In August of 1838, in the middle of a devastating civil war, a grotesque figure arrived with the mail coach at Santiago de Compostela, the ancient pilgrimage town in the North-West of Spain. He was a former Swiss mercenary, who thirty years previously had heard a rumour about a massive hoard of church plate buried by the soldiers of Marshal Ney. A fantasy? A daydream? Just one of the many hollow legends of hidden gold that abound in Spain? Perhaps so. But, astonishingly, the Swiss vagrant did not come on his own errand. He came sponsored by Spain's savvy Minister of Finance, Don Alejandro Mon, who for some shadowy reason of his own lent credence to the tale. Like an historical Sherlock Holmes, Peter Missler traces the true tale of Benedict Mol, the treasure hunter, through the mists of time and a smoke-screen of cover-stories. It is a fascinating saga which takes us into Portugal with the looting French invaders, into the wildest mountains of Northern Spain with the brilliant polyglot George Borrow, and - by the hand of Mol - into the darkest nooks and corners of a hospital for syphilitics. No treasure was ever found, either in the first attempt, which toppled the government, or in the second one, which ended with the murder of two innocent peasants. Therefore, quite possibly, Ney's treasure still lies waiting elsewhere in a Santiago park...

The first book ever written about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by a member of his personal staff-his former assistant, Paul Letersky-offers unprecedented, "clear-eyed and compelling" (Mark Olshaker, coauthor of Mindhunter) insight into an American legend. The 1960s and 1970s were arguably among America's most turbulent post-Civil War decades. While the Vietnam War continued seemingly without end, protests and riots ravaged most cities, the Kennedys and MLK were assassinated, and corruption found its way to the highest levels of politics, culminating in Watergate. In 1965, at the beginning of the chaos, twenty-two-year-old Paul Letersky was assigned to assist the legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who'd just turned seventy and had, by then, led the Bureau for an incredible forty-one years. Hoover was a rare and complex man who walked confidently among the most powerful. His personal privacy was more tightly guarded than the secret "files" he carefully collected-and that were so feared by politicians and celebrities. Through Letersky's close working relationship with Hoover, and the trust and confidence he gained from Hoover's most loyal senior assistant, Helen Gandy, Paul became one of the few able to enter the Director's secretive-and sometimes perilous-world. Since Hoover's death half a century ago, millions of words have been written about the man and hundreds of hours of TV dramas and A-list Hollywood films produced. But until now, there has been virtually no account from someone who, for a period of years, spent hours with the Director on a daily basis. Balanced, honest, and keenly observed, this "vivid, foibles-and-all portrait of the fabled scourge of gangsters, Klansmen, and communists" (The Wall Street Journal) sheds new light on one of the most powerful law enforcement figures in American history.

Heinz Unger, born in Berlin, Germany, in 1895, was reared from a young age to follow in his father's footsteps and become a lawyer. However, after attending a 1915 Munich performance of Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) conducted by Bruno Walter, Unger decided to devote the rest of his life to music and particularly to the dissemination of Gustav Mahler's music. This microhistory explores how the double strands of German and Jewish identity converged in Unger's lifelong struggle to grasp who he was. Critical to this understanding was Mahler's music - a music that Unger endowed with exceptional meaning and that was central to his Jewish identity. This book sets this exploration of Unger's "performative ritual" within a biographical tale of a life lived travelling the world in search of a home, a search that took the conductor from his native Germany to the Soviet Union, England, Spain, and, finally, Canada.

