The Summer of My Greek Taverna

Tom Stone

Tom Stone went to Greece on summer to write a novel – and stayed twenty-two years. On Patmos, the tiny island where St. John received the apocalyptic visions recorded in the Book of Revelations, he fell in love with Danielle, a beautiful French painter. His novel completed and sold, he decided to stay a little longer.

Seven idyllic years later, after the birth of their second child, they left Patmos for Crete, where Stone taught English to civil servants and Danielle painted icons for tourists. But Stone’s heart was still on Patmos and when a Patmian friend. Theologos, called and offered him a summer partnership in his beach taverna, The Beautiful Helen, Stone jumped at the chance – much to the dismay of his wife, who cautioned him not to forget the old adage about Greeks bearing gifts.

Back on Patmos, Stone quickly discovered that he was no longer a friend or a patron but a competitor. He learned hard lessons about the Greek’s skill at bargaining, and about how truly effective the curse of the Evil Eye can be…..”
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Catch Me if You Can

Frank Abagnale

Frank Abagnale, alias Frank Williams, Robert Conrad, Frank Adams and Robert Monjo, was one of the most daring con men, forgers, imposters and escape artists in history. During his brief but notorious criminal career, Abagnale donned a pilot's uniform and co-piloted a Pan Am jet, masqueraded as the supervising resident of a hospital, practised law wihtout a licence, passed himself off as a college sociology professor, and cashed over $2.5 million in forged cheques - all before he was twenty-one. An hilarious, stranger-than-fiction account of his sumptuous life on the lam, international escapades and ingenious escapes, Catch Me if You Can is a captivating tale of deceit.
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Spygirl

True adventures from my life as a private eye, Amy Gray

Amy tells what it's like to work in a man's world; she describes the initiation new gumshoes are put through; the unique dynamics of her workplace (do you really want to fight over the last biscuit with someone who's packing heat?) and what happens when her professional and private lives collide.

Spygirl is a chronicle of the real-life adventures of a single girl in New York - trying to find a clean, sheap apartment, a satisfying career and a boyfriend who isn't the kind of guy she should probably be investigating.
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The City of Falling Angels

John Berendt

The author arived in February 1996 for a prolonged spell in the city that had captivated him on his first visit. His intention was simply to see it without the obscuring overlay of tourists, but he quickly realized that his arrival had coincided with an extraordinary moment.

Using the fire that destoyed the Fenice Theatre as his starting point, Berendt takes us on a unique tour of the city and its inhabitants. It is a tour that few are privileged to enjoy. For behind the exquisite facade of the world's most beautiful historic city, scandal, corruption and venality are rampant, and Berendt is a master at seeking them out.

Millionaire art collector Peggy Guggenheim, Ezra Pound's mistress Olga Rudge, Alistair and Romilly McAlpine, are some of the high profile residents (or former residents); but no less fascinating are lesser-known eccentric Venetians such as Plant Man Adriano Delon, Massimo Donadon the Rat Man of Treviso, or Mario Moro - self-styled carabiniere, fireman, soldier or airman, depending on the day of the week.

Perfectly poised to gain access to private and unapproachable people and persuade them to talk frankly, Berendt weaves an elegantly captivating narrative that is mischievous, witty and utterly compelling.
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Captain James Cook

Richard Hough

James Cook was the last and greatest of the romantic navigators. In his relatively short and short and adventurous life (1728-79)he voyaged to the eastern and western seaboards of North America, the North and South Pacific and the Arctic and Antarctic bringing about a new comprehension of the world's geography and its peoples. He was the linking figure between the grey speculation of the early eighteenth century and the industrial age of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Richard Hough has written an exciting and marvellously readable biography, full of new insights and interpretations of one of the world's greatest mariners. - book cover
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America in Vietnam

edited by William Appleman Williams and others.

This collection of essays and documents, written and compiled by four distinguished historians, is an essential source book for anyone seeking to understand the causes, character, and consequences of American involvement in Vietnam.

Through a wide variety of documents - including newly opened presidential papers, congressional debates, military reports, treaties, and newspaper articles - the authors trace the origins of the war back to pre-World War II attitudes and then proceed through the development of the "domino theory' and the policies of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Jonson, and Nixon to the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. -- book cover
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The Prize

Daniel Yergin

Oil has shaped the politics of the twentieth century and has changed profoundly the way we lead our daily lives. The canvas for this story of oil is enormous - from the drilling of the first well in Pennsylvania, through two great world wars to the "accident' that led to the discovery of North Sea oil, to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm. Now, in The Prize, oil has become the subject of a book which does justice to the great struggle for wealth and power that has always surround the black gold.

In the great traditions of epic storytelliing, the international bestseller The Prize tells how and why oil has become the largest industry in the world, a game of huge risks and monumental rewards. --- book cover
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Billy

Pamela Stephenson

If anyone knows Billy connolly better than himself, it's his wife, Pamela Stephenson. In this extraordinary book, she combines the very personal with a frank objectivity that makes for a compellingly moving - yet hugely entertaining - biography. This is the real Billy Connolly. - book cover
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The Liver Cleansing Diet

Sandra Cabot

This outlines an 8-week plan to get you and your liver into shape. It includes a generous selection of tasty recipes to help you get on to a healthy eating plan.
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Funny, Funny, Funny

Denys parsons

A superb collection of amusing, amazing, confusing and convulsing misprints, howlers and oddities. On the left-hand pages are the FUNNY HA HA items and on the right-hand pages the FUNNY PECULIAR pieces. Together they provide hours of hilarity and mirth. - book cover.
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Unlonely Planet

Billy Curry

Twenty-eight-year-old Billy Curry has had enough of the Melbourne rat race. Aproaching the critical stages of his professional career, his inner curiosity of travel begins to take over. He has not seen much of the world and decides to change his four-week annual leave holiday to an around-the-world adventure. He starts with kayaking and trekking through the Himalayas then later gains a unexpected role in a Bollywood film in Bombay.

