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Showing 1 - 20 of 7829 items
By Charlotte Gray. 2019
On an island paradise in 1943, Sir Harry Oakes, gold mining tycoon, philanthropist and "richest man in the Empire," was…
murdered. The news of his death surged across the English-speaking world, from London, the Imperial centre, to the remote Canadian mining town of Kirkland Lake, in the Northern Ontario bush. The murder became celebrated as "the crime of the century." The layers of mystery deepened as the involvement of Oakes' son-in-law, Count Alfred de Marigny, came quickly to be questioned, as did the odd machinations of the Governor of the Bahamas, the former King Edward VIII. Despite a sensational trial, no murderer was ever convicted. Rumours were unrelenting about Oakes' missing fortune, and fascination with the Oakes story has persisted for decades. Award-winning biographer and popular historian Charlotte Gray explores, for the first time, the life of the man behind the scandal, a man who was both reviled and admired - from his early, hardscrabble days of mining exploration, to his explosion of wealth, to his grandiose gestures of philanthropy. And Gray brings fresh eyes to the bungled investigation and shocking trial in the remote colonial island streets, proposing an overlooked suspect in this long cold case. 2019.By Mark Bourrie. 2019
NOMINATED FOR THE 2020 RBC TAYLOR PRIZE AS SEEN ON GLOBAL NEWS-TV'S THE MORNING SHOW Murderer. Salesman. Pirate. Adventurer. Cannibal.…
Co-founder of the Hudson's Bay Company. Known to some as the first European to explore the upper Mississippi, and widely as the namesake of ships and hotel chains, Pierre-Esprit Radisson is perhaps best described, writes Mark Bourrie, as “an eager hustler with no known scruples.” Kidnapped by Mohawk warriors at the age of fifteen, Radisson assimilated and was adopted by a powerful family, only to escape to New York City after less than a year. After being recaptured, he defected from a raiding party to the Dutch and crossed the Atlantic to Holland—thus beginning a lifetime of seized opportunities and frustrated ambitions. A guest among First Nations communities, French fur traders, and royal courts; witness to London’s Great Plague and Great Fire; and unwitting agent of the Jesuits’ corporate espionage, Radisson double-crossed the English, French, Dutch, and his adoptive Mohawk family alike, found himself marooned by pirates in Spain, and lived through shipwreck on the reefs of Venezuela. His most lasting venture as an Artic fur trader led to the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which operates today, 350 years later, as North America’s oldest corporation. Sourced from Radisson’s journals, which are the best first-hand accounts of 17th century Canada, Bush Runner tells the extraordinary true story of this protean 17th-century figure, a man more trading partner than colonizer, a peddler of goods and not worldview—and with it offers a fresh perspective on the world in which he lived.By Neville Thompson. 2021
"A welcome new bright spot in the vast literature of World War II." – DAVID SHRIBMAN The relationship between Winston…
Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt was among the most momentous - and mysterious - in history. The story of how these fiercely independent leaders worked together to defeat Hitler's Germany has been divined mainly from their cautious letters and the comments of staffers. Meanwhile, the detailed record of their fellow head of government, Canadian Prime Minister William L. Mackenzie King, who knew each of them better than they knew each other, has been largely overlooked. A sublime diplomat, King was determined, as leader of the largest British Dominion and America’s closest neighbour, to serve as a lynchpin between the great powers. Churchill and Roosevelt both came to rely upon him as their next most important ally, routinely confiding in him and never suspecting that he was meticulously recording every word, prayer, slight, and tic from their countless interactions in his voluminous unpublished diary. The Third Man offers us a truly unique look at the personalities, the strategies, and the epic relationship that won WWII.By Christian Fink-Jensen, Randolph Eustace-Walden. 2016
In 1922, a 15-year-old girl, fed up with life in a French convent school, answered an ad for a travelling…
secretary. Tall, blonde, and swaggering with confidence, she might have passed for twenty. She also knew what she wanted: to become the first female to drive around the world. Her name was Aloha Wanderwell. Aloha's mission was foolhardy in the extreme. Drivable roads were scarce and cars were alien to much of the world. The Wanderwell Expedition created a specially modified Model T Ford for the journey that featured gun scabbards and a sloped back that could fold out to become a darkroom. All that remained was for Aloha to learn how to drive. Aloha became known around the globe. She was photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower, parked on the back of the Sphinx, firing mortars in China, and smiling at a tickertape parade in Detroit. By the age of 25, she had become a pilot, a film star, an ambassador for world peace, and the centrepiece of one of the biggest unsolved murder mysteries in California history. Her story defied belief, but it was true. Every bit of it. Except for her name. The American Aloha Wanderwell was, in reality, the Canadian Idris Hall. Drawing upon Aloha's diaries and travel logs, as well as films, photographs, newspaper accounts, and previously classified government documents, Aloha Wanderwell reveals the astonishing story of one of the greatest — and most outrageous — explorers of the 1920s.By Joe Gold. 2021
