A Book of Kells recalls the lives of John Kell and Kathleen Ward who meet in 1917 when he is a Canadian sailor stationed in Portsmouth, England. Her father, a Methodist Sunday School teacher, brings him home for tea. Kathleen’s sister writes to Jack until she gets married in 1924 and Kathleen takes up the correspondence. Meanwhile, Jack has been getting an education and has spent a year as a student minister on a Cree mission field where he plans to return for another five years. When he gets Kathleen’s letter it is like manna from heaven. The courtship is awkward and tumultuous. She asks him to come over for another look but, when he does, she rebuffs him. However, they agree to give themselves a year to reconsider. Seventy-two letters get through, even though the Indian reserve is cut off from civilization for six months of the year. They marry in 1927, she goes up to Oxford House by canoe along the old fur trade route, and she treks for five days by horse-drawn toboggan in mid-winter to give birth to a baby. When I enter the picture during the Great Depression, a stressed-out minister’s wife and three little girls are crammed into a duplex on a working-class street in Toronto. We’re working our hearts out as little "examples," trying to help Father. In later years, I discovered an emotional toll to pay. I couldn’t sit through a church service without breaking into unrestrained weeping. My teen-age and college years were full of turmoil. What seemed to be the fundamental problem was that I had been trained to put away my ego in favor of redeeming my soul. Still, religion was a great strength, protecting our family from tendencies towards alcoholism and mental illness. I struggle desperately to avoid the pitfall of black sheep, which seemed inevitable for the youngest of three "perfect" minister’s daughters. The name of this family voyage recalls the famous ninth-century gospel manuscript illuminated by monks.

Compared to his Australian excursions, Bill Bryson had it easy on the Appalachian Trail.  Nonetheless, Bryson has on serveral occasions embarked on seemingly endless flights bound for a land where Little Debbies are scarce but insects are abundant (up to 220,000 species of them), not to mention the crodiles.Taking readers on a rollicking ride far beyond packaged-tour routes, IN A SUNBURNED COUNTRY introduces a country where interesting things happen all the time, from a Prime Minister who was lost at sea while swimming at a Victoria beach to Japanese cult members who managed to set off an atomic bomb unnoticed on their 500,000-acre property.  Leaving no Vegemite unsavored, readers will accompany Bryson as he dodges jellyfish while learning to surf at Bondi Beach, discovers a fish that can climb trees, dehydrates in deserts where the temperatures leap to 140 degrees, and tells the true story of the rejected Danish architect who designed the Sydney Opera House.Published just in time for the Olympics, IN A SUNBURNED COUNTRY provides a singularly intriguing, wonderfully wacky take on a glorious, adventure-filled locale.

North Korea today is one of the last bastions of hard-line Communism. Western historians and researchers have had little access to information about North Korea apart from official Party documents and propaganda. This book marks the first time that a victim of the regime has provided a personal and documented insight into the labour camps, the organized famine, and the political conditioning within this "hermit kingdom". Kang Chol-Hwan was arrested at the age of nine along with other members of his family when his grandfather made remarks about life in a capitalist country that were judged to be too complimentary. He grew up in the camps and has escaped to South Korea to document his personal life as a testimonial to the hardships and atrocities that constitute the lives of some several hundred thousand people living in the gulag today. Kang's account of this internment reveals the life-and-death conditions of the camp. Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, this book brings together unassailable firsthand experience, setting one young man's personal suffering in the wider context of modern history.

The history of the birth of Australia which came out of the suffereing and brutality of England's infamous convict transportation system. With 16 pages of illustrations and 3 maps.

Fairness and Freedom compares the history of two open societies--New Zealand and the United States--with much in common. Both have democratic polities, mixed-enterprise economies, individuated societies, pluralist cultures, and a deep concern for human rights and the rule of law. But all of these elements take different forms, because constellations of value are far apart. The dream of living free is America's Polaris; fairness and natural justice are New Zealand's Southern Cross. Fischer asks why these similar countries went different ways. Both were founded by English-speaking colonists, but at different times and with disparate purposes. They lived in the first and second British Empires, which operated in very different ways. Indians and Maori were important agents of change, but to different ends. On the American frontier and in New Zealand's Bush, material possibilities and moral choices were not the same. Fischer takes the same comparative approach to parallel processes of nation-building and immigration, women's rights and racial wrongs, reform causes and conservative responses, war-fighting and peace-making, and global engagement in our own time--with similar results. On another level, this book expands Fischer's past work on liberty and freedom. It is the first book to be published on the history of fairness. And it also poses new questions in the old tradition of history and moral philosophy. Is it possible to be both fair and free? In a vast array of evidence, Fischer finds that the strengths of these great values are needed to correct their weaknesses. As many societies seek to become more open--never twice in the same way, an understanding of our differences is the only path to peace.

“One of the great adventures of our time.”—Life “Am going to cross Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come? …Reply at once.” That is how six brave and inquisitive men came to seek a dangerous path to test a scientific theory. On a primitive raft made of forty-foot balsa logs and named “Kon-Tiki” in honor of a legendary sun king, Heyerdahl and five companions deliberately risked their lives to show that the ancient Peruvians could have made the 4,300-mile voyage to the Polynesian islands on a similar craft. On every page of this true chronicle—from the actual building of the raft through all the dangerous and comic adventures on the sea, to the spectacular crash-landing and the native islanders’ hula dances—each reader will find a wholesome and spellbinding escape from the twenty-first century. 80 b&w illustrations

The convict women who built a continent..."A moving and fascinating story." -Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost The Tin Ticket takes readers to the dawn of the nineteenth century and into the lives of three women arrested and sent into suffering and slavery in Australia and Tasmania-where they overcame their fates unlike any women in the world. It also tells the tale of Elizabeth Gurney Fry, a Quaker reformer who touched all their lives. Ultimately, this is a story of women who, by sheer force of will, became the heart and soul of a new nation.

Bruce Chatwin—author of In Patagonia—ventures into the desolate land of Outback Australia to learn the meaning of the Aborginals' ancient "Dreaming-tracks." Along these timeless paths, amongst the fortune hunters and redneck Australians, racist policemen and mysterious Aboriginal holy men, he discovers a wondrous vision of man's place in the world.