Search:

Lightning down : a World War II story of survival / by Clavin, Thomas,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."The incredible true story of fighter pilot Joe Moser's war in the sky and secret survival at Buchenwald during World War II. On August 13, 1944, Joe Moser set off on his 44th combat mission over occupied France. Soon, he would join almost 150 other Allied airmen as prisoners in Buchenwald, one of the most notorious and deadly of Nazi concentration camps. Tom Clavin's Lightning Down tells this largely untold and riveting true story. Moser was just 22 years old, a farmboy from Washington State who fell in love with flying. During the war he realized his dream of piloting a P-38 Lightning, one of the most effective weapons the Army Air Corps had against the powerful German Luftwaffe. But on that hot August morning he had to bail out of his damaged, burning plane. Captured immediately, Moser's journey into hell began. Joe Moser and his courageous comrades from England, Canada, New Zealand, and elsewhere endured against impossible odds in the most horrific surroundings ... until the day the orders are issued by Hitler himself to execute them. Only a most desperate plan might save them. The page-turning momentum of Lightning Down is like that of a thriller, but the stories of imprisoned and brutalized airmen are true and told in unforgettable detail, led by the distinctly American voice of Joe Moser, who prays every day to be reunited with his family. Lightning Down is a can't-put-down inspiring saga of brave men confronting great evil and great odds against survival"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Moser, Joseph F.; United States. Army Air Forces. Fighter Squadron, 429th; Buchenwald (Concentration camp); Fighter pilots; Prisoners of war; Prisoners of war; World War, 1939-1945;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

How to be a family : the year I dragged my kids around the world to find a new way to be together / by Kois, Dan,author.;
"What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids' lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family? Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children's time wisely, and when they weren't arguing over screen time, the Kois family -- Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters -- could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren't families supposed to achieve happiness together? In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny family memoir, the fractious, loving Kois' go in search of other places on the map that might offer them the chance to live away from home -- but closer together. Over a year the family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside the East Coast parenting bubble. HOW TO BE A FAMILY brings readers along as the Kois girls -- witty, solitary, extremely online Lyra and goofy, sensitive, social butterfly Harper -- hike through the Kiwi bush, ride bikes to a Dutch school in the pouring rain, battle iguanas in their Costa Rican kitchen, and learn to love a town where everyone knows your name. Meanwhile, Dan interviews neighbors, public officials, and scholars to learn why each of these places work the way they do. Will this trip change the Kois family's lives? Or do families take their problems and conflicts with them wherever we go? A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, HOW TO BE A FAMILY will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take"--
Subjects: Kois, Dan; Families; Voyages around the world.; Voyages and travels; Parenting;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Unbound : finding myself on top of the world / by Jagger, Steph,author.;
"A young woman follows winter across five continents on a physical and spiritual journey that tests her body and soul, in this transformative memoir, full of heart and courage, that speaks to the adventurousness in all of us. Steph Jagger had always been a force of nature. Dissatisfied with the passive, limited roles she saw for women growing up, she emulated the men in her life--chasing success, climbing the corporate ladder, ticking the boxes, playing by the rules of a masculine ideal. She was accomplished. She was living "The Dream." But it wasn't her dream. Then the universe caught her attention with a sign: Raise Restraining Device. Steph had seen this ski lift sign on countless occasions in the past, but the familiar words suddenly became a personal call to shake off the life she had built in a search for something different, something more. Steph soon decided to walk away from the success and security she had worked long and hard to obtain. She quit her job, took a second mortgage on her house, sold everything except her ski equipment and her laptop, and bought a bundle of plane tickets. For the next year, she followed winter across North and South America, Asia, Europe, and New Zealand--and up and down the mountains of nine countries--on a mission to ski four million vertical feet in a year. What hiking was for Cheryl Strayed, skiing became for Steph: a crucible in which to crack open her life and get to the very center of herself. But she would have to break herself down--first physically, then emotionally--before she could start to rebuild. And it was through this journey that she came to understand how to be a woman, how to love, and how to live authentically. Electrifying, heartfelt, and full of humor, Unbound is Steph's story--an odyssey of courage and self-discovery that, like Wild and Eat, Pray, Love, will inspire readers to remove their own restraining devices and pursue the life they are meant to lead"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Jagger, Steph.; Self-actualization (Psychology); Skiers;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