"Dr. Wakefield sets the record straight. It was not he who showed callous disregard towards vulnerable, sick children with autism. It was the British medical establishment, the General Medical Council, the media and the pharmaceutical industry."-Mary Holland, Esq., co-founder, Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy As Andrew Wakefield states in his prologue, "If autism does not affect your family now, it will. If something does not change-and change soon-this is almost a mathematical certainty. This book affects you also. It is not a parochial look at a trivial medical spat in the United Kingdom, but dispatches from the battlefront in a major confrontation-a struggle against compromise in medicine, corruption of science, and a real and present threat to children in the interests of policy and profit. It is a story of how 'the system' deals with dissent among its doctors and scientists." In the pursuit of possible links between childhood vaccines, intestinal inflammation, and neurologic injury in children, Wakefield lost his job in London's Royal Free Hospital, his country of birth, his career, and his medical license. A recent General Medical Council ruling stated that he was "dishonest, irresponsible and showed callous disregard for the distress and pain of children." Maligned by the medical establishment and mainstream media, Wakefield endeavors to set the record straight in Callous Disregard. While explaining what really happened, he calls out the organizations and individuals that are acting not for the sake of children affected by autism, but in their own self-interests.

Who were the pioneers in science education, and what motivated them to do what they did?" This book is the second volume of an attempt to capture and record some of the answers to these questions-either from the pioneers themselves or from those persons who worked most closely with them. As with the first volume, we have attempted to include as many pioneers as possible, but we know that there are still many that are not included in this or the previous volume. As we have posed questions, rummaged through files and oft?neglected books, and probed the memories of many individuals, we have come to realize our list of true pioneers is ever growing. As we consider our list of pioneers, we know that there are names on the list that most of us readily recognize. We also fully realize that there are names of whom few of us have heard-yet who were significant in their roles as mentors or idea development and teaching. We continue to be impressed with our science education "family tree" ever branching out to more individuals and connections. The stories in this volume continue to demonstrate how vital this network was in supporting the individual pioneers during their journey in difficult times and continues to be for those of us today in our own enterprise.

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.

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.

'The inventions, the innovations, the stories, the surprises. A combination of history, reference and entertainment - something for every seafarer and many others too.' - Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence People have been sailing for thousands of years, but we've come some distance from longboats and clippers. How did we arrive here? In fifty tales of inventors and innovations, Sails, Skippers and Sextants looks at the history of one of our most enjoyable pastimes, from the monarch who pioneered English yachting to the engineer who invented sailboards. The stories are sometimes inspiring, usually amusing and often intriguing - so grab your lifejacket, it's going to be quite an adventure.

A collection of newspaper stories by award-winning Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard-including "Dirty John," the basis for the hit podcast and the upcoming Bravo scripted series starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. Since its release in fall 2017, the "Dirty John" podcast-about a conman who terrorizes a Southern California family-has been downloaded more than 20 million times, and will soon premiere as a scripted drama on Bravo starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. The story, which also ran as a print series in the Los Angeles Times, wasn't unfamiliar terrain to its writer, Christopher Goffard. Over two decades at newspapers from Florida to California, Goffard has reported probingly on the shadowy, unseen corners of society. This book gathers together for the first time "Dirty John" and the rest of his very best work. "The $40 Lawyer" provides an inside account of a young public defender's rookie year in the legal trenches. "Framed" offers an unblinking chronicle of suburban mayhem (and is currently being developed by Netflix as a film starring Julia Roberts). A man wrongly imprisoned for rape, train-riding runaways in love, a Syrian mother forced to leave her children in order to save them, a boy who grows up to become a cop as a way of honoring his murdered sister, another boy who struggles with the knowledge that his father is on death row: these stories reveal the complexities of human nature, showing people at both their most courageous and their most flawed. Goffard shared in the Los Angeles Times' Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2011 and has twice been a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing. This collection-a must-read for fans of both true-crime and first-rate narrative nonfiction-underscores his reputation as one of today's most original journalistic voices.

Antigua--a ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies and the author's birthplace--is the setting of a lyrical, sardonic, and forthright essay that offers an insider's eye-opening view of the lives and ways of her people.

