-riches yarn replete with struggle, an indomitable hero and eventual glamour. It opens with a 17-year-old Sheldon preparing to commit suicide in Chicago in 1934. "Lonely and trapped," he wanted to attend college but couldn't afford it. Thankfully, his father intervened, and the young man got a new lease on life. He went from being an RKO theater usher to a struggling songwriter, then a top-flight Hollywood screenwriter in a few short years. For the next 30-odd years, Sheldon wrote and directed films, meeting studio honchos and stars like Kirk Douglas, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. The author's impressive achievements include a WWII flying stint, a screenwriting Oscar for 1947's *The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer* , a Tony for writing the 1959 Broadway hit *Redhead* , the creation of four classic TV series (including *I Dream of Jeannie* ) and several bestsellers (_Bloodline_; *The Sands of Time* ; etc.). Yet these accomplishments came with bouts of depression and the death of a child. While the book is long on Sheldon's Hollywood and television days, it skimps on his domestic and publishing lives. Still, that shouldn't stop Sheldon's legions of fans from lapping this up. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Product Description Author of over a dozen bestsellers, Academy Award-winning screenwriter, and creator of some of television's greatest hits, Sheldon has seen and done it all, and now in this candid memoir, he shares his story for the first time.

This bestselling biography of one of the 20th century's most remarkable and controversial writers is now available in paperback.  Author Barbara Branden, who knew Rand for nineteen years, provides a matchless portrait of this fiercely private and complex woman.

This bestselling biography of one of the 20th century's most remarkable and controversial writers is now available in paperback.  Author Barbara Branden, who knew Rand for nineteen years, provides a matchless portrait of this fiercely private and complex woman.

In her international bestseller, The Downing Street Years, Margaret Thatcher provided an acclaimed account of her years as Prime Minister. This second volume reflects on the early years of her life and how they influenced her political career.

Undoubtedly, “The Revolution WILL be televised” was the main players’ motto. Most Romanians only saw their revolution on their small black and white televisions while others were the actors, willing and uninformed…. The Revolution ruthlessly took more than it gave — beautiful bodies, healthy food, cultivated culture, tested tradition. In the end, communism’s empty materialism was simply traded for western society’s empty materialism, which happily did away with what the Eastern Block years had inefficiently leftover. The hungry people of before 1989 have been transformed into obese people. Instead of queuing for meagrely rationed bread they now queue to buy imported foods in overpriced hypermarkets. It’s time the world heard this true story of Romania’s Revolution, because most Romanians took only a couple of years to realize how little western culture had to offer.

"An Icelandic-punk version of Catcher in the Rye." — Dallas Morning News"If there were more people like Jón Gnarr the world wouldn't be in such a mess." — Oliver SacksThe second book in a trilogy chronicling the troubled childhood of international sensation Jón Gnarr, The Pirate revisits his teenage years with sincere compassion and great humor: bullied relentlessly, Jón receives rebellious inner strength through the Sex Pistols and Prince Kropotkin — punk rock and anarchy offer the promise of a better and more exciting life.Jón Gnarr, the most famous comedic actor in Iceland, founded the Best Party, ran for mayor of Reykjavík as a joke and won, and served as mayor of Reykjavík 2010–2014, in the process becoming an international sensation and symbol of true alternatives to the political process worldwide.

When Lorenzo de’ Medici seized control of the Florentine Republic in 1512, he summarily fired the Secretary to the Second Chancery of the Signoria and set in motion a fundamental change in the way we think about politics. The person who held the aforementioned office with the tongue-twisting title was none other than Niccolò Machiavelli, who, suddenly finding himself out of a job after 14 years of patriotic service, followed the career trajectory of many modern politicians into punditry. Unable to become an on-air political analyst for a television network, he only wrote a book. But what a book The Prince is. Its essential contribution to modern political thought lies in Machiavelli’s assertion of the then revolutionary idea that theological and moral imperatives have no place in the political arena. “It must be understood,” Machiavelli avers, “that a prince … cannot observe all of those virtues for which men are reputed good, because it is often necessary to act against mercy, against faith, against humanity, against frankness, against religion, in order to preserve the state.” With just a little imagination, readers can discern parallels between a 16th-century principality and a 20th-century presidency.

Here is a remarkable true story of forgiveness—a tremendous testament to the courage that propels one toward remembrance, and finally, peace with the past. A classic war autobiography, The Railway Man is a powerful tale of survival and of the human capacity to understand even those who have done us unthinkable harm.