Torn apart by war. Reunited through faith. In this remarkable true story of the Holocaust, we follow David Goldberger from…
the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, back to Budapest where his wife, Aurelia, and infant son are hiding under false Christian identities. By the time he is liberated by the allies, Goldberger weighs a skeletal sixty-five pounds and is told to wait for the Slovakian legion to rescue him. With the threat of typhus looming, Goldberger instead escapes with a group of men to Hannover. There, he is given two pieces of wool cloth-the key to rebuilding his future as he searches for his wife and child. Drawn from survivor testimony, personal conversations, and archival documents, and vividly brought to life by Goldberger's son Joe Gold, Two Pieces of Cloth bears witness to the horrors of the Holocaust, while serving as a testament to the power and resilience of the human spirit.By Adam Shoalts. 2021
NATIONAL BESTSELLERSpellbinding adventure from Canada's most beloved modern-day explorer.Traverspine is not a place you will find on most maps. A…
century ago, it stood near the foothills of the remote Mealy Mountains in central Labrador. Today it is an abandoned ghost town, almost all trace of it swallowed up by dark spruce woods that cloak millions of acres.In the early 1900s, this isolated little settlement was the scene of an extraordinary haunting by large creatures none could identify. Strange tracks were found in the woods. Unearthly cries were heard in the night. Sled dogs went missing. Children reported being stalked by a terrifying grinning animal. Families slept with cabin doors barred and axes and guns at their bedsides.Tales of things that "go bump in the night" are part of the folklore of the wilderness, told and retold around countless campfires down through the ages. Most are easily dismissed by skeptics. But what happened at Traverspine a hundred years ago was different. The eye-witness accounts were detailed, and those who reported them included no less than three medical doctors and a wildlife biologist.Something really did emerge from the wilderness to haunt the little settlement of Traverspine. Adam Shoalts, decorated modern-day explorer and an expert on wilderness folklore, picks up the trail from a century ago and sets off into the Labrador wild to investigate the tale. It is a spine-tingling adventure, straight from a land steeped in legends and lore, where Vikings wandered a thousand years ago and wolves and bears still roam free.In delving into the dark corners of Canada's wild, The Whisper on the Night Wind combines folklore, history, and adventure into a fascinating saga of exploration.By Rosemary Sullivan. 2022
Less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept...Using new technology, recently discovered documents and sophisticated investigative techniques, an international…
team—led by an obsessed retired FBI agent—has finally solved the mystery that has haunted generations since World War II: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And why?Over thirty million people have read The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal teen-aged Anne Frank kept while living in an attic with her family and four other people in Amsterdam during World War II, until the Nazis arrested them and sent them to a concentration camp. But despite the many works—journalism, books, plays and novels—devoted to Anne’s story, none has ever conclusively explained how these eight people managed to live in hiding undetected for over two years—and who or what finally brought the Nazis to their door.With painstaking care, retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and a team of indefatigable investigators pored over tens of thousands of pages of documents—some never before seen—and interviewed scores of descendants of people familiar with the Franks. Utilizing methods developed by the FBI, the Cold Case Team painstakingly pieced together the months leading to the infamous arrest—and came to a shocking conclusion. The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation is the riveting story of their mission. Rosemary Sullivan introduces us to the investigators, explains the behavior of both the captives and their captors and profiles a group of suspects. All the while, she vividly brings to life wartime Amsterdam: a place where no matter how wealthy, educated, or careful you were, you never knew whom you could trust.By Lezlie Lowe. 2022
The long-awaited narrative history of the women who volunteered in Nova Scotia during the Second World War by award-winning journalist…