When the heavens went on sale : the misfits and geniuses who put space within reach / by Vance, Ashlee,author.;
"With the launch of the Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, Elon Musk's SpaceX became the first private company to build a low-cost rocket that could reach orbit. And that milestone carried major implications: Silicon Valley, not NASA, was suddenly cemented as the epicenter of the new Space Age. Start-ups and the wealthy investors behind them began to realize that the universe--ungoverned and infinite--was open for business. Welcome to the wild west of aerospace engineering. When the Heavens Went on Sale tells the remarkable, unfolding story of this frenzied intergalactic land grab. Through his trademark immersive reporting, Ashlee Vance follows four pioneering companies--Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab--as they build new space systems and attempt to launch rockets into orbit. While the public fixated on the space tourism being driven by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, these new companies arrived with a different set of goals: to make rocket and satellite launches fast and cheap, thereby opening Earth's lower orbit for business--and setting it up as the next playing field for humankind's technological evolution, where we can connect, analyze, and monitor everything on Earth. Vance has had a front row seat and singular access to this peculiar and unprecedented moment in history. When the Heavens Went on Sale travels through private company headquarters, labs, and top-secret launch locations around the world, including California, Texas, Alaska, New Zealand, Ukraine, India, and French Guiana. Vance chronicles it all in full color: the private jets, communes, gun-toting bodyguards, hallucinogens, espionage investigations, and multi-millionaires guzzling booze to dull the pain as their fortunes disappear. With the most detailed and intimate reporting of Vance's career, When the Heavens Went on Sale reveals the spectacular chaos of the new business of space, and what happens when the idealistic, ambitious minds of Silicon Valley turn their unbridled vision toward the limitless expanse of the stars. This is the most pressing and controversial technology story of our times, a tale of fascinating characters chasing unimaginable stakes as they race to space"--
Subjects: Privatization.; Rockets (Aeronautics); Space tourism.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Stolen focus : why you can't pay attention - and how to think deeply again / by Hari, Johann,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening-and how to get our attention back. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding it much harder to focus than he used to. He found that a life of constantly switching from device to device, from tab to tab, is diminishing and depressing. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions-even abandoning his phone for three months-but in the long-term, nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention and to study their scientific findings-and learned that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong. In the U.S., teenagers now focus on a task for only sixty-five seconds on average, and office workers manage only three minutes. We think this inability to focus is a personal flaw, an individual failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: Our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces, and the science shows that these forces have been ramping up for decades-leaving us uniquely vulnerable, when social media arrived, to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. These forces have been so successful that our collapse in attention is behind many of the wider problems society faces. In Stolen Focus, Hari embarks on a thrilling journey, taking readers from veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD, to Silicon Valley dissidents who exposed social media companies' furtive attempts to hack our focus; from a favela in Rio where everyone lost their attention in a particularly catastrophic way, to an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore their workers' attention. In this urgent, deeply researched book, Hari shows that if we understand the twelve true causes of this crisis-from the collapse of sustained reading to the disruption of boredom to rising pollution-we, as individuals and as a society, can finally begin to solve it by staging an "attention rebellion." Finally, we have a way to get our focus back"--
