Other books that might interest you

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  On This Day: August 21

  Emily Goldstein

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  On This Day: August 21. Daily podcast of historical and noteworthy activity on this calendar day. Lincoln-Douglas debates; Hawaii becomes 50th US state; Nat Turner led an unsuccessful slave rebellion

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  Death in Salem - The Private...

  Diane Foulds

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  Salem witchcraft will always have a magnetic pull on the American psyche. During the 1692 witch trials, more than 150 people were arrested. An estimated 25 million Americans—including author Diane Foulds—are descended from the twenty individuals executed. What happened to our ancestors? Death in Salem is the first book to take a clear-eyed look at this complex time, by examining the lives of the witch trial participants from a personal perspective.  
   
  Massachusetts settlers led difficult lives; every player in the Salem drama endured hardships barely imaginable today. Mercy Short, one of the “bewitched” girls, watched as Indians butchered her parents; Puritan minister Cotton Mather outlived all but three of his fifteen children. Such tragedies shaped behavior and, as Foulds argues, ultimately played a part in the witch hunt’s outcome. A compelling “who’s who” to Salem witchcraft, Death in Salem profiles each of these historical personalities as it asks: Why was this person targeted?

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  Slaphappy - Pride Prejudice and...

  Thomas Hackett

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  Slaphappy is reporter Thomas Hackett's penetrating look at the world of professional wrestling, for those who love the spectacle and for the sport's skeptics and the uninitiated. Through interviews with wrestlers, promoters, and fans, Hackett explores the full range of issues that swirl around wrestling culture -- fame, masculinity, violence, aggression, performance, and play. Among the lessons of professional wrestling is that deceit is a fundamental fact of American life. And yet, paradoxically, the one thing wrestling isn't is dishonest. Although wrestlers play pretend, wrestling itself doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is -- fantastically absurd, a very American kind of madness. Celebrity-obsessed, pathologically narcissistic, murderously competitive, it both epitomizes and parodies the delusional egoism at the heart of the culture.More than that, wrestling provides its fans and performers a medium for thinking about "getting over" in America today. This spectacle of excess may be the apotheosis of American imbecility, but it is also defiant, hopeful, liberating, and unifying -- a throwback to the raucous pleasures of early theater. Fans aren't detached connoisseurs, looking satirically down on life, concealing their anxieties in the cold comforts of irony. They are total participants in a carnival of their own making, shouting epithets, throwing chairs, expatiating their worries in a crowd's triumphant foolishness.It is, Slaphappy concludes, all the stuff of human culture. Where does fantasy end and reality begin? Where does the performance stop and life take over? Writing with affection and discernment, Hackett gets deep into the culture, discovering that the make-believe competition of wrestling is indeed "real" for millions of young men -- real in the sense that something real and important is at stake: their worth as men.

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  Autobiography of a Yogi...

  Paramahansa Yogananda

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  Autobiography of a Yogi will introduce the listener to the life of Paramahansa Yogananda and his encounters with spiritual figures of both the Eastern and the Western world. The audio book begins with his childhood family life, to finding his guru, to becoming a monk and establishing his teachings of Kriya Yoga meditation. The audio book continues in 1920 when Yogananda accepts an invitation to speak in a religious congress in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He then travels across America lecturing and establishing his teachings in Los Angeles, California. In 1935, he returns to India for a yearlong visit. When he returns to America, he continues to establish his teachings, including writing this book.

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  The Sporting Gun's Bedside...

  Douglas Butler

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  Thirty shooting stories in pursuit of pheasant, mallard, geese, hares, mink, even an old wild goat, these modern tales involve bi-lingual dogs, an ignominious goose, red-letter days and disappointments, days on boglands, grouse moors, smart shoots and estuaries.
  
  
  Punt gunning, rough shooting and wildfowling, dawns and dusks and assorted brushes with ecstasy and near-death. Douglas Butler has an ear for a good shooting story and, as an inveterate shooter himself, knows just what curious, unexpected, dramatic things can sometimes happen when out in the fields, woods and marshes with fellow guns and dogs.

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  Return to Saigon - From high...

  Larry Duthie

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  He ejects from his burning Navy jet and lands on a karst ridge near Hanoi. What follows in this meticulously researched history is a memoir of war. It is an account of one of the most implausible and heroic rescues of the air-war--and the aftermath. And the events immediately following his rescue carry the author to a secret base in Laos, then to a makeshift hospital in Saigon. The larger story, however, is of the author’s complex relationship with Vietnam. 
  It begins in Saigon, where he completes high school and comes to love the Vietnamese people. When he departs for college, he believes he’s done with the country. But when he leaves college life behind and enlists in the Navy, a series of improbable events land him in Navy flight school. As a pilot, it’s a direct line to combat and an unexpected return to a Saigon hospital--one with a surprising connection to his past. 
  The author experienced some of the fiercest air combat of the war. His air wing repeatedly hit the toughest targets in North Vietnam and suffered the highest loss rate--39 of its 72 aircraft went down. Many others suffered battle damage. The Jolly Green helicopter pilot who flew from the secret base in Laos to rescue the author earned the rarely awarded Air Force Cross and his three crew-members all were awarded Silver Stars. Following his hospitalization and rehabilitation, the writer volunteered for a third combat deployment, where he completed 137 combat missions. 
  Three decades later, the war behind him, he returns to Saigon, then he travels north to Hanoi to make his way into the remote countryside where he and his flight leader were shot down. A local guide, a woman who remembers the day the two airplanes were blown from the sky, leads him up the steep karst ridge and then deep into a cavern. During the trek he learns her brother was one of the gunners. Later that day, seated at a table in her thatched home, he begins to find reconciliation.

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