Confessions Of A Boatbuilder

Confessions of a Boat Builder recaptures the maritime lore and romance of the last days of the wooden boat and the craftsmen who built them.

Will Millar always dreamed of running away to sea. Now he's an expert sailor, ready to take readers on a lighthearted romp around the world.

Skene's is one of the most famous books on yacht design ever written. First published in 1904, Skene did several revisions, the last of which was published in 1938 and reprinted here in its original form. In 1962, the book was completely revised by Francis S. Kinney and re-published as Skene's Elements of Yacht Design. Kinney's last version was in 1973 and it is long out of print. While the experts are divided on the relative merits of the different editions, it appears that there is strong demand for Skene's original work. At last the book is again available to the many boatbuilders. aspiring naval architects and sailors who need it for frequent reference. The index has been completely revised and expanded to make it more useful for today's readers. "This book is intended to be a practical and concise presentation of some of the operations involved in designing yachts of all types. Cumbersome and impractical methods which are so often found in more pretentious works on naval architecture have been avoided. Those presented have been in everyday use by the author." Thus wrote Norman L. Skene int he preface to the fifth edition of Elements of Yacht Design.

In Men without Maps, John Ibson uncovers the experiences of men after World War II who had same-sex desires but few affirmative models of how to build identities and relationships. Though heterosexual men had plenty of cultural maps—provided by nearly every engine of social and popular culture—gay men mostly lacked such guides in the years before parades, organizations, and publications for queer persons. Surveying the years from shortly before the war up to the gay rights movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Ibson considers male couples, who balanced domestic contentment with exterior repression, as well as single men, whose solitary lives illuminate unexplored aspects of the queer experience. Men without Maps shows how, in spite of the obstacles they faced, midcentury gay men found ways to assemble their lives and senses of self at a time of limited acceptance.

On the battlefields of World War II, with their fellow soldiers as the only shield between life and death, a generation of American men found themselves connecting with each other in new and profound ways. Back home after the war, however, these intimacies faced both scorn and vicious homophobia. The Mourning After makes sense of this cruel irony, telling the story of the unmeasured toll exacted upon generations of male friendships. John Ibson draws evidence from the contrasting views of male closeness depicted in WWII-era fiction by Gore Vidal and John Horne Burns, as well as from such wide-ranging sources as psychiatry texts, child development books, the memoirs of veterans’ children, and a slew of vernacular snapshots of happy male couples. In this sweeping reinterpretation of the postwar years, Ibson argues that a prolonged mourning for tenderness lost lay at the core of midcentury American masculinity, leaving far too many men with an unspoken ache that continued long after the fighting stopped, forever damaging their relationships with their wives, their children, and each other.

Vols. 8-10 of the 1965-1984 master cumulation constitute a title index.

This is the true story, as told to the doctor who looked after him just before he died, of the life of one of the last traditional yakuza in Japan. It wasn’t a "good" life, in either sense of the word, but it was an adventurous one; and the tale he has to tell presents an honest and oddly attractive picture of an insider in that separate, unofficial world. In his low, hoarse voice, he describes the random events that led the son of a prosperous country shopkeeper to become a member, and ultimately the leader, of a gang organizing illegal dice games in Tokyo's liveliest entertainment area. He talks about his first police raid, and the brutal interrogation and imprisonment that followed it. He remembers his first love affair, and the girl he ran away with, and the weeks they spent wandering about the countryside together. Briefly, and matter-of-factly, he describes how he cut off the little finger of his left hand as a ritual gesture of apology. He explains how the games were run and the profits spent; why the ties between members of "the brotherhood" were so important; and how he came to kill a man who worked for him. What emerges is a contradictory personality: tough but not unsentimental; stubborn yet willing to take life more or less as it comes; impulsive but careful to observe the rules of the business he had joined. And in the end, when his tale is finished, you feel you would probably have liked him if you'd met him in person. Fortunately, Dr. Saga's record of his long conversations with him provides a wonderful substitute for that meeting.

'Confessions Of Con Cregan, the Irish Gil Blas' is an adventure-humor novel written by Charles James Lever. It revolves around a young man named Con Cregan, who when he was 15, decided to leave his house and sets out on 12-year-long adventure that brought him away from his hometown of Dublin, all the way to places like Canada and Spain.