'No sea voyage can be dull for a man who has an eye for the ever-changing sea and sky, the waves, the wind and the way of a ship upon the water.' So observes H.W. 'Bill' Tilman in this account of two lengthy voyages in which dull intervals were few and far between. In 1966, after a succession of eventful and successful voyages in the high latitudes of the Arctic, Tilman and his pilot cutter Mischief head south again, this time with the Antarctic Peninsula, Smith Island and the unclimbed Mount Foster in their sights. Mischief goes South is an account of a voyage marred by tragedy and dogged by crew trouble from the start. Tilman gives ample insight into the difficulties associated with his selection of shipmates and his supervision of a crew, as he wryly notes, 'to have four misfits in a crew of five is too many'. The second part of this volume contains the author's account of a gruelling voyage south, an account left unwritten for ten years for lack of time and energy. Originally intended as an expedition to the remote Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, this 1957 voyage evolved into a circumnavigation of Africa, the unplanned consequence of a momentary lapse in attention by an inexperienced helmsman. The two voyages described in Mischief goes South covered 43,000 miles over twenty-five months spent at sea and, while neither was deemed successful, published together they give a fine insight into Tilman's character.

In this provocative and eye-opening classic of investigative journalism, the #1 New York Times bestselling author and "America's best true-crime writer" (Kirkus Reviews), Ann Rule, explores the nearly twenty-year long search for America's most prolific and horrifying serial killer. In 1982, the body of Wendy Coffield is discovered floating near the sandy shore of Washington's Green River. Authorities have no idea that this tragic and violent death is only the beginning of a string of murders that will rock and terrify the Seattle area for two decades. With her signature riveting prose and in-depth research, Ann Rule takes us behind the scenes of the search for the Green River Killer, a terrifying specter who ritualistically killed young women and eluded authorities for years. From seeking the help of incarcerated serial killer Ted Bundy to Ann Rule's horrifying realization that the killer she was writing about had attended her book signings, Green River, Running Red is the suspenseful and unforgettable "definitive narrative of the brutal and senseless crimes that haunted the Seattle area for decades" (Publishers Weekly).

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.

At a time when that 1960s notion of air travel as decadent and exceptional is experiencing an unexpected revival, this book ... could be the G&T in a plastic glass you need.' The Spectator Travel writer Julia Cooke's exhilarating portrait of Pan Am stewardesses in the Mad Men era. Come Fly the World tells the story of the stewardesses who served on the iconic Pan American Airways between 1966 and 1975 - and of the unseen diplomatic role they played on the world stage. Alongside the glamour was real danger, as they flew soldiers to and from Vietnam and staffed Operation Babylift - the dramatic evacuation of 2,000 children during the fall of Saigon. Cooke's storytelling weaves together the true stories of women like Lynne Totten, a science major who decided life in a lab was not for her, to Hazel Bowie, one of the relatively few African American stewardesses of the era, as they embraced the liberation of a jet-set life. In the process, Cooke shows how the sexualized coffee-tea-or-me stereotype was at odds with the importance of what they did, and with the freedom, power and sisterhood they achieved.

However many times it has been done, the act of casting off the warps and letting go one's last hold of the shore at the start of a voyage has about it something solemn and irrevocable, like marriage, for better or for worse. Mostly Mischief's ordinary title belies four more extraordinary voyages made by H.W. 'Bill' Tilman covering almost 25,000 miles in both Arctic and Antarctic waters. The first sees the pilot cutter Mischief retracing the steps of Elizabethan explorer John Davis to the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage. Tilman and a companion land on the north coast and make the hazardous crossing of Bylot Island while the remainder of the crew make the eventful passage to the southern shore to recover the climbing party. Back in England, Tilman refuses to accept the condemnation of Mischief's surveyor, undertaking costly repairs before heading back to sea for a first encounter with the East Greenland ice. Between June 1964 and September 1965, Tilman is at sea almost without a break. Two eventful voyages to East Greenland in Mischief provide the entertaining bookends to his account of the five-month voyage in the Southern Ocean as skipper of the schooner Patanela. Tilman had been hand-picked by the expedition leader as the navigator best able to land a team of Australian and New Zealand climbers and scientists on Heard Island, a tiny volcanic speck in the Furious Fifties devoid of safe anchorages and capped by an unclimbed glaciated peak. In a separate account of this successful voyage, Colin Putt describes the expedition as unique - the first ascent of a mountain to start below sea level.

