Mostrando resultados por autor "Winchester" en Todas las categorías

Land - whether meadow or mountainside, desert or peat bog, parkland or pasture, suburb or city - is central to our existence. It quite literally underlies and underpins everything. Employing the keen intellect, insatiable curiosity, and narrative verve that are the foundations of his previous bestselling works, Simon Winchester examines what we human beings are doing - and have done - with the billions of acres that together make up the solid surface of our planet.

Benjamin's life was perfect. He'd just graduated from college and landed his dream job; he was finally ready to make his own way in life. However, before he could do that, he and his buddies decided to go on one last camping trip that changed everything. Suddenly, the five of them were ripped from their campsite on Earth by powerful magics, brought face-to-face with the might of the rune mages, and forced to become pawns in larger schemes.

The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island of Krakatoa - the name has since become a byword for a cataclysmic disaster - was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly 40,000 people. Beyond the purely physical horrors of an event that has only very recently been properly understood, the eruption changed the world in more ways than could possibly be imagined. Dust swirled round die planet for years, causing temperatures to plummet and sunsets to turn vivid with lurid and unsettling displays of light.

When it comes to climate-change-inspired threats, it is rising sea levels we hear most about. But if the oceans are, as Herman Melville put it, “the tide-beating heart of the Earth”, rivers are its circulatory system. In the United States, there is no river more storied, symbolic, and vital than the Mississippi, and none, to use Mark Twain’s word, more lawless. The struggle to control it has been going on nearly as long as there has been human civilization on its banks, and the attendant drama and dangers have been memorialized by many writers.

Award-winning journalist and author Simon Winchester takes readers on a personal tour of the Balkans. Combining history and interviews with the people who live there, Winchester offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex issues at work in this chaotic region. Unrest in the Balkans has gone on for centuries. A seasoned reporter, Winchester visited the region twenty years ago. When Kosovo reached crisis level in 1997, Winchester thought a return visit to the beleaguered area would help to make sense out of the awful violence.

Escape to the American frontier this Christmas with four heartwarming tales of love, redemption, and second chances. The Christmas Schoolmarm (New and Never Before Published!) - In 1880s Dakota Territory, Mary McGurty flees Boston and an unwanted suitor, reinventing herself as mail-order bride Adelaide Whitfield. Desperate for a fresh start, she agrees to marry widowed rancher Michael Campbell and become stepmother to his young daughter Sarah. As Christmas approaches, Mary finds herself falling deeply in love with both her new family and life on the frontier. Her plans to create a magical ...

In 1793 William Smith, a canal digger, made a startling discovery that was to turn the fledgling science of the history of the earth - and a central plank of established Christian religion - on its head. He noticed that the rocks he was excavating were arranged in layers; more important, he could see quite clearly that the fossils found in one layer were very different from those found in another. And out of that realization came an epiphany.

No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair. He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire.

When Boston schoolteacher Clara Whitmore accepts a position as a mail-order bride in Montana Territory, she expects to find a schoolhouse waiting. Instead, she finds widower Sam Mitchell, his two grieving children, and a town resistant to change. Fleeing an unwanted engagement back East, Clara's determined to make this new life work—even if it means teaching children in her parlor and proving herself to a man whose heart is still frozen in grief. Sam Mitchell needs a mother for his children and a teacher for the growing town, but he never expected both to arrive in one determined package....

Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.

From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary.

Summer Meads, a girl born into the world as a slave and forced to grow up tossed from one house to the next, must survive. She knows nothing of her bloodline to the Mafia world, even when she met Chase when they were children. To save Summer and to take down one of the most feared Mafia families, Chase must marry her. At what cost will Chase and Summer’s marriage cost not only them, but the Marcel family? How can a slave girl be helpful for the Mafia family?

He will kill for her. He will burn for her. In a brutal, frozen world, Winter is hidden and hunted—half-Black, half-white, and entirely alone. Ethan is married. Trapped. Dying inside. Their love is forbidden. Their touch, a crime. But when danger comes for Winter, Ethan will cross a line that will damn them both. This isn’t a love story. That would be too safe ... It’s a love watered in pain, fed by longing and reaped in a betrayal so deadly ... not even their hearts will survive.

Douglas Webster was a young pilot from Ohio, newly married and with 17 combat missions under his belt. On December 5, 1965 he strapped into an A-4 Skyhawk bomber for a routine weapons loading drill and simulated mission. After mishandling the maneuver, the plane and its pilot sunk to the bottom of the South China Sea, along with a live B43 one-megaton thermonuclear bomb. A cover-up mission began.

The Breath of the Gods is an urgently-needed portrait across time of that unseen force—unseen but not unfelt—that respects no national borders and no vessel or structure in its path. Wind, the movement of the air, is seen by so many as a heavenly creation and generally a thing of essential goodness. But when it flexes its invisible muscles, all should take care and be very afraid.

Craft your dream landscape within days, even if you've never touched a spade before... Ever looked at your neighbor's garden and wondered how to get such a fabulous transformation? Have you dreamed of crafting a tranquil space to find solitude but fear that your lack of experience can only lead to a disaster? Are you overwhelmed by landscape design jargon, wish lists, budget constraints, and a dizzying array of plant options? You're not alone. Many new homeowners, young couples, and others just like you grapple with these questions every day. But it's time to wave goodbye to your worries ...

With the advent of the internet, any topic we want to know about is instantly available with the touch of a smartphone button. With so much knowledge at our fingertips, what is there left for our brains to do? At a time when we seem to be stripping all value from the idea of knowing things—no need for math, no need for map reading, no need for memorisation—are we risking our ability to think? As we empty our minds, will we one day be incapable of thoughtfulness?

After its victory over the Count, the Lich’s domain now reaches far from Blackwater in every direction. It has gathered monstrous allies, constructed undead abominations, and enslaved small gods to its cause. However, none of that will be enough to sate its appetites. Instead, it has set its sights on goals so large that individual lives are almost meaningless, and whole nations and religions are nothing but stepping stones. The Lich is deathless and, therefore, unbound by mortal time scales. So, it can think bigger than anyone has dared before now.

No longer a mere lich, Tenebroum has chosen a name, devoured a god, and ascended to godhood itself. As formidable a victory as this was, though, it came at a steep price: its secrecy. Now, with the Lord of Light slain, the sun itself has been plucked from the sky, the entire world knows of its existence. The newborn Lord of Shadows will encounter countless foes ready to challenge it, both on and off the battlefield. To meet these new threats and satiate its bottomless hunger, the dread god will wage war upon the entire world, even the gods themselves.

The international best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force.