Subjects: Attention.; Distraction (Psychology);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Aftershocks : pandemic politics and the end of the old international order / by Kahl, Colin H.,1971-author.; Wright, Thomas J.,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."The COVID-19 crisis is the greatest shock to world order since Worlwd War II. Millions have been infected and killed. The economic crash caused by the pandemic is the worst since the Great Depression, with the International Monetary Fund estimating that it will cost over $9 trillion of global wealth in the next few years. Many will be left impoverished and hungry. Fragile states will be further hollowed out, creating conditions ripe for conflict and mass displacement. Meanwhile, international institutions and alliances already under strain before the pandemic are teetering, while the United States and China, already at loggerheads before the crisis, are careening toward a new Cold War. China's secrecy and assertiveness have shattered hopes that it will become a responsible stakeholder in the international order. Colin Kahl and Thomas Wright's Aftershocks is both a riveting journalistic account of one of the strangest years on record and a comprehensive analysis of the pandemic's ongoing impact on the foundational institutions and ideas that have shaped the modern world. This is the first crisis in decades without a glimmer of American leadership and it shows -- there has been no international cooperation on a quintessential global challenge. Every country has followed its own path -- nationalizing supplies, shutting their borders, and largely ignoring the rest of the world. The international order the United States constructed seven decades ago is in tatters, and the world is adrift. None of this came out of the blue. Public health experts and intelligence analysts had warned for a decade that a pandemic of this sort was inevitable. The crisis broke against a global backdrop of rising nationalism, backsliding democracy, declining public trust in governments, mounting rebellion against the inequalities produced by globalization, resurgent great power competition, and plummeting international cooperation. And yet, there are some signs of hope. The COVID-19 crisis reminds us of our common humanity and shared fate. The public has, for the most part, responded stoically and with kindness. Some democracies -- South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, New Zealand, among others -- have responded well. America may emerge from the crisis with a new resolve to deal with non-traditional threats, like pandemic disease, and a new demand for effective collective action with other democratic nations. America may also finally be forced to come to grips with our nation's inadequacies, and to make big changes at home and abroad that will set the stage for opportunities the rest of this century holds. But one thing is certain: America and the world will never be the same again"--
Subjects: COVID-19 (Disease); Epidemics; Epidemics;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The savage storm : the battle for Italy 1943 / by Holland, James,1970-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."Acclaimed WWII historian James Holland both narrates and reframes the controversial first months of the Italian Campaign and sets a new standard in the chronicling of war. Following victory in Sicily, while the central command planned the spring 1944 invasion of France, Allied troops crossed into southern Italy in September 1943, expecting to drive Axis forces north and liberate Rome by Christmas. Italy quickly surrendered but German divisions fiercely resisted, and the hoped-for quick victory descended into one of the most challenging and protracted battles of the entire war. Chronicling the dramatic opening months of the Italian Campaign in unflinching and insightful detail, The Savage Storm is unlike any campaign history yet written. Holland has always narrated war at ground level, but here goes further by chronicling events almost entirely through the contemporary eyes of those who were there on all sides and at all levels-Allied, Axis, and civilians alike. Weaving together a wealth of letters, diaries, and other documents-from the likes of American General Mark Clark, German battalion commander Georg Zellner, New Zealand lance-corporal Roger Smith, and legendary war reporter Ernie Pyle-Holland traces the battles as they were experienced across plains, over mountains, through shattered villages and cities, in intense heat and, towards the end of December 1943, frigid cold and relentless rain. Such close-up views persuade Holland to recast important aspects of the campaign, reappraising the reputation of Mark Clark himself and other senior commanders of the U.S. Fifth and British Eighth armies. Given the shortage of Allied shipping and materiel allocated to Italy because of the build-up for D-Day, more was expected of Allied troops in Italy than anywhere else, and, as accounts at the time attest, a huge price was paid by everyone for each bloodily contested mile. Putting readers vividly in the moment as events unfolded, with characters made unforgettable by their own words, The Savage Storm is a defining account of the pivotal months leading to Monte Cassino, and a landmark in the writing about war"--
Subjects: World War, 1939-1945; World War, 1939-1945;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

SriLankaNZ
Mode of access: Internet.
Subjects: News;
© , SriLankaNZ
unAPI

Palmary
Mode of access: Internet.
Subjects: News;
© , New Zealand Messenger
unAPI

NZ Messenger
Mode of access: Internet.
Subjects: News;
© , New Zealand Messenger
unAPI