and author of No Place to Go. "I was home cooking carrots because my mother was off winning the war." -- Patricia Timbrell, whose mother, Amy Jones, along with her friend Una Smith, established and ran the Central Magazine Exchange, which distributed four million used magazines and 30,000 packs of cards by June 1942 alone for troop and merchant ships in Halifax Harbour. Halifax women won the Second World War -- but not in the ways you might have been told. We all know the stories of Canadian women during the war who trained as machinists, welders, and streetcar drivers to fill the shoes of men who answered the call. We know how women kept the home fires lit while their husbands, brothers, and fathers fought. This is not that story. The Volunteers: How Halifax Women Won the Second World War is the untold story of Halifax women who geared up in a flash to focus on the comfort, community connections, and mental health of Halifax?s exploding population of sailors, soldiers, airmen, and merchant mariners. They did a job no government could have organized or afforded. They did it without being asked. And they did it with no respite from their daily duties. Thoroughly researched and compellingly told, and with a dozen archival images, The Volunteers examines the untold stories of the hardworking women whose unpaid and unacknowledged labour won the Second World War.By Luis Alvarez. 2008
Providing a new history of youth culture based on rare, in-depth interviews with former zoot-suiters, Luis Alvarez explores race, region,…
and the politics of culture in urban America during World War II. He argues that Mexican American and African American youths, along with many nisei and white youths, used popular culture to oppose accepted modes of youthful behavior, the dominance of white middle-class norms, and expectations from within their own communities.By George Hill. 2013
This is a story of adventure in the Hindu Kush Mountains, and of a previously untold Military and Naval Intelligence…
Mission along about 800 miles of the Durand Line in World War II. The American officers passed through the Tribal Areas and the princely states of the North-West Frontier Province, and into Baluchistan. It also provides an insight into the background and daily life of a Naval Intelligence Officer who was stationed in Karachi, India (now Pakistan), in World War II. He was probably the first American official to travel to all of the Provinces that now comprise the country of Pakistan, and he also traveled in India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).By Allan Zullo. 2007
By Andrew Shennan. 2000
Offering a fresh critical perspective on this momentous event, Andrew Shennan examines both the continuities and discontinuities that resulted from…
the events of 1940. The main focus is on the French experience of the war, but this experience is framed within the larger context of France's - and Europe's - protracted mid-twentieth century crisis.By Scott S. F. Meaker, Adriana Rojas. 2016
Mientras el poder de Hitler crecía, acorralaba a otros que él consideraba indeseables. Hitler de había convertido en un poder…
y la destrucción lenta de los Judíos se puso a cabo. En 1942, cerca de un millón de Judíos ya habían sido asesinados. Ejecución era sólo una forma de muerte. Dos millones y medio habían sido gaseados y medio millón muertos de hambre. Un brote de Tifoidea mato a muchos otros. Después de la victoria de los aliados, Alemania estaba en caos. Este libro es un esfuerzo de ver en el tipo de situación que llevaría a un país civilizado a permitir que un Holocausto tuviera lugar.By Patrick K. O'Donnell. 2008
Like a scene from Where Eagles Dare, a small team of American spies parachutes into Italy behind enemy lines. Their…
orders: link up with local partisans and sabotage the well-guarded Brenner Pass-the Nazis' crucial supply route through the Alps-thereby bringing the German war effort in Italy to a grinding halt.By Mina Hubbard. 2004
The fascinating story of the first white person to cross Labrador In 1905 Mina Benson Hubbard became the first white…
person to cross Labrador, documenting her travels in the classic A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador. This reissue, edited and fully annotated by Sherrill Grace, makes the complete work available for the first time since the original 1908 publication and features an introduction that situates Hubbard's writing in the context of her life and times, making clear how unusual - and unexpected - it was for a woman to undertake such an expedition, let alone going on to write and lecture about it.By Alice Nelson. 2015
Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist Alice Nelson provides the introductory essay for After This, a powerful collection of…
narratives by fourteen Holocaust survivors. Alice worked closely with local survivors and their families to present each individual’s record of those terrible years – stories like that of Rosa Levy, whose tale of moving to Australia after the war is one of quiet triumph.By Liz Byrski. 2015
In the aftermath of the Battle of Britain, airmen filled a small town where pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe established…
