Dive into adventure as you enter a world with a young boy as he takes on the challenges that are known but to our dreams.

A fast-paced narrative about the world-famous libertine Giacomo Casanova, from celebrated biographer Leo Damrosch “A nuanced, deftly contextualized biography of an adventurer, an opportunist, and a man of voracious appetites . . . another top-notch work from Damrosch.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “An eye-opening and well-informed study of an ‘extraordinary character’ in all his darkness and brilliance.”—Publishers Weekly The life of the iconic libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) has never been told in the depth it deserves. An alluring representative of the Enlightenment’s shadowy underside, Casanova was an aspiring priest, an army officer, a fortune teller, a con man, a magus, a violinist, a mathematician, a Masonic master, an entrepreneur, a diplomat, a gambler, a spy—and the first to tell his own story. In his vivid autobiography Histoire de Ma Vie, he recorded at least a hundred and twenty love affairs, as well as dramatic sagas of duels, swindles, arrests, and escapes. He knew kings and an empress, Catherine the Great, and most of the famous writers of the time, including Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. Drawing on seldom used materials, including the original French and Italian primary sources, and probing deeply into the psychology, self-conceptions, and self-deceptions of one of the world’s most famous con men and seducers, Leo Damrosch offers a gripping, mature, and devastating account of an Enlightenment man, freed from the bounds of moral convictions.

Autobiography.

A unique memoir in which a young adventurer from colonial Rhodesia charms his way around the world, sleeping in stately homes and public toilets, smuggling drugs across several borders, and losing a $50 million fortune to the CIA, before settling into a stellar banking career. Looking back on a life well lived as he faces terminal illness, he swears that the key to his success was his grueling training as a Buddhist monk in a snowbound Japanese monastery.

Absorbing survey of the vast, modern scholarship on the complex, enigmatic, diverse genius of Newton.

Eva Jean Wrather devoted seventy years to writing a biography of Alexander Campbell, the Scots-born founder of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the only Protestant denomination to originate in the United States. Her work, which she was still revising when she died, is a literary biography, without scholarly documentation.

Henry Morton Stanley was a cruel imperialist - a bad man of Africa. Or so we think: but as Tim Jeal brilliantly shows, the reality of Stanley's life is yet more extraordinary. Few people know of his dazzling trans-Africa journey, a heart-breaking epic of human endurance which solved virtually every one of the continent's remaining geographical puzzles. With new documentary evidence, Jeal explores the very nature of exploration and reappraises a reputation, in a way that is both moving and truly majestic.

This previously unpublished work, by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer James (1891-1955), tells the story of Irish-born William R. Grace (1832-1904) who, arriving in America as a teenager in 1846, worked his way up from ordinary seaman to become master of a vast commercial empire, reformer of the Democratic party, and New York City's first Catholic mayor. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Soldier, explorer, mystic, guru, and spy, Francis Younghusband began his colonial career as a military adventurer and became a radical visionary who preached free love to his followers. Patrick French’s award-winning biography traces the unpredictable life of the maverick with the “damned rum name,” who single-handedly led the 190 British invasion of Tibet, discovered a new route from China to India, organized the first expeditions up Mount Everest and attempted to start a new world religion. Following in Younghusband’s footsteps, from Calcutta to the snows of the Himalayas, French pieces together the story of a man who embodies all the romance and folly of Britain’s lost imperial dream.

From the bestselling author of Jurassic Park, Timeline, and Sphere comes a deeply personal memoir full of fascinating adventures as he travels everywhere from the Mayan pyramids to Kilimanjaro. Fueled by a powerful curiosity—and by a need to see, feel, and hear, firsthand and close-up—Michael Crichton's journeys have carried him into worlds diverse and compelling—swimming with mud sharks in Tahiti, tracking wild animals through the jungle of Rwanda. This is a record of those travels—an exhilarating quest across the familiar and exotic frontiers of the outer world, a determined odyssey into the unfathomable, spiritual depths of the inner world. It is an adventure of risk and rejuvenation, terror and wonder, as exciting as Michael Crichton's many masterful and widely heralded works of fiction.