Autobiography/Bio/Non-Fiction

//Autobiography/Bio/Non-Fiction
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  • The tale of the White Star Liner Oceanic which struck a remote reef of Shetland and sank in 1914, just after the outbreak of World War One.  This 'Queen of the Seas' was more magnificently luxurious than her famous sister Titanic.  It is remarkable that the disaster was scarcely heard of at the time and is now all but forgotten; but it was wartime; secrecy was paramount and the line had been taken over by the Royal Navy and had become the armed cruiser HMS Oceanic, yet still retaining its grand marble bathrooms, gilt carvings, gold-plated fittings and stained glass domes. The cause of the disaster is classic - there were two captains; one  naval and the other merchant navy, although the naval officer was in supreme command. The ship was on patrol off the north coast of Scotland; the navigator was miles out in in his estimate of of its position on September 8 and when  the mist cleared, instead of being well south and west of the isle of Foula, the ship was east of it and heading straight for the terrible Shaalds reef. After that, mistake piled on mistake - the bow struck and the tide pushed the ship further onto the reef; and the giantess was poised briefly before breaking up and sinking. A remarkable salvage operation of the Oceanic was achieved in 1974.
  • For more than forty years, Frederick Forsyth has been writing extraordinary real-world novels of intrigue, from the groundbreaking The Day of the Jackal to the prescient The Kill List . Whether writing about the murky world of arms dealers, the shadowy Nazi underground movement, or the intricacies of worldwide drug cartels, every plot has been chillingly plausible because every detail has been minutely researched. But what most people don’t know is that some of his greatest stories of intrigue have been in his own life. He was the RAF’s youngest pilot at the age of nineteen, barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, got strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war, landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau (and was accused of helping fund a 1973 coup in Equatorial Guinea). The Stasi arrested him, the Israelis feted him, the IRA threatened him, and a certain attractive Czech secret police agent—well, her actions were a bit more intimate. And that’s just for starters... Illustrated with black and white photographs.
  • Gerald Durrell's debut book is the chronicle of a six months collecting trip to the West African colony of British Cameroon - now Cameroon - that Durrell made with the highly regarded aviculturist and ornithologist John Yealland between December 1947 and August 1948. Their reasons for going on the trip were twofold: to collect and bring back alive some of the fascinating animals, birds, and reptiles that inhabit the region and secondly, for both men to realise a long cherished dream to see Africa. It's a combination of comic exaggeration and environmental accuracy, portrayed in Durrell's light, clever prose that successfully launched Durrell's career as a writer of both non-fiction and fiction, which in turn financed his work as a zookeeper and conservationist.
  • Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, with her daughters Christabel, Sylvia and Adela were the central figures of the Suffragette movement who fought for votes for women in the early years of the 20th century.  Civil disobedience, direct action, mass meetings, hunger strikes and vandalism were all employed to shout the message of equality.  A possible apocryphal story is that of a young suffragette who was distressed by the growing violence on behalf of the Cause, and who came to Mrs. Pankhurst crying, "What shall we do?  What shall we do?"  The reply?  "Put your faith in God, my dear.  She will help us."
  • What will happen to our own sense of identity if surgeons can transplant heads? If biologists can make heads bigger? If psychologists could put electric motors inside the head? This is a sharp assessment of contemporary scientists' projects for reshaping people and controlling their behaviour. Packard investigates the work of geneticists, behavioural psychologists, psycho-surgeons - and politicians, technologists and marketing professionals. Some of the projects are intriguing; some are disturbing - and some make the skin crawl...such as: devising ever-more sophisticated forms of surveillance; manufacturing living organs; stimulating and modifying the brain; programming behaviour; controlling people en masse; altering the natural process of birth, death and old age; hybridising man with animal or man with machine; manipulating genes.
  • Comprehensive in coverage and meticulously researched, this book calls on the latest scientific research to challenge our society's largely unquestioning commitment to new technology. While modern technology has many benefits, the authors believe that Western society's reliance on the latest tech as a cure-all for our problems is seriously misplaced - in some cases, dangerously so. Health and environment issues include: The damaging effects on human health of certain microwaves, including those from mobile phones, mobile phone base stations and television transmission towers; the ongoing debate about the effects of human health of aluminium in food and other consumer  products; the growing evidence that the trans-polyunsaturated acids formed in most margarines during manufacture may be worse for your health than butter; and the growing understanding that the amount of natural light entering the eyes can contribute significantly to the body's ability to fight disease.  There is much which is disagreeable and sometimes distressing, but this book is not a downer. At the end of each chapter there's a positive 'What YOU can do' section.

  • Originally published in 1837, here are the 'Authentic Narratives of the Most Celebrated Sea Robbers' - pirates! True stories of the diabolical desperadoes who plundered ships on the high seas and murdered their passengers and crews. The stories - based on contemporary newspaper accounts, trial proceedings and Admiralty records - describe in lurid detail the life, atrocities and bloody death of the infamous Black Beard as well as the cold-blooded exploits of Jean Lafitte, Robert Kidd, Edward Low, Thomas White, Anne Bonney, Mary Read and scores of other maritime marauders. For those interested in the true-life adventures of the ruthless men and women who sailed under the black flag so long ago. With illustrations reproduced from the original edition.  
  • A fabulous, easy to read volume on the Prince Regent and his day. The Regency Period was one of the most romantic of British history: an age that swung between extremes of elegance and refinement and the depths of sodden brutality. The central figure is the Prince Regent, 'Prinny', and though he sometimes appears as a gigantic spoilt child, he was famously good company and a notable patron of the arts. The author portrays the personalities of the giants of the romantic age - Byron, Shelley, Sheridan, Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Beau Brummel and Sir Walter Scott; Davy Faraday and Macadam; Turner, Constable and Cotman - to name a few. It was an age of extravagance; an age marked by great eccentricities and prodigious jokes; the Luddite riots; the Battles of Waterloo and Peterloo; the first waltzes and the first locomotives. There's exotic and outrè fashions, scandals, political upheaval, architecture and the lot of the common man. Illustrated with colour and black and white drawings and photographs.

  • Long before her successful marriage to Prince Albert, Princess Victoria had a passionate affair with a dashing Scotsman. The 13th Lord Elphinstone was a trusted member of her uncle King William IV's household and a nobleman - but despite his impressive pedigree, Elhinstone was neither German nor royal, prerequisites for the 15 year old princess's ambitious mother, the Duchess of Kent. As the revelations of Victoria's out of wedlock affair (and the rumoured child that the union produced) would have threatened her reign, attempts were made to bury the matter forever. Elphinstone was appointed Governor of Madras and effectively banished to India. The young princess never forgot her first love; she pined for five years before giving in to her mother and marrying Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg.  Successive generations of Royals kept Victoria's secret, aware that the Queen;s correspondence with her cherished first-born 'Vicky' (the Princess Royal) revealed all and lay like a ticking time bomb in a German castle attic In 1945, Victoria's great-grandson  King George IV sent Royal favourite (and MI5 operative) Anthony Blunt on  seven special missions to recover the letters. But Blunt was one of history's successful double agents; before returning the letters to Buckingham Palace he microfilmed the most controversial missives and passed them on to the KGB. Perry  learnt of Blunt's actions while interviewing two ex-KGB master spies in Moscow in the 1990s.His mission to uncover the story of Victoria's first love saw him spending months combing through more than 300 heavily edited files in the British Library, piecing together the truth of Victoria's secret for the first time.   Here is a surprising true story of passion, long-buried secrets and international espionage.  With balck and white and colour photographs.