Few people have changed the world like the Nobel Prize winners. Their breakthrough discoveries have revolutionised medicine, chemistry, physics and economics. Nobel Life consists of original interviews with twenty-four Nobel Prize winners. Each of them has a unique story to tell. They recall their eureka moments and the challenges they overcame along the way, give advice to inspire future generations and discuss what remains to be discovered. Engaging and thought-provoking, Nobel Life provides an insight into life behind the Nobel Prize winners. A call from Stockholm turned a group of twenty-four academics into Nobel Prize winners. This is their call to the next generations worldwide.

‘Jauhar weaves his own personal and family story into his history of the heart…very effectively… This gives a certain dramatic tension to the book, as it tells the fascinating and rather wonderful history of cardiology.’ –Henry Marsh, New Statesman

A Mail on Sunday Book of the Year

The heart lies at the centre of life. For cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar it is an obsession.

In this fascinating history he interweaves gripping scenes from the operating theatre with the moving tale of his family’s history of heart problems – from the death of his grandfather to the ominous signs of how he himself might die.

Jauhar looks at the pioneers who risked patients’ lives and their own careers, and confronts the limits of medical technology, arguing that how we live is more important than any device or drug we may invent. Heart is the all-encompassing story of the engine of life.

"Delightfully horrifying."--Popular Science
One of Mental Floss's Best Books of 2018
One of Science Friday's Best Science Books of 2018

· A mysterious epidemic of dental explosions…
· A teenage boy who got his wick stuck in a candlestick...
· A remarkable woman who, like a human fountain, spurted urine from virtually every orifice...

These are just a few of the anecdotal gems that have until now lain undiscovered in medical journals for centuries. This fascinating collection of historical curiosities explores some of the strangest cases that have perplexed doctors across the world.

From seventeenth-century Holland to Tsarist Russia, from rural Canada to a whaler in the Pacific, many are monuments to human stupidity – such as the sailor who swallowed dozens of penknives to amuse his shipmates, or the chemistry student who in 1850 arrived at a hospital in New York with his penis trapped inside a bottle, having unwisely decided to relieve himself into a vessel containing highly reactive potassium. Others demonstrate exceptional surgical ingenuity long before the advent of anaesthesia – such as a daring nineteenth-century operation to remove a metal fragment from beneath a conscious patient’s heart. We also hear of the weird, often hilarious remedies employed by physicians of yore – from crow’s vomit to port-wine enemas – the hazards of such everyday objects as cucumbers and false teeth, and miraculous recovery from apparently terminal injuries.

Blending fascinating history with lacerating wit, The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth will take you on a tour of some of the funniest, strangest and most wince-inducing corners of medical history.

UPDATED WITH NEW MATERIAL FROM THE AUTHOR In The Curse of Oak Island, longtime Rolling Stone contributing editor and journalist Randall Sullivan explored the curious history of Oak Island and the generations of people who tried and failed to unlock its secrets. Drawing on his exclusive access to Marty and Rick Lagina, stars of the History Channel's television show The Curse of Oak Island, Sullivan delivers an up to the minute chronicle of their ongoing search for the truth. In 1795, a teenager discovered a mysterious circular depression in the ground on Oak Island, in Nova Scotia, Canada, and ignited rumors of buried treasure. Early excavators uncovered a clay-lined shaft containing layers of soil interspersed with wooden platforms, but when they reached a depth of ninety feet, water poured into the shaft and made further digging impossible. Since then the mystery of Oak Island's "Money Pit" has enthralled generations of treasure hunters, including a Boston insurance salesman whose obsession ruined him; young Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and film star Errol Flynn. Perplexing discoveries have ignited explorers' imaginations: a flat stone inscribed in code; a flood tunnel draining from a man-made beach; a torn scrap of parchment; stone markers forming a huge cross. Swaths of the island were bulldozed looking for answers; excavation attempts have claimed two lives. Theories abound as to what's hidden on Oak Island. Could it be pirates' treasure or Marie Antoinette's lost jewels? Or perhaps the Holy Grail or proof of the identity of the true author of Shakespeare's plays? In this rich, fascinating account, Sullivan takes readers along as the Lagina brothers mount the most comprehensive effort yet to crack the mystery, and chronicles the incredible history of the "curse" of Oak Island, where for two centuries dreams of buried treasure have led intrepid treasure hunters to sacrifice everything.

