by Gerri Miller
Some people go into the bathroom and then never come out. See our list of 8 famous people who died in the bathroom, including Elvis, Jim Morrison, and Orville Redenbacher.
"21" is a movie based on the best-selling book, Bringing Down the House, about a group of math prodigies who use card-counting to win big in blackjack. How does card-counting work, and can you still get away with it?
Prices: Books About Shipwrecks
Nor'easters, blizzards, and hurricanes. Spanish galleons, German U-boats, and presidential yachts. Pirates and privateers. The ephemeral and deadly nature of islands, dunes, inlets, and shoals. The history of the Delmarva Peninsula's Atlantic coast is rich with tales of fantasy and adventure, heroism and tragedy, greed and charity. Claiming more than 2,300 vessels since 1632, it rivals North Carolina's Outer Banks for the infamous title "The Graveyard of the Atlantic."Maritime historian Donald G. Shomette brings these stories to life. Featuring the accounts of twenty-five ill-starred vessels—some notorious and some forgotten until now—this anthology provides a fascinating history of a local maritime culture and charts how the catastrophic events along this shore significantly affected U.S. merchant shipping as a whole. Shomette weaves together history, folklore, and legend in accounts of the tragic loss of the 1750 Spanish treasure fleet, the British blockade of the Delaware in the American Revolution, the depredations of Confederate commerce raiders during the Civil War, the Billy Mitchell affair, the Hurricane of 1933, and the Nazi U-boat offensive of World War II. His appendix provides a complete catalog of all 2,300 recorded wrecks, including coordinates and location descriptions where available.A vivid montage of seafaring adventures and pivotal events in American history, this volume makes an essential contribution to the library of the history buff, wreck diver, and local adventurer.
$32.46
In light of, and in response to, the popular perception of the Caribbean as an epitome of cultural hybridity and improvisation, this book seeks to further examine Caribbean cultural identities along the lines of race, class, nationalism, and history. Drawing on a variety of genres of literature and popular music, the present volume includes not only pieces that stress the shaping and reshaping of Afro-Caribbean cultural identities and the significance of hybridization, but also those that think against the grain and pursue questions which have not received enough critical attention. This latter task can be seen in the attempt to probe the phenomenon that the Caribbean's image as a tropical getaway in metropolitan popular imaginations tends to eclipse its troubled pasts, traumatic memories, and current (and recurrent) problems which elude the rhetoric of cultural hybridity, presupposing instead a certain non-conflictual diversity or racial equality in the relatively innocuous realm of 'culture'. Although nuanced among themselves on certain issues, the individual chapters together highlight a body of work which is distinct from the bulk of Anglo-American academic productions on the Caribbean, as the majority of the textual and cultural materials treated here come from either the Hispanic or Francophone Caribbean.
$42.00
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a time of great colonial expansion, marked by a mercantile frenzy of ships carrying merchants, aristocrats, missionaries, sailors, Inquisitors, botanists, and statesmen pursuing the spoils of empire. Among the narratives that chronicled these voyages, those of the Portuguese are unequaled. C. R. Boxer's fascinating translations of famous Portuguese shipwreck stories detail the disasters and terrors plaguing the perilous sea trading route between Portugal and India. In the tradition of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Defoe, and Poe, these dramatic stories of shipwreck-and those who lived to tell about it-represent existence and survival pushed to the limits. They describe disastrous turns of fate and miraculous rescues, heroism and cowardice, and offer the exhilaration and sheer emotive appeal of a tale of adventure well told. Often circulated in pamphlet form, these stories recounting the dangers and terrors of storm-tossed ocean voyages and the fate of castaways in distant lands were a popular genre, rife with compelling and often gory details. This first ever paperback edition includes a new translation of the tragic tale of Captain Manuel de Sousa Sepúlveda, shipwrecked with his family on the sands of Africa in 1552, the previous English versions of which have long been unavailable. Vividly descriptive and engrossing, these tales of selfishness, cruelty, despair, pirates, mayhem, and harrowing storms will captivate readers. C. R. Boxer (1904-2000) was an expert on the perils of the high seas. During his colorful twenty-three-year career in the military, he served as an interpreter and intelligence officer in the Far East, where he was imprisoned by the Japanese from 1941 to 1945. A prolific writer, autodidact, and bon vivant, he was also a celebrated collector of rare books and professor of Portuguese studies at universities in his native England and the United States. Josiah Blackmore is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto.
$27.47
