Narrow Dog to Carcassonne

Narrow Dog to Carcassonne PDF Author: Terry Darlington
Publisher: Delta
ISBN: 0440337569
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
The hilarious and true story of two senior-citizens and their whippet dog who hatch, plan and carry out a “lunatic scheme” to sail from Stone in Staffordshire to Carcassonne in the South of France.

Narrow Dog to Carcassonne

Narrow Dog to Carcassonne PDF Author: Terry Darlington
Publisher: Delta
ISBN: 0440337569
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
The hilarious and true story of two senior-citizens and their whippet dog who hatch, plan and carry out a “lunatic scheme” to sail from Stone in Staffordshire to Carcassonne in the South of France.

Narrow Dog to Indian River

Narrow Dog to Indian River PDF Author: Terry Darlington
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0385342098
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Virginia to Florida in an English canal boat. Join the authors of “one of the most hilarious travel memoirs ever written”* on a wild odyssey aboard one of the most unlikely craft ever to sail U.S. waters. No one had ever sailed an English narrowboat in the U.S. before—for reasons that become clear when Terry Darlington, his wife, Monica, and their well-traveled dog, a whippet named Jim, begin a nine-month voyage down the 1,150-mile Intracoastal Waterway. But no sooner do they set out in the seven-foot-wide Phyllis May than they encounter an ice storm in Virginia and piranhas in North Carolina. The Georgia coast is a madman’s jigsaw and in Florida the alligators wait patiently for Jim. But as they wend their way through golden marshes, incomparable cities, and lost arcadias, the intrepid trio aboard the beautiful painted boat reveals a South few of us have ever seen. And with frequent stops to dine on sweet tea, grits, and the freshest of the day’s catch, they make plenty of strange companions along the way—from wayfarers stopping to give Jim a good scratch behind the ears to ex–CIA agents and the Good Ole Boys of the Deep South—and discover that everyone has a story they’re only too willing to share. Beautifully written, lovingly observed and very funny, Narrow Dog to Indian River takes you on a dangerous, surprising, and always entertaining journey through the wonderland of the South. *Booklist

Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier

Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier PDF Author: Terry Darlington
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0857500635
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Get Book Here

Book Description
At seventy-five, Terry and Monica Darlington had done everything they could think of doing, including building a business, becoming athletes and running a literary society. Lately they had become boating adventurers and Terry a bestselling writer. But in their Midlands canal town in November, life was looking dull and short on surprises. Then their famous canal boat was destroyed by fire. Within a few days they had bought a new one and they headed north in the Phyllis May 2 - to Liverpool, Lancaster, York, the Pennines and Wigan Pier. Terry recorded the journey and alongside it the story of his life and his marriage and his whippet Jim, with a broken ear like a flat cap, and Monica's whippet Jess, the Flying Catastrophe. Funny, affecting and beautifully told, this story brims with canals and rivers and whippets, and adventures all over the world, and the famous and fascinating people the Darlingtons have met. It's another classic Narrow Dog book.

The Control of Nature

The Control of Nature PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708495
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

National Velvet

National Velvet PDF Author: Enid Bagnold
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486782123
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
The timeless tale of 14-year-old Velvet Brown's participation in the Grand National Steeplechase has thrilled generations of readers. The story provides a positive role model for girls and remains ever popular with young horse lovers.

Wolf Totem

Wolf Totem PDF Author: Jiang Rong
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143109316
Category : Mongolia
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Get Book Here

Book Description
Chen Zhen volunteers to live in a remote settlement on the border of Inner and Outer Mongolia. There, he discovers life of apparent idyllic simplicity based on an eternal struggle between the wolves and the humans in their fight to survive. Chen learns about the spiritual relationship which exists between these adversaries.

