Winchester William And Other Tales

The Greatest Western Writer Of The 21st Century From America's most popular, bestselling Western writer, each novel in this brilliant new series follows the trail of a different gun--each gun with its own fiery story to tell. On the American frontier, every gun tells a story. A boy in Texas waits for a Christmas present he chose from a Montgomery Ward catalog. The present, a brand new, lever action Winchester 1886 and a box of its big .50-caliber slugs, never makes it there. Instead, the rifle is caught up in a train robbery and starts a long and violent journey of its own--from the hands of a notorious, kill-crazy outlaw to an Apache renegade to a hardscrabble rancher and beyond. But while the prized Winchester is wandering the West--aimed, fired, battered and bartered--Deputy U.S. Marshal Jimmy Mann is hunting for the outlaw who robbed the train in Texas. The only clue he has is this prized and highly coveted weapon. What stands in his way are storms, Indians, thieves, a lot of bloody deaths--and a merciless desperado just waiting to kill the lawman on his trail... Also available in audio at www.GraphicAudio.net.

“Simon Winchester never disappoints, and The Men Who United the States is a lively and surprising account of how this sprawling piece of geography became a nation. This is America from the ground up. Inspiring and engaging.” —Tom Brokaw Simon Winchester, acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Atlantic and The Professor and the Madman, delivers his first book about America: a fascinating popular history that illuminates the men who toiled fearlessly to discover, connect, and bond the citizenry and geography of the U.S.A. from its beginnings. How did America become “one nation, indivisible”? What unified a growing number of disparate states into the modern country we recognize today? To answer these questions, Winchester follows in the footsteps of America’s most essential explorers, thinkers, and innovators, such as Lewis and Clark and the leaders of the Great Surveys; the builders of the first transcontinental telegraph and the powerful civil engineer behind the Interstate Highway System. He treks vast swaths of territory, from Pittsburgh to Portland, Rochester to San Francisco, Seattle to Anchorage, introducing the fascinating people who played a pivotal role in creating today’s United States. Throughout, he ponders whether the historic work of uniting the States has succeeded, and to what degree. Featuring 32 illustrations throughout the text, The Men Who United the States is a fresh look at the way in which the most powerful nation on earth came together.

“I have not lately read a finer book than this—on any subject at all. . . . A masterpiece.” —Simon Winchester, New Statesman The photographs of three young men had stood in his grandmother’s house for as long as he could remember, beheld but never fully noticed. They had all fought in the Second World War, a fact that surprised him. Indians had never figured in his idea of the war, nor the war in his idea of India. One of them, Bobby, even looked a bit like him, but Raghu Karnad had not noticed until he was the same age as they were in their photo frames. Then he learned about the Parsi boy from the sleepy south Indian coast, so eager to follow his brothers-in-law into the colonial forces and onto the front line. Manek, dashing and confident, was a pilot with India’s fledgling air force; gentle Ganny became an army doctor in the arid North-West Frontier. Bobby’s pursuit would carry him as far as the deserts of Iraq and the green hell of the Burma battlefront. The years 1939–45 might be the most revered, deplored, and replayed in modern history. Yet India’s extraordinary role has been concealed, from itself and from the world. In riveting prose, Karnad retrieves the story of a single family—a story of love, rebellion, loyalty, and uncertainty—and with it, the greater revelation that is India’s Second World War. Farthest Field narrates the lost epic of India’s war, in which the largest volunteer army in history fought for the British Empire, even as its countrymen fought to be free of it. It carries us from Madras to Peshawar, Egypt to Burma—unfolding the saga of a young family amazed by their swiftly changing world and swept up in its violence.

"Adam Nicolson writes popular books as popular books used to be, a breeze rather than a scholarly sweat, but humanely erudite, elegantly written, passionately felt...and his excitement is contagious."—James Wood, The New Yorker Adam Nicolson sees the Iliad and the Odyssey as the foundation myths of Greek—and our—consciousness, collapsing the passage of 4,000 years and making the distant past of the Mediterranean world as immediate to us as the events of our own time. Why Homer Matters is a magical journey of discovery across wide stretches of the past, sewn together by the poems themselves and their metaphors of life and trouble. Homer's poems occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes "a third space" in the way we relate to the past: not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic, invented after memory but before history, poetry which aims "to bind the wounds that time inflicts." The Homeric poems are among the oldest stories we have, drawing on deep roots in the Eurasian steppes beyond the Black Sea, but emerging at a time around 2000 B.C. when the people who would become the Greeks came south and both clashed and fused with the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean. The poems, which ask the eternal questions about the individual and the community, honor and service, love and war, tell us how we became who we are.

A classic, chilling tale of mystery and psychological horror that “will hold your attention to the last” (The New York Times). When a young, blond, handsome man walks into a psychiatrist’s office, stating that he believes he is losing his mind and asking questions about hallucinations, the doctor is prepared to help his new patient overcome his delusions. But as this twisting tale progresses, the line between what is real and unreal begins to blur—and the story becomes not only a murder mystery but a dark, unsettling voyage into memory, madness, torture, and despair.

Deputy U.S. Marshall Jimmy Mann hunts for the outlaw who robbed a train in Texas tracking the only clue he has, the prized and highly coveted Winchester 1886.

Presents a history and critique of a selection of the famous ghost stories from different countries, organized by such common themes as spectral armies, phantom women in white, haunted houses, screaming skulls, crisis apparitions, and ghostly lights.