Narrow Dog To Carcassonne

The hilarious and true story of two senior-citizens and their whippet dog who hatch, plan and carry out a “lunatic scheme” to sail from Stone in Staffordshire to Carcassonne in the South of France.

Following the triumph of thier trip through France to Carcassonne, these two pensioners (and thier whippet, Jim) now cast off in thier narrowboat down the Intracoastal Waterway of the USA - from VIrginia to the Gulf of Mexico.

At seventy-five, Terry and Monica Darlington had done everything they could think of doing, including starting a business and becoming athletes and running a literary society.Lately they had become boating adventurers and Terry a bestselling writer. But in their Midlands canal town in November, life was looking dull and short on surprises. Then their famous canal boat was destroyed by fire. Within a few days they had bought a new one and soon headed north in the Phyllis May 2 – to Liverpool, Lancaster, the Pennines and Wigan Pier. Terry recorded the journey, and alongside it the story of his life and his marriage and his dog Jim, with his broken ear like a flat cap, and Monica’s dog Jess, known with heartbreaking reason as the Flying Catastrophe. Funny, affecting and beautifully told, this is a story that brims with incident and excitement, and is full of the famous and fascinating people the Darlingtons have met - a story of an adventurous life well lived.

The timeless tale of 14-year-old Velvet Brown's participation in the Grand National Steeplechase has thrilled generations of readers. The story provides a positive role model for girls and remains ever popular with young horse lovers.

Truly hilarious books are rare. Even rarer are those based on real events. Join A.J. Mackinnon, your charming and eccentric guide, on an amazing voyage in a boat called Jack de Crow. Equipped with his cheerful optimism and a pith helmet, this Australian Odysseus in a dinghy travels from the borders of North Wales to the Black Sea – 4900 kilometres over salt and fresh water, under sail, at the oars, or at the end of a tow-rope – through twelve countries, 282 locks and numerous trials and adventures, including an encounter with Balkan pirates. Along the way he experiences the kindness of strangers, gets very lost, and perfects the art of slow travel.

While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

The New York Timescompared Sheldon M. Novick'sHenry James: The Young Masterto "a movie of James's life, as it unfolds, moment to moment, lending the book a powerful immediacy." Now, inHenry James: The Mature Master, Novick completes his super, revelatory two-volume account of one of the world's most gifted and least understood authors, and of a vanished world of aristocrats and commoners. Using hundreds of letters only recently made available and taking a fresh look at primary materials, Novick reveals a man utterly unlike the passive, repressed, and privileged observer painted by other biographers. Henry James is seen anew, as a passionate and engaged man of his times, driven to achieve greatness and fame, drawn to the company of other men, able to write with sensitivity about women as he shared their experiences of love and family responsibility. James, age thirty-eight as the volume begins, basking in the success of his first major novel,The Portrait of a Lady, is a literary lion in danger of being submerged by celebrity. As his finances ebb and flow he turns to the more lucrative world of the stage-with far more success than he has generally been credited with. Ironically, while struggling to excel in the theatre, James writes such prose masterpieces asThe Wings of the DoveandThe Golden Bowl. Through an astonishingly prolific life, James still finds time for profound friendships and intense rivalries.Henry James: The Mature Masterfeatures vivid new portraits of James's famous peers, including Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson; his close and loving siblings Alice and William; and the many compelling young men, among them Hugh Walpole and Howard Sturgis, with whom James exchanges professions of love and among whom he thrives. We see a master converting the materials of an active life into great art. Here, too, as one century ends and another begins, is James's participation in the public events of his native America and adopted England. As the still-feudal European world is shaken by democracy and as America sees itself endangered by a wave of Jewish and Italian immigrants, a troubled James wrestles with his own racial prejudices and his desire for justice. With the coming of world war all other considerations are set aside, and James enlists in the cause of civilization, leaving his greatest final works unwritten. Hailed as a genius and a warm and charitable man-and derided by enemies as false, effeminate, and self-infatuated-Henry James emerges here as a major and complex figure, a determined and ambitious artist who was planning a new novel even on his deathbed. InHenry James: The Mature Master, he is at last seen in full; along with its predecessor volume, this book is bound to become t

A WRY AND HILARIOUS ACCOUNT OF LIFE AT A BOOKSHOP IN A REMOTE SCOTTISH VILLAGE "Among the most irascible and amusing bookseller memoirs I've read." --Dwight Garner, New York Times "Warm, witty and laugh-out-loud funny..."—Daily Mail The Diary of a Bookseller is Shaun Bythell's funny and fascinating memoir of a year in the life at the helm of The Bookshop, in the small village of Wigtown, Scotland—and of the delightfully odd locals, unusual staff, eccentric customers, and surreal buying trips that make up his life there as he struggles to build his business . . . and be polite . . . When Bythell first thought of taking over the store, it seemed like a great idea: The Bookshop is Scotland's largest second-hand store, with over one hundred thousand books in a glorious old house with twisting corridors and roaring fireplaces, set in a tiny, beautiful town by the sea. It seemed like a book-lover's paradise . . . Until Bythell did indeed buy the store. In this wry and hilarious diary, he tells us what happened next—the trials and tribulations of being a small businessman; of learning that customers can be, um, eccentric; and of wrangling with his own staff of oddballs (such as ski-suit-wearing, dumpster-diving Nicky). And perhaps none are quirkier than the charmingly cantankerous bookseller Bythell himself turns out to be. But then too there are the buying trips to old estates and auctions, with the thrill of discovery, as well as the satisfaction of pressing upon people the books that you love . . . Slowly, with a mordant wit and keen eye, Bythell is seduced by the growing charm of small-town life, despite —or maybe because of—all the peculiar characters there.