Welcome to the daring, thrilling, and downright strangeadventures of William Willis, one of the world’s original extremesportsmen. Driven by an unfettered appetite for personal challengeand a yen for the path of most resistance, Willis mounted asingle-handed and wholly unlikely rescue in the jungles of FrenchGuiana and then twice crossed the broad Pacific on rafts of his owndesign, with only housecats and a parrot for companionship. Hisfirst voyage, atop a ten-ton balsa monstrosity, was undertaken in1954 when Willis was sixty. His second raft, having crossed eleventhousand miles from Peru, found the north shore of Australiashortly after Willis’s seventieth birthday. A marvel of vigor andfitness, William Willis was a connoisseur of ordeal, all butorchestrating short rations, ship-wreck conditions, and crushingsolitude on his trans-Pacific voyages. He’d been inspired by Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl’s bid to provethat a primitive raft could negotiate the open ocean. Willis’strips confirmed tha

In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal. Translated by Randolf Hogan.

Descended from West African kings and healers, raised in theturbulence of Guinea in the 1960s, Kadiatou Diallo was married offat the age of thirteen and bore her first child when she wassixteen. Twenty-three years later, that child–a gentle, innocentyoung man named Amadou Diallo–was gunned down without cause on thestreets of New York City. Now Kadi Diallo tells the astonishing,inspiring story of her life, her loss, and the defiant strength shehas always found within.

The author of classic novels including Indiana and Lélia , George Sand is perhaps better known for herunconventional life. Belinda Jack unravels the many facets of thiswriter who counted among her friends and lovers everyone fromChopin and Liszt to Dostoyevsky and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.Sand defied convention by writing novels; but the fact that she wasa cigar-smoking cross-dresser who took male and female lovers,declared marriage “barbarous,” and championed socialism made her alegend. Allowing Sand’s voice to be heard, but wise enough toquestion it, Jack presents a riveting study of a woman raised byher aristocratic grandmother and her prostitute mother, and whoselife and work were forever fueled by rival worlds.

In this beautifully written and profoundly stirringautobiography, Geoffrey Wolff unravels the enigma of hisGatsby-esque father, an inveterate liar who falsified everythingbut love. 8 pages of black-and-white photos.

Every Alaskan king crab season, brothers Andy and JohnathanHillstrand risk their lives and seek their fortunes upon thetreacherous waters of the Bering Sea. Sons of a hard-bitten, highlysuccessful fisherman, and born with brine in their blood, theHillstrand boys couldn’t imagine a life without a swaying deckunderfoot and a harvest of mighty king crabs waiting to be pulledfrom the ocean floor. In pursuit of their daily catch, the brothersbrave ice floes and heaving waves sixty feet high, the perils ofthousand-pound steel traps thrown about by the punishing wind, andthe constant menace of the open, hungry water—epitomized in thechorus of a haunting sailors’ sing-along: “Many brave hearts areasleep in the deep, so beware, beware.” By turns raucous and reflective, exhilarating and anguished,enthralling, suspenseful, and wise, Time Bandit chronicles alarger-than-life love affair as old as civilization itself—a loveaffair between striving, willful man and inscrutable, enduringnature.

I tell of a time, a place, and a way of life long gone. For manyyears I have had the urge to describe that treasure trove, lest itvanish forever. So, partly in response to the basic human instinctto share feelings and experiences, and partly for the sheer joy andexcitement of it all, I report on my early life. It was quite aromp. So begins Mildred Kalish’s story of growing upon her grandparents’ Iowa farm during the depths of the GreatDepression. With her father banished from the household formysterious transgressions, five-year-old Mildred and her familycould easily have been overwhelmed by the challenge of simplytrying to survive. This, however, is not a tale of suffering. Kalish counts herself among the lucky of thatera. She had caring grandparents who possessed—and valiantly triedto impose—all the pioneer virtues of their forebears, teachers whoinspired and befriended her, and a barnyard full of animals readyto be tamed and loved. She and her siblings and their cousins fromthe farm across

McCain, with help from his administrative assistant Salter,picks up where the bestselling Faith of My Fathers left off, afterhis release from a North Vietnamese POW prison. After two decadesin Congress, he has plenty of stories to tell, beginning with hisfirst experiences on Capitol Hill as a navy liaison to the Senate,where he became friends with men like Henry "Scoop" Jackson andJohn Tower. (The latter friendship plays a crucial role in McCain'saccount of the battle over Tower's 1989 nomination for defensesecretary.) He revisits the "Keating Five" affair that nearlywrecked his career in the early '90s, pointedly observing how theinvestigating Senate committee left him dangling for politicalreasons long after he'd been cleared of wrongdoing. There's muchless on his 2000 presidential campaign than one might expect; asingle chapter lingers on a self-lacerating analysis of how he lostthe South Carolina primary. (He admits, "I doubt I shall havereason or opportunity to try again" for the White House, and