Bent Northrop Memorial Library

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY: HISTORICAL, POLITICAL & MILITARY. Discover the amazing true story behind the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick and the new feature film Heart of the Sea. A tragic yet riveting narration of life and death and man against the elements, Beneath the Heart of the Sea is an extreme account of shipwreck survival. On the morning of November 20,1820, in the Pacific Ocean 2,000 miles from the coast of South America, an enraged...

A fascinating exploration of the life of mountaineer and adventurere, Edmund Hilary - penetrating beyond the legend to reveal a character of paradoxes.

Well if you have a big life, a lot of stuff happens. Dad had a big life.' - Peter Hillary

Edmund Hillary is a towering figure among adventurers. His conquest of Everest and his dedication to the welfare of the Nepalese people is well known. While much has been written about what Sir Edmund Hillary

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The story of Leonidas Hubbard's ill-fated expedition to canoe up the Naskaupi River in Labrador, Canada, written by his companion on the journey Dillon Wallace.

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. “The Oregon Trail” offers a critical view of the Conestoga wagon generation. The result of the notes Parkman took along the newly-developed roads to the West, the book put an end to the sentimentalized portrait of pioneer travel. Altering the course of American history and shaping early views of Native Americans, it denounces, in its descriptions of the Oglala...

Billy Williams came to colonial Burma in 1920, fresh from service in World War I, to a job as a "forest man" for a British teak company. Mesmerized by the intelligence, character, and even humor of the great animals who hauled logs through the remote jungles, he became a gifted "elephant wallah." Increasingly skilled at treating their illnesses and injuries, he also championed more humane treatment for them, even establishing an elephant "school"...

When John Wesley Powell became the first person to navigate the entire Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon, he completed what Lewis and Clark had begun nearly 70 years earlier--the final exploration of continental America. The son of an abolitionist preacher, a Civil War hero (who lost an arm at Shiloh), and a passionate naturalist and geologist, in 1869 Powell tackled the vast and dangerous gorge carved by the Colorado River and known today...

Like the instant classic The Last American Man, Fearless is the story of a remarkable individual who accepts no personal limits—including fear. Freya Hoffmeister, a forty-six-year-old former sky diver, gymnast, marksman, and Miss Germany contestant, left her twelve-year-old son behind to paddle alone and unsupported around Australia—a year-long adventure that virtually every expert guaranteed would get her killed. She planned

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Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin is a book by Robert Louis Stevenson that serves as a tribute to the life and work of the electrical engineer and inventor Fleeming Jenkin. The book tells the story of Jenkin's life, his innovative work in the field of electrical engineering, and his contributions to the understanding of science. Through his writing, Stevenson showcases Jenkin's genius and passion for his work, as well as his warm and loving personality. The...

"The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York--the revolutionary hero, back from the...

Pioneering science-fiction writer Jules Verne is the second most translated author of all time (after Agatha Christie.) This translation of his short story A Voyage in a Balloon first appeared in Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art in a May 1852 edition, making it the first of the French writer's stories to be published in English. As Verne writes in this story: "May this terrific recital, while it instructs those who read it, not discourage...