The much-anticipated European summer finally arrives and Billy is a guest on a royal prince's super yacht, runs with the bulls in Spain, and narrowly escapes the Mob in Italy. Next stop to Sweden to experience the beauty of Scandinavia, the States to sample the fraternity lifestyle, and somehow gets stabbed with a pizza cutter wielded by a Brazilian prostitute in Rio. The nine-month experience is filled with many mishaps, adventures, tragedies, romances and fun-filled episodes.
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Wickedness

Mary Midgley

In this book Mary Midgley looks into the darkness of the human soul. "She sets out to delineate, not so much the nature of wickedness as its actual sources. Midgley's analysis proves that the capacity for real wickedness in an inevitable part of human nature. This is not, however, a blanket acceptance of evil. She provides us with a framework that accepts its existence yet offers humankind the possibility of rejecting this part of our nature. Out of this dark journey she returns with an offering to us: an understanding of human nature that enhances our very humanity. To read Wickedness is to understand Mary Midgley's reputation as one of the world's greatest moral philosphers." -- book cover
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A Foreign affair

Valerie Barnes

"Trapped in the austerity of post-war London, 20-year-old Valerie Barnes yearned for the good times promised by the wartime songs. Then two chance meetings catapulted her into a high-flying career at the newly-formed United Nations in Geneva and the arms of a glamorous Frenchman...

Joining an elite breed of independent women who travelled the world in the 1950s and 1960s, Valerie lived a jet-setting life as an intepreter, working in exotic locales and rubbing shoulders with prime ministers and presidents. At the same time she was juggling a Swiss chalet home, three children and a love-rat of a husbnd back in Geneva. But whatever Valerie did, she threw herself into it with zest. From dancing Flamenco to being kidnapped in Cairo, being wooed by an African president or falling for a passionate Pole, Valerie's gift for storytelling makes A Foreign Affair a lively, funny, utterly delightful memoir." - book cover
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Maverick in Madagascar

Mark Eveleigh

Intrigued by tales of the Vazimba people – a mysterious tribe of white pygmies according to some accounts; an invisible telepathic people according to others – Mark Eveleigh travels to the ancient ‘Isle of the Moon”. He treks along Madagascar’s north-west coast, accompanied first by his pack bull Jobi and then by an intrepid Malagasy guide, Eloi, who prudently dons a bullet-prooof vest for the trip. Before he comes to the end of his quest, and hears the story of the last of the Vazimba at the feet of an old village headman, he explores the difference between myth and reality in a land that has spawned sacred crocodiles, schizophrenic tyrant queens, blood-guzzling spirit animals and people-eating plants. Mark Eveligh exuberantly captures the spirit of Madagascar in this modern-day adventure. - book cover
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Larkin about Ireland

John Larkin

John Larkin travels to Ireland in search of his spiritual home, the one his father had left behind in the fifties. Instead he finds a nation undergoing tremendous change: from poor to rich, religious to secular, leprechauns to boy bands. Ireland is on the move, cutting deals, talking bollocks on mobile phones.

It's a hilarious and often poignant journey up Croagh Patrick, the holiest of holy mountains, around The Ring of Kerry, to Knock, home to the tackiest sourvenir shops in the world (and an apparition of The Blessed Virgin), and into pubs where the locals still end their days in a lively fall off a bar stool. -- book cover.

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Worth Her Salt

Margaret Bevege, Margaret James & Carmel Shute, editors

Worth Her Salt brings together research and recollection in an illuminating exploration of women’s experiences in Australia. A collection of refreshing diversity, its range of topics includes sexual harassment at work, flappers and their lifestyle, the continuing fight for equal pay, and women pioneers of politics and social reform; it ranges from education in Adelaide at the turn of the century to life in north Queensland in World War II, and looks at the contemporary implications of technological change. – book cover
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Science Show II

Robyn William, editor

This selection of talks and interviews is as diverse and provocative as the programme itself. There is cosmology, psychology, technology; there are engineers and philosophers; there is botany, zoology, geography…and a touch of whimsy. - book cover
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Snakecharmers in Texas

Clive James

“This collection of essays brings the celebrated Jamesian wit to bear on a dazzingly diverse assembly of personalities, places and burning issues of the eighties. He tells of such wonders of the world as the Statue of Liberty and the Sydney Opera House, and visits the Nuremburg stadium littered with crushed Fanta can where the master race once assembled shoulder to brown-shirted shoulder. He reports on the Royal progress through the Californian heartland of Ron and Nancy’s USA and the invasion of Normandy by an ageing army of D-Day veterans out on an anniversary spree. He profiles Barry Manilow in “a detergent-blue suit with diamante trim” and Philip Larkin “wearing his Library Association tie” alongside the seductive Diana Cooper and the searing Bob Geldorf and in company with the frost-borne footwork of Torvill and Dean.” – book cover
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