The Englishwoman Gertrude Bell lived an extraordinary life. Her adventures are the stuff of novels: she rode with bandits; braved desert shamals; was captured by Bedouins; and sojourned in a harem. Called the most powerful woman in the British Empire, she counseled kings and prime ministers. Bell's colleagues included Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, who in 1921 invited Bell - the only woman whose advice was sought - to the Cairo Conference to "determine the future of Mesopotamia." Bell numbered among her closest friends T.E. Lawrence, St. John Philby, and Arabian sheiks. In this volume of three of her notebooks, Rosemary O'Brien preserves Bell's elegant, vibrant prose, and presents Bell as a brilliant tactician fearlessly confronting her own vulnerability. The fundamental themes of her life - reckless behavior; a divided self which combined brilliance of intellect with a passionate nature; a sense of history; and the fatal gift of falling in love with a married man - are all here in remarkable detail. Her journey to northern Arabia in 1914 earned Bell professional recognition from the Royal Geographical Society, and solidified her reputation as a canny political analyst of Middle Eastern affairs. In addition to Bell's own photographs, O'Brien has provided us an unprecedented first access to excerpts of the Bell/Richard Doughty-Wyllie love letters, the married British army officer with whom she was in love and for whom her diaries were written.

BEST Pocket Parks of NYC is for the adventurous traveler as well as the local intrigued by the 'little green spaces in the middle of the city.' There are over 520 privately owned public space (POPS) in New York City, but many are simply widened sidewalks or empty plazas. BEST Pocket Parks of NYC takes the best of these spaces, those with seating and ambience, and compiles them into a guide with interesting bits of information scrounged from databases, articles and all manner of public documents. "The information is in various places and can be difficult to find," according to the author. "I have visited every park, researched from a variety of sources, and come up with a guide to those pocket parks and public spaces that lend themselves to stopping and relaxing for a while before you go on with your day." BEST Pocket Parks of NYC is the first of several guides planned that will give the reader interesting information and history along with the location of pocket parks and public spaces in several U.S. cities as well as locations in Europe.

The Englishwoman Gertrude Bell lived an extraordinary life. Her adventures are the stuff of novels: she rode with bandits; braved desert shamals; was captured by Bedouins; and sojourned in a harem. Called the most powerful woman in the British empire, she counselled kings and prime ministers. Bell's colleagues included Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, who in 1921 invited Bell - the only woman whose advice was sought - to the Cairo Conference to ""determine the future of Mesopotamia"". Bell numbered among her closest friends T.E. Lawrence, St. John Philby and Arabian sheiks. In this volume of three of her notebooks, Rosemary O'Brien preserves Bell's elegant, vibrant prose and presents Bell as a brilliant tactician fearlessly confronting her own vulnerability. The fundamental themes of her life - reckless behaviour; a divided self which combined brilliance of intellect with a passionate nature; a sense of history; and the fatal gift of falling in love with a married man - are all here in remarkable detail. Her journey to northern Arabia in 1914 earned Bell professional recognition from the Royal Geographical Society, and solidified her reputation as a canny political analyst of Middle Eastern affairs. In addition to Bell's own photographs, O'Brien has provided us an unprecedented first access to excerpts of the Bell/Richard Doughty-Wylie love letters, the married British army officer with whom she was in love and for whom her diaries were written.