This is a book about expedition, adventure, our thirst for knowledge and pushing the limits of human endurance. From the navigational instruments that have led us through unknown lands, to the advanced engineering that carried us into the depths of the ocean, to the rocket science that propelled us into space, science and adventure have always been inextricably linked. Both are at the heart of everything we now know about the complex universe we find ourselves in. From the groundbreaking sea voyage in 1735 that settled the debate raging between Descartes and Newton about the shape of the earth to the balloon ride that led to the discovery of cosmic rays, we have pushed the limits of what's possible, both on our planet and beyond the clouds. The Little Book of Big Explorations is a collection of some of the most daring and eye-opening adventures in history that have changed the way we view the world, as well as a look at what's still to be discovered. Our insatiable curiosity has driven our survival as a species and can be charted through the centuries by these incredible voyages of discovery.

'A roaring tale ... remains as vivid and exciting today as it was on publication in 1697' Guardian The pirate and adventurer William Dampier circumnavigated the globe three times, and took notes wherever he went. This is his frank, vivid account of his buccaneering sea voyages around the world, from the Caribbean to the Pacific and East Indies. Filled with accounts of raids, escapes, wrecks and storms, it also contains precise observations of people, places, animals and food (including the first English accounts of guacamole, mango chutney and chopsticks). A bestseller on publication, this unique record of the colonial age influenced Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels and consequently the whole of English literature. Edited with an Introduction by Nicholas Thomas

It is widely believed that people living in the Middle Ages seldom traveled. But, as Medieval Travel and Travelers reveals, many medieval people - and not only Marco Polo - were on the move for a variety of different reasons. Assuming no previous knowledge of medieval civilizations, this volume allows readers to experience the excitement of men and women who ventured into new lands. By addressing cross-cultural interaction, religion, and travel literature, the collection sheds light on how travel shaped the way we perceive the world, while also connecting history to the contemporary era of globalization. Including a mix of complete sources, excerpts, and images, Medieval Travel and Travelers provides readers with opportunities for further reflection on what medieval people expected to find in foreign locales, while sparking curiosity about undiscovered spaces and cultures.

George Erickson returns to the far north in search of new sights and stories to tell. Like Service and London, the giants who have captivated millions with tales told across a flickering campfire, he invites new readers to climb into the Tundra Cub II and fly off to a land where the northern lights shimmer, the rivers run cold, and cares slowly wither and die. We will camp on a fog-bound Hudson Bay island, alert for polar bears.Moving inland, we will follow musk oxen, stroll through caribou herds that cover the earth like living carpets and laugh at arctic hares that run on their hind legs like men. Near the Arctic Circle, we will enter a land where the sun, like a moody teenager, refuses to go to bed, then six months later declines to rise. As we wander from campsite to campsite like a bee from blossom to blossom, we will dust off treasured memories that reach back forty years. "Back to the Barrens" provides a fascinating tour of the North, of aeronautics, science, mythology and history in an entertaining, readable book written with humor by a man with the capacity to dream, and the ability to make his dream come true.

A New Scientist Book of the Year Prehistory is all around us. We just need to know where to look. Juan Jose Millas has always felt like he doesn't quite fit into human society. Sometimes he wonders if he is even a Homo sapiens at all. Perhaps he is a Neanderthal who somehow survived? So he turns to Juan Luis Arsuaga, one of the world's leading palaeontologists and a super-smart sapiens, to explain why we are the way we are and where we come from. Over the course of many months the two visit different places, many of them common scenes of our daily lives, and others unique archaeological sites. Arsuaga tries to teach the Neanderthal how to think like a sapiens and, above all, that prehistory is not a thing of the past: that traces of humanity through the millennia can be found anywhere, from a cave or a landscape to a children's playground or a toy shop. Millas and Arsuaga invite you on a journey of wonder that unites scientific discovery with the greatest human invention of all: the art of storytelling.

Pictures often tell stories. But pictures also have a story themselves when they have passed through many hands on their way into a museum. The author, who supports his views with the results of relevant provenance research, goes on a search for traces of these descriptions of the lives of artworks from the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne: the city of Cologne thus had to litigate against the daughter of Hermann Goering for nineteen years in connection with a painting by Cranach; a high price had to be paid for the acquisition of another painting because it was not wanted as a gift; and a courageous museum director made his acquisitions of art despite great resistance. In this book for all museum visitors and readers who would like to learn more about the exhibits, the stories behind the pictures come to life.

Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine. Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose. Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood's saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn't get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers. Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain's account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity's several 'husbands' (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane's reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004 - 2006 HBO series Deadwood makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on - raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.

Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine.
Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose.
Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood's saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn't get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers.
Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain's account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity's several "husbands" (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane's reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004-2006 HBO series "Deadwood" makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on--raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.""

'The Majorana Case is beautifully written, with a pleasant style, and concatenates a great deal of material. A text that could only be written by those who know the life and work of Ettore Majorana very well, as Prof Recami. The book traces the extraordinary life of Ettore Majorana - through his letters, documents and several testimonies from his friends and family members. What makes it more fascinating is that the author presented it also as a detective-story, by exploring his mysterious disappearance at young age. The personal testimonies also give to the book a welcome surplus. The Majorana Case, therefore, is both a pleasant biography and a mystery book.'Contemporary PhysicsEttore Majorana was born in the Sicilian city of Catania. He joined Enrico Fermi's 'Via Panisperna boys' at an early age and was part of the team who first discovered the slow neutrons (the research that would lead to the nuclear reactor and eventually, the atomic bomb). Enrico Fermi considered him one of brightest scientists, comparable to Galileo and Newton.On March 25, 1938, Ettore Majorana mysteriously disappeared at 31. When the author moved to the University of Catania, Sicily, from Milan University back in 1968, he soon discovered important documents pertaining to Majorana's life and works. Together with his own investigative materials and full cooperation from Majorana's family members, he published a book on his disappearance in Italian (after having helped the famous Italian writer, Leonardo Sciascia, to write down his known Essay, by supplying him with copy of some of the discovered documents). Recami's book was entitled Il Caso Majorana - Epistolario, Documenti, Testimonianze and when it first appeared in Italy, it drew interest from all the major newspapers, publications and TVs & broadcast media.Even after his disappearance, Ettore Majorana's name appeared in many areas of frontier physics research, ranging from elementary particle physics to applied condensed matter, to mathematical physics, and more. His long lasting contributions is a testimony of his brilliance and farsightedness and has continued to draw interest from scientists not only in Italy, but from all over world until today.An English version of the original is very appropriate at this juncture, when more and more scholars in the world are getting convinced that he was really a genius 'like Galileo and Newton'. This book traces the extraordinary life of Ettore Majorana - through his letters, documents and testimonies from his friends and family members. What makes this book more fascinating (as a detective-story too) is his mysterious disappearance at young age. This book, therefore, is both a biography and a mystery book.

What does it mean to be on the wrong side of history?

Svenja O'Donnell’s beautiful, aloof grandmother Inge never spoke about the past. All her family knew was that she had grown up in a city that no longer exists on any map: Königsberg in East Prussia, a footnote in history, a place that almost no one has heard of today. But when Svenja impulsively visits this windswept Baltic city, something unlocks in Inge and, finally, she begins to tell her story.

It begins in the secret jazz bars of Hitler’s Berlin. It is a story of passionate first love, betrayal, terror, flight, starvation and violence. As Svenja teases out the threads of her grandmother’s life, retracing her steps all over Europe, she realises that there is suffering here on a scale that she had never dreamt of. And finally, she uncovers a desperately tragic secret that her grandmother has been keeping for sixty years.

Inge's War listens to the voices that are often missing from our historical narrative – those of women caught up on the wrong side of history. It is a book about memory and heritage that interrogates the legacy passed down by those who survive. It also poses the questions: who do we allow to tell their story? What do we mean by family? And what will we do in order to survive?

An award-winning author reveals the real-life Da Vinci Code fraud that rocked the establishment. An ancient manuscript is discovered claiming that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. The religious world is thrown into turmoil. It sounds like the plot of a conspiracy thriller, and is one of the biggest scandals of modern scholarship. In 2012, Dr Karen King, a star professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced a blockbuster discovery at a scholarly conference just steps from the Vatican: she had found an ancient fragment of papyrus in which Jesus called Mary Magdalene 'my wife'. The tattered manuscript made international headlines. Biblical scholars were in an uproar, but King had impeccable credentials as a world-renowned authority on female figures in the lost Christian texts from Egypt known as the Gnostic gospels. As Ariel Sabar began to investigate the mysteries surrounding the papyrus, he embarked on an indefatigable globe-spanning hunt that ultimately uncovered the forgery and the identity of the forger, reckoning with fundamental questions about the nature of truth and the line between faith and reason.

