Western Biography

Whilst it’s impossible to capture the essence of Nigeria in one story, its writers have given listeners the opportunity to experience the many different parts that make up Africa’s most populous nation. In Of This Our Country, acclaimed and award-winning Nigerian writers go a step further and describe their Nigeria, sharing personal essays about a country that holds so much more than any one perspective could. Through the words of these writers, a living portrait of Nigeria is woven, one that is as beautiful as it is complex.

Cameron West was in his thirties, a successful businessman, happily married and the father of a young son when he spoke these words. The “voice” he heard belonged to Davy, the first of twenty-four distinct alter personalities to emerge over a period of several months as West began to recall memories of horrific abuse he’d repressed since childhood.

If you are a hip hop fan and want "the real" about the "World's Most Dangerous Group" and all the players that paved the way for West Coast hip hop, this is the audiobook for you, told by the man who was there from the very beginning.

The Allied invasion of Europe during summer 1944 was widely expected, and it fell to the Axis intelligence services to provide High Command with advance warning of the precise date and place of the landings. Using cryptanalysis of Allied signals, undercover agents and ships, and photographic evidence, Axis intelligence was pitted directly against their Allied counterparts, who actively tried to create a decoy and aim their enemies at the wrong location.

Nicolaus Copernicus was a brilliant mathematician and astronomer who lived during the Renaissance and Reformation eras and contributed to science with a new model of the universe that placed the Sun instead of the Earth at the center of the universe. Although a similar theory had been formulated centuries earlier by Aristarchus of Samos, Copernicus went much farther than anyone before him. A major milestone in the history of science, the publication of his book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543 was a radical act that demolished thousand-year old beliefs. Born in Royal ...

Sir Walter Ralegh was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth. She showered him with estates and political appointments. He envisioned her becoming empress of a universal empire. She gave him the opportunity to lead the way. In Walter Ralegh, Alan Gallay shows that, while Ralegh may be best known for founding the failed Roanoke colony, his historical importance vastly exceeds that enterprise. Inspired by the mystical religious philosophy of hermeticism, Ralegh led English attempts to colonize in North America, South America, and Ireland.

Paul Lamb is a hedgelayer. From the end of summer until the birds begin to nest in the spring, his primary employment is the maintenance and restoration of hedgerows. This book, following the rhythm of the seasons, describes Paul’s life on the road and the practical aspects of his job, including the highs and the lows. It is about practising a craft with skill and preserving it for future generations, and celebrating the glory of the landscape he loves so much.

When Ghana declared independence from Britain in 1957, it immediately became a target for opportunists determined to lay hold of whatever assets colonialism hadn’t already stripped. The military ousted the new nation’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of stealing the country’s gold and hiding it overseas. Into this story stepped one of history’s most charismatic scammers, John Ackah Blay-Miezah – a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty, Blay-Miezah declared himself the custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions.

I feared for their lives and their ears. Our local weekly newspaper showed pictures of them dangling from ropes hanging in woven baskets off the embankment of a mountain in order to tap sticks of dynamite into the holes they drilled in the granite cliff faces they blasted away. One could hear that awful, loud dynamite blasting all the way in town. But the booming had been even worse for the ears of the railroad workers who detonated the charges for the grading and tunneling, especially the Chinese who were given these most dangerous jobs.

Galileo's oldest child was 13 when he placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Her support was her father's greatest source of strength. Her presence, through letters which Sobel has translated from Italian and masterfully woven into the narrative, graces her father's life now as it did then. Galileo's Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose 17th-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion.

The era of the gunfighter in the Wild West began during James Butler Hickok's life. Better known as "Wild Bill," he was the first and most famous gunfighter. A man without equal, he was said to have killed hundreds of outlaws in valiant and bloody struggles to the death, from which he invariably emerged the victor and the hero. Hickok himself was not above adding embellishments to the stories about himself to any reporter who sought him out.

Benjamin Franklin was first and foremost a public servant, but he was also a prolific writer, humorist, musician, inventor, businessman, and scientist. He was always working to improve civic society. Among many other things, he organized the first volunteer fire department and established the first lending library in America. In the 18th century, he was celebrated as a scientist, inventor, and innovator who somehow emerged from the obscurity of his modest birth to prominence.

In 2001, at 47, Thomas DeWolf was astounded to discover that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in American history, responsible for transporting at least 10,000 Africans to the Americas. His infamous ancestor, U.S. senator James DeWolf of Bristol, of Rhode Island, curried favor with President Jefferson to continue in the trade after it was outlawed.

Masters and Commanders has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

Author Orlando (Ori) Spado honestly recants his humble beginnings from the small town of Rome in upstate New York, to becoming known as "The Mob Boss of Hollywood." A candid account documenting his fall from a well-known Hollywood fixer mixing with A list celebrities to serving 62 months in Federal prison, and ultimately making a determined comeback.

Bryce Andrews was raised to do no harm. The son of a pacifist and conscientious objector, he moved from Seattle to Montana to tend livestock and the land as a cowboy. For a decade, he was happy. Yet, when Andrews inherited his grandfather’s Smith & Wesson revolver, he felt the weight of the violence braided into his chosen life. Other white men who’d come before him had turned firearms like this one against wildlife, wilderness, and the Indigenous peoples who had lived in these landscapes for millennia. This was how the West was “won.”

Country Editor's Boy picks up where Hal Borland's classic memoir High, Wide and Lonesome left off: with Borland, on the cusp of adulthood in the early twentieth century, making his way in an eastern Colorado town that still retained all the flavors of the Old West. Borland's father, the editor of a local weekly newspaper, was working to help his publication transition along with the town around him. At the same time, young Hal was experiencing dramatic social and economic change in his own way.

I lead my Grulla Mare, Savanna, to water. She is the gray of a mule deer's winter coat, with a dorsal stripe and zebra markings on her legs that trace back to the original wild horses, though she is quarter horse, not mustang. The mustang follows. It is his first time here, to the pinon pine and juniper woodland that defines my desert home.

With the coming of the railroads, the American cowboy's job changed drastically, as the great trail herds became a thing of the past. Many cowboys faded into history, but there was a place in northwest Colorado and northeast Utah that still prized their skills. Val FitzPatrick's family homesteaded in this region, and Val became a rider for the Two-Bar at the age of 14. In later years, Val wrote many accounts of his life, and The Arbuckle Cafe is a collection of the best of his stories, all classic and authentic insights of what life on the range was really like.

Herbert Hoover led one of the most fascinating lives of an America in the twentieth century. Orphaned as a young boy he would graduate from Stanford University, build a fortune as a mining engineer, and become the most accomplished humanitarian of his era. His complex personality led many to view him as aloof and uncaring, though ironically through his extreme generosity he helped feed millions of starving Europeans during two World Wars. After a brilliant career as Secretary of Commerce he became president of the United States in 1928 which was at the high point of America’s prosperity. ...