National Network for Equitable Library Service

This is the true story of two nineteenth-century explorers who discovered 1,500-year-old pyramids and temples in Central America and evidence of an astonishingly sophisticated culture. Their discovery of the Mayan civilization would change Western understanding of human history.

Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, Chapman was parachuted into Britain with orders to blow up an airplane factory. Instead, he contacted MI5, the British Secret Service. For the next four years, he worked as a double agent, a British spy at the heart of the German Secret Service.

The incredible story of the “King of the Pirates,” who burst from the waters of early Canada to become a terror of the seas. He was tall, dark, and handsome, he wore fine velvets and lace, and in four tumultuous years he tore the guts out of the Atlantic. Bartholomew Roberts took over four hundred ships and rarely lost a fight at sea in his short, spectacular reign. Black Flag of the North tells the story of Roberts’s dramatic life, from his boyhood in rural South Wales through his days at sea in the slave trade.

After her marriage of 25 years ended badly, Linda Kenyon was determined to never put herself in the way of a broken heart again. But then she met an extraordinary man, and in an act of great courage -- or foolishness -- decided to sell everything she owned and sail across the ocean with him. Sea Over Bow: Crossing the North Atlantic is the account of that journey. It takes readers to the middle of the ocean, a place most people have only imagined. It describes the trail of sparkling blue-green light that traces their path across the water at night.

Not all dreams have happy endings. Sailing in Circles, Goin' Somewhere is the funny, bittersweet memoir of a Prince Edward Island man who, over seven years, builds a classic 1930s wooden sailboat and, in 2004, attempts to circumnavigate eastern North America. The author leaves a small fishing port on the Island and tracks along the rugged coast, up the St. Lawrence River, and through the Great Lakes. Alone, he encounters heavy fog, near-collisions with freighters, mechanical breakdowns, enormous seas, several brushes with disaster, and even a hostile reception at one French-speaking port.

Inner Ranges brings together an enlightening and entertaining selection of mountain writing by one of Canada's most respected adventure journalists and thinkers. This collection of original and previously published pieces includes provocative editorial and opinion work about the state of adventure, personal tales from a life of exploration and risk-taking, some touches of humour, and award-winning profiles of some of Canada's mountaineering greats.

If you live life without a net, what happens when you fall? Kathleen Cremonesi knew early on she wanted to be different. Determined to avoid following in her mother's footsteps to an ill-fated marriage, Kathleen left Oregon in her early 20s to travel across Europe. On a whim, this former administrative assistant with wanderlust took a job as a dancer in an Italian circus and, working her way up, became an ostrich-riding, shark-taming showgirl. Kathleen bonds with the exotic animals that could strike and kill at any moment, but instead bring her a peace she has never known.

From an award-winning journalist comes this real-life cloak-and-dagger tale of Vera Atkins, one of Britain's premiere secret agents during World War II. As the head of the French Section of the British Special Operations Executive, Vera Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored special operatives whose job was to organize and arm the resistance in Nazi-occupied France. After the war, Atkins courageously committed herself to a dangerous search for twelve of her most cherished women spies who had gone missing in action.

The remarkable story of Lanier Phillips and the shipwreck that changed his life. On February 18, 1942 the US Navy destroyer Truxton was shipwrecked off Newfoundland. 110 men died; of the 46 who survived one was black. The rescuers, never having seen a black man before, tried to scrub his skin clean and white. This is a story about growing up with fear in Klan-dominated Georgia, enlisting in a segregated navy, facing death in the icy North Atlantic, and a rescue which galvanised a man to fight racial discrimination.

The gripping memoir of a young man, a wolf, their parallel lives and ultimate collision, Badluck Way is also an ode to the satisfaction of hard work on some of the wildest and most beautiful land in the world. "Mine might have been a simple, pretty story, if not for the wolves. In late July, they emerged from the foothills..." In this gripping memoir of a young man, a wolf, their parallel lives and ultimate collision, Bryce Andrews describes life on the remote, windswept Sun Ranch in southwest Montana.