Treason at Lisson Grove

Treason at Lisson Grove PDF Author: Anne Perry
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345510593
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER The man who lies bleeding to death in a London brickyard is no ordinary drifter but a secret informant with details of an international plot against the British government. Special Branch officer Thomas Pitt, hastening to rendezvous with him, arrives seconds after the knife-wielding assassin—who, in turn, flees on an erratic course that leads Pitt in wild pursuit to picturesque St. Malo on the French coast. Meanwhile, Pitt’s supervisor, Victor Narraway, stands accused of embezzling government funds. Since the man who ruined Narraway’s career is in Ireland, Pitt’s clever wife, Charlotte, agrees to pose as Narraway’s sister and accompany him to Dublin to investigate. But unknown to Pitt and Narraway, a shadowy plotter is setting a trap that, once sprung, could destroy not just reputations but the British empire itself.

The Diary of a Bookseller

The Diary of a Bookseller PDF Author: Shaun Bythell
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612197256
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
A WRY AND HILARIOUS ACCOUNT OF LIFE AT A BOOKSHOP IN A REMOTE SCOTTISH VILLAGE "Among the most irascible and amusing bookseller memoirs I've read." --Dwight Garner, New York Times "Warm, witty and laugh-out-loud funny..."—Daily Mail The Diary of a Bookseller is Shaun Bythell's funny and fascinating memoir of a year in the life at the helm of The Bookshop, in the small village of Wigtown, Scotland—and of the delightfully odd locals, unusual staff, eccentric customers, and surreal buying trips that make up his life there as he struggles to build his business . . . and be polite . . . When Bythell first thought of taking over the store, it seemed like a great idea: The Bookshop is Scotland's largest second-hand store, with over one hundred thousand books in a glorious old house with twisting corridors and roaring fireplaces, set in a tiny, beautiful town by the sea. It seemed like a book-lover's paradise . . . Until Bythell did indeed buy the store. In this wry and hilarious diary, he tells us what happened next—the trials and tribulations of being a small businessman; of learning that customers can be, um, eccentric; and of wrangling with his own staff of oddballs (such as ski-suit-wearing, dumpster-diving Nicky). And perhaps none are quirkier than the charmingly cantankerous bookseller Bythell himself turns out to be. But then too there are the buying trips to old estates and auctions, with the thrill of discovery, as well as the satisfaction of pressing upon people the books that you love . . . Slowly, with a mordant wit and keen eye, Bythell is seduced by the growing charm of small-town life, despite —or maybe because of—all the peculiar characters there.

Ashenden

Ashenden PDF Author: W. Somerset Maugham
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
During World War I W. Somerset Maugham, already by then an established playwright and author, was recruited to be a British intelligence agent. These stories reflect his wartime experiences in intelligence gathering. Though fictionalized, they managed to retain enough authentic elements for Winston Churchill to advise Maugham that their publication might be a violation of the Official Secrets Act, resulting in the author burning an additional 14 stories. Set in various locales across the continent, these remaining Ashenden stories are a precursor to the jet-setting spy novels of the 1950s and 1960s. Maugham is known as a master short story writer and these stories are no exception, combining wit and realism to create memorable characters in a unique and highly critical portrait of wartime espionage. Initially released to a mixed reception—with an early review by D. H. Lawrence being especially scathing—Ashenden has since been credited as an inspiration for numerous authors, including John Le Carré, Graham Greene, and Raymond Chandler. The latter in particular was especially impressed, writing in 1950, “There are no other great spy stories—none at all. I have been searching and I know.” This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Through the French Canals

Through the French Canals PDF Author: David Jefferson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 147298174X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
Through the French Canals has probably tempted more people to explore the beautiful waterways of France than any other book. First published in 1970, it's been the key authoritative title on cruising the French canals ever since. The revised new edition is the essential comprehensive planning guide for anyone wanting to cruise through the French waterways or take their boat from the English Channel through to the Mediterranean via the inland route. It includes: over 50 routes fully described and illustrated, with positions of locks, towns and villages through routes from the English Channel and Atlantic to the Mediterranean, plus distances, and assessment of suitable boats for the canals. It also provides dimensions of locks and operating times, details of bridge heights, canal depths, fuelling points, waterway signals, a guide to the cost of living, shopping and stores, sources of weather information, haltes for overnight stops, and ports de plaisance. As well as new photography, the new edition is updated throughout with new information on local facilities, new haltes and ports de plaisance, new VNF License fees, revisions to cruise hire companies, updated references to holding tanks, the availability of diesel and costs of cruising and much more.