**Formerly published as The Lost Boys** 'Remarkable. A powerful, engrossing story of a journey into the heart of darkness and final escape from it' Sunday Times In September, 1944, the SS march into a remote Italian castle, arrest a mother and seize her two sons, aged just two and three. If Hitler has his way she will never see them again. For Fey Pirzio-Biroli is the daughter of Ulrich von Hassell, executed days before after the failed assassination of the Fuhrer. Mercilessly cast into the Nazi death machine, Fey must cling to the hope that one day she will escape and rescue her lost children . . . 'Riveting, important, reads like a terrifying thriller' Daily Telegraph 'Heartbreaking. It started with a plot to kill Hitler. It ended in one of the most astonishing and moving stories of the war' Daily Mail 'Extraordinary. A rich, deep, gripping read' Guardian 'As thrilling as any novel. Bailey has an extraordinary talent for bringing history to life' Kate Atkinson

There are some truths that are inescapable, and one such truth is the necessity for harmony and disharmony in our natural world: predator and prey, humans and wildlife, nature and the forces of nature. In Jack Boudreaus ninth book, KING OF THE MOUNTAIN, he takes a deep look at the delicate balance of co-existence. He introduces us to the hunters, landowners and conservationists that have witnessed the changing world of BCs great north. True to Jacks style, these stories are personal, humorous and sometimes tragic for both human and animal.

In the early hours of an autumn day in 1947, a truck laden with German prisoners-of-war and their English guards approached a level crossing in a sleepy Yorkshire village. At the same moment, an express train was thundering towards the crossing. For some inexplicable reason, with the train just yards away, the soldier behind the wheel of the truck did not stop. Instead he pressed the accelerator pedal...The scene was set for a terrible tragedy - one which was largely forgotten, until author Richard M Jones began to investigate the story 60 years later.

One winter's evening in 1821, stung by his girlfriend Eliza's rejection, 17-year-old John Horwood picked up a stone and flung it at her. That thoughtless act of fury was to cost both those young people their lives. A prominent surgeon who clearly placed his own reputation above the care of his patients carried out an operation on Eliza which he must have known would probably kill her - as it did. Smith kept her skull for teaching purposes, and when John was sentenced to hang for her death he made sure the youth's body would be his to dismember. He even had a book bound with John Horwood's skin. When Mary Halliwell, a descendant of John Horwood, unearthed this grotesque and shocking story, she and her husband Dave went into action. 190 years after the fateful day when John's young life was so unjustly snuffed out, they finally managed to arrange a Christian burial for his remains.

"Compass" chronicles the misadventures of those who attempted to perfect the magnetic compass so precious to sixteenth-century seamen that, by law, any man found tampering with it had his hand pinned to the mast with a dagger. From the time man first took to the seas until only one thousand years ago, sight and winds were the sailor's only navigational aids. It was not until the development of the compass that maps and charts could be used with any accuracy even so, it would be hundreds of years and thousands of shipwrecks before the marvelous instrument was perfected. And its history up to modern times is filled with the stories of disasters that befell sailors who misused it. In this page-turning history of man's search for reliable navigation of treacherous sea routes around the globe, Alan Gurney brings to life the instrument Victor Hugo called "the soul of the ship."

'One of the non-fiction books of the year.' Andrew O' Hagan A powerful, evocative and deeply personal journey into the world of missing people When Francisco Garcia was just seven years old, his father, Christobal, left his family. Unemployed, addicted to drink and drugs, and adrift in life, Christobal decided he would rather disappear altogether than carry on dealing with the problems in front of him. So that's what he did, leaving his young wife and child in the dead of night. He has been missing ever since. Twenty years on, Francisco is ready to take up the search for answers. Why did this happen and how could it be possible? Where might his father have gone? And is there any reason to hope for a happy reunion? During his journey, which takes him all across Britain and back to his father's homeland of Spain, Francisco tells the stories of those he meets along the way: the police investigators; the charity employees and volunteers; the once missing and those perilously at risk around us; the families, friends and all those left behind. If You Were There is the moving and affecting story of one man's search for his lost family, an urgent document of where we are now and a powerful, timeless reminder of our responsibility to others.

El tema de los extraterrestres es muy debatido, algunas veces a favor y otras en contra. Esta vez, presentamos mas de cincuenta comunicaciones bioenergemales (CBELs) que a traves de los anos presuntamente hemos tenido, entre otros, con el bioenergema de Khriannia, una mujer extraterrestre, ocasionalmente, tambien con algunos de sus allegados y familiares, y finalmente con Bhrikiam, un hombre extraterrestre. Ambos dijeron provenir de un planeta llamado Agram, ubicado en la constelacion Andromeda de la Via Lactea. Ademas, hemos tenido CBELs con diversas civilizaciones extraterrestres. Esta rica bioinformacion es exclusiva de este libro.