revolutionary surgical and therapeutic treatments. For the child Liz Byrski, growing up in East Grinstead, the burnt faces of these airmen filled her nightmares. In her late 60s, Liz returned to make peace with her memories and to speak not only with the survivors—known as the Guinea Pig Club—but with the nurses who played a vital and unorthodox role in their treatment, sometimes at a significant personal cost.[Includes 16 charts, 54 maps and 196 illustrations]Triumph in the Philippines is the story of the largest joint campaign of…
the Pacific phase of World War II. Devoted principally to the accomplishments of U.S. Army ground combat forces and to the operations of major organized Philippine guerrilla units that contributed notably to the success of the campaign, the volume describes the reconquest of the Philippine archipelago exclusive of Leyte and Samar. The narrative includes coverage of air, naval, and logistical activity necessary to broad understanding of the ground combat operations. The strategic planning and the strategic debates leading to the decision to seize Luzon and bypass Formosa are also treated so as to enable the reader to fit the Luzon and Southern Philippines Campaigns into their proper perspective of the war against Japan.For the forces of General MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area the reconquest of Luzon and the Southern Philippines was the climax of the Pacific war, although no one anticipated this outcome when, on 9 January 1945, Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger's Sixth Army poured ashore over the beaches of Lingayen Gulf. Viewed from the aspect of commitment of U.S. Army ground forces, the Luzon Campaign (which strategically and tactically in-chides the seizure of Mindoro Island and the securing of the shipping lanes through the central Visayan Islands) was exceeded in size during World War II only by the drive across northern France. The Luzon Campaign differed from others of the Pacific war in that it alone provided opportunity for the employment of mass and maneuver on a scale even approaching that common to the European and Mediterranean theaters. The operations of Lt. Gen. Robert L. Eichelberger's Eighth Army, both on Luzon and during the Southern Philippines Campaign, were more akin to previous actions throughout the Pacific, but the southern campaign, too, presented features peculiar to the reconquest of the Philippine archipelago.By Edmund G Love, Philip A Crowl. 2013
[Includes 4 tables, 3 charts, 27 maps and 90 illustrations]Seizure of the Gilberts and Marshalls deals with amphibious warfare as…
waged by American forces against the Japanese-held atolls of the Central Pacific during World War II...The atoll operations described in this volume were amphibious from beginning to end. They were not simple seaborne hit-and-run raids of the Dieppe type. The objective was to secure the atolls as steppingstones to the next advance. The islands were relatively small, permitting continual naval and air support of the ground operations.Some outstanding examples of the co-ordination of fire support by artillery, naval gunfire, and air are found in this book. The advantages of simple plans and the disadvantages of the more complicated will stand out for the careful reader.The story of the capture of these atolls of Micronesia offers some of the best examples of combined operations that are available in the annals of modern war. Ground, sea, and air components were always present, and the effectiveness with which they were combined and co-ordinated accounts in large measure for the rapid success enjoyed in these instances by American arms.From the point of view of strategy, the significance of this volume lies in the fact that it tells the story of the beginnings of the drive across the Central Pacific toward the Japanese homeland. This concept of defeating Japan by pushing directly westward from Hawaii through the island bases of the mid-Pacific was traditional in American strategic thinking, but had never been put to test and was seriously challenged in some quarters. As is shown here, the test was first made in the campaigns against the Gilberts and Marshalls, the outcome was successful, and the experience gained was of inestimable value in planning for the subsequent conduct of the war in the Pacific.By Clara Bensen. 2016
One Dress, Three Weeks, Eight Countries--Zero Baggage Newly recovered from a quarter-life meltdown, Clara Bensen decided to test her comeback…
by signing up for an online dating account. She never expected to meet Jeff, a wildly energetic university professor with a reputation for bucking convention. They barely know each other’s last names when they agree to set out on a risky travel experiment spanning eight countries and three weeks. The catch? No hotel reservations, no plans, and best of all, no baggage. Clara’s story will resonate with adventurers and homebodies alike--it’s at once a romance, a travelogue, and a bright modern take on the age-old questions: How do you find the courage to explore beyond your comfort zone? Can you love someone without the need for labels and commitment? Is it possible to truly leave your baggage behind?