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.

Inspired by her own foremothers' legacies and the friendships formed throughout her life, Rozella Kennedy centers and celebrates the stories of 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women--both famous and little-known--who changed the course of US history. In the beautiful pages of Our Brave Foremothers, discover an intergenerational, intercultural bouquet of Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women lifted into the significance that they deserve. - From Etel Adnan to Mary Jones, Thelma Garcia Buchholdt to Pura Belpre to Zitkala-Sa, here are 100 women of color who left a lasting mark on United States history. Including both famous and little-known names, the thoughtful profiles and detailed portraits of these women herald their achievements and passions. - Following each entry is a prompt that asks you to connect your life to theirs, an inspiring way to understand their influence and the power of their stories. To consider on a deeper level the devotedness of Clara Brown, the fearlessness of Jovita Idar, the guts of Grace Lee Boggs, or the selflessness of Martha Louise Morrow Foxx. And to be as brave as we each can be--and then beyond that.

A young reader's edition of The Volunteer - Jack Fairweather's Costa Book of the Year 2020. An extraordinary, eye-opening account of the Holocaust. Occupied Warsaw, Summer 1940: Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground operative, accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands interned at a new concentration camp, report on Nazi crimes, raise a secret army and stage an uprising. The name of the camp - Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, and under the cruellest of conditions, Pilecki's underground sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi officers and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying Nazi plans to exterminate Europe's Jews, Pilecki realized he would have to risk his men, his life and his family to warn the West before all was lost. To do so meant attempting the impossible - but first he would have to escape from Auschwitz itself... For children aged 12 and up. Written from exclusive access to previously hidden diaries, family and camp survivor accounts, and recently declassified files. Critically acclaimed and award-winning journalist Jack Fairweather brilliantly portrays the remarkable man who volunteered to face the unknown. This extraordinary and eye-opening account of the Holocaust invites us all to bear witness.

ONE OF PEOPLE MAGAZINE'S BEST SUMMER READS 2022 5* 'A jaw-dropping memoir' - THE TELEGRAPH 'One of the maddest memoirs you'll read this year... a beautiful, warm, funny book.' -The Times 'Extraordinary' -The Guardian 'A wholly absorbing page-turner that everyone will want to read. You should probably buy two.' -Kirkus Starred Review 'A riveting debut.' -People Magazine 'By turns hilarious, wrenching, and achingly tender.' -Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author 'A remarkable and wise book, two memoirs braided together with such tendresse that readers will come to believe the ironic title in earnest' -LA TIMES 'Riveting and hilariously funny' - The Times For most of her life, Chrysta Bilton was one member of a small, if dysfunctional, family of four. There was her sister, Kaitlyn, her hedonistic, glamorous, gay mum Debra, and Jeffrey, who Debra hand-picked, in an LA hairdressers, to be the father of her children. During Chrysta's unstable childhood, Debra struggled to keep the family afloat and Jeffrey wandered in and out of their lives. Then, in her twenties, Chrysta discovered that her father had secretly donated his sperm over 500 times - and that she had at least 35 other siblings. A Normal Family is a captivating coming-of-age memoir about Chrysta's reckoning with the secrets both parents had carefully kept from her. Heartfelt, warm and funny, it's a story of embracing the family we have, in all the forms we find it.