In the tradition of Godforsaken Sea and In the Heart of the Sea, Fair Wind and Plenty of It is a virtuoso debut by a sailor turned scribe -- a must-read for lovers of nautical adventure. On November 25th, 1997, the barque Picton Castle, a three-masted, square-rigged tall ship, headed out from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia on a voyage around the world. Aboard ship a shifting crew of thirty, a combination of professional sailors and paying crew who were out $32,500 for the privilege of working “crew before the mast,” would travel for over a year and half, calling in at ports as exotic and varied as Aruba, Somoa, Bali and Zanzibar. Fair Wind and Plenty of It tells the story of an obsession, as Captain Dan Moreland, driven by a desire to make his mark in the world of traditional sail, rallies forces to convert a sixty-nine-year-old North Sea trawler into a seaworthy tall ship, and then assembles the crew to sail it. It’s the story of the uneasy balance that is achieved on board, where insubordination and rancour must be kept in line among a crew whose only connection is their common desire to be part of this journey. And it is Rigel’s story: a man who was conceived the day his father laid the keel for his first boat, whose mother was a sailmaker, and who has to reconcile his family legacy with his own need to understand why he must take part in the voyage of the barque Picton Castle. In Fair Wind and Plenty of It, Rigel Crockett tells a tale of shipboard camaraderie, gut-wrenching struggles and the near-mutinies that marked the year-and-a half journey -- where fellow shipmates proved to be as perilous as the ever-present sea.

A true-life, modern-day tale of high seas adventure follows the travels of a three-masted tall ship that left Nova Scotia in 1997 for a trip around the world, while the crew found themselves on personal journeys of their own. 30,000 first printing.

It's 1971, and the Naval Investigate Service, or "NIS" as it's better known, is nothing like the NCIS of present-day television. There are no cell phones, desktop computers, DNA, or the Internet. All the Navy and civilian personnel working for this specialized unit have to rely on are their minds. Logic, investigative skills, and experience hitting the streets are all they have to get the information they need. The work is often dangerous, and sometimes, good old-fashioned luck is the real key to sending the criminals to the brig for good. At NIS headquarters in Washington D.C., Lieutenant Commander Marcus Colt has made a name for himself handling the country's most unusual cases. Despite his occasional short temper and hint of sarcasm coloring his attitude, Colt is intelligent and driven to succeed. And while his behavior sometimes complicates situations, as the top internal affairs investigator, this decorated officer is the one top Navy brass go to when no one else can handle the mission. One such assignment is the latest in a long line of challenges to cross Colt's desk. A series of informational leaks within the NIS agency have led to the executions of at least four, confidential informants on the Norfolk Naval Base, and the threat of more victims is imminent. Armed with his uncanny, investigative skills and deceptively youthful looks, Colt goes undercover as a junior enlisted man in Norfolk, Virginia and works to stop the leak at its source. To accomplish this difficult task, he must build close relationships with personnel in his NIS unit, invade their privacy, and dig up their life secrets-all while keeping his true identity and mission hidden. As straightforward as his investigative job is, nothing with this assignment is what it seems. And when the case takes unexpected twists and turns, Colt finds himself questioning everything he knows. The loss of an old flame, evading assassins, an unexpected meeting with a high-ranking officer's daughter, and overcoming his own personal guilt from a past Vietnam mission that nearly cost him everything all add complexity to his assignment. But friends, both new and old, along with his fellow agents at the NIS, aid Colt in his mission as he works to solve the case. He has the skills and the team, but time is quickly running out. With danger and uncertainty surrounding him, it will take everything Marcus Colt has to stop the leak before someone else dies-especially when that next someone could be him.

His father killed by the British and his home burned, young Tatton Chantry left Ireland to make his fortune and regain the land that was rightfully his. Schooled along the way in the use of arms, Chantry arrives in London a wiser and far more dangerous man. He invests in trading ventures, but on a voyage to the New World his party is attacked by Indians and he is marooned in the untamed wilderness of the Carolina coast. It is in this darkest time, when everything seems lost, that Chantry encounters a remarkable opportunity. . . . Suddenly all his dreams are within reach: extraordinary wealth, his family land, and the heart of a Peruvian beauty. But first he must survive Indians, pirates, and a rogue swordsman who has vowed to see him dead.

These widely acclaimed essays from the author of Infinite Jest -- on television, tennis, cruise ships, and more -- established David Foster Wallace as one of the preeminent essayists of his generation. In this exuberantly praised book -- a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner -- David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction, including the bestselling Infinite Jest.

One of the best ways to understand history is through eye-witness accounts. Ting-Xing Ye’s riveting first book, A Leaf in the Bitter Wind, is a memoir of growing up in Maoist China. It was an astonishing coming of age through the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1974). In the wave of revolutionary fervour, peasants neglected their crops, exacerbating the widespread hunger. While Ting-Xing was a young girl in Shanghai, her father’s rubber factory was expropriated by the state, and he was demoted to a labourer. A botched operation left him paralyzed from the waist down, and his health deteriorated rapidly since a capitalist’s well-being was not a priority. He died soon after, and then Ting-Xing watched her mother’s struggle with poverty end in stomach cancer. By the time she was thirteen, Ting-Xing Ye was an orphan, entrusted with her brothers and sisters to her Great-Aunt, and on welfare. Still, the Red Guards punished the children for being born into the capitalist class. Schools were being closed; suicide was rampant; factories were abandoned for ideology; distrust of friends and neighbours flourished. Ting-Xing was sent to work on a distant northern prison farm at sixteen, and survived six years of backbreaking labour and severe conditions. She was mentally tortured for weeks until she agreed to sign a false statement accusing friends of anti-state activities. Somehow finding the time to teach herself English, often by listening to the radio, she finally made it to Beijing University in 1974 as the Revolution was on the wane — though the acquisition of knowledge was still frowned upon as a bourgeois desire and study was discouraged. Readers have been stunned and moved by this simply narrated personal account of a 1984-style ideology-gone-mad, where any behaviour deemed to be bourgeois was persecuted with the ferocity and illogic of a witch trial, and where a change in politics could switch right to wrong in a moment. The story of both a nation and an individual, the book spans a heady 35 years of Ye’s life in China, until her eventual defection to Canada in 1987 — and the wonderful beginning of a romance with Canadian author William Bell. The book was published in 1997. The 1990s saw the publication of several memoirs by Chinese now settled in North America. Ye’s was not the first, yet earned a distinguished place as one of the most powerful, and the only such memoir written from Canada. It is the inspiring story of a woman refusing to “drift with the stream” and fighting her way through an impossible, unjust system. This compelling, heart-wrenching story has been published in Germany, Japan, the US, UK and Australia, where it went straight to #1 on the bestseller list and has been reprinted several times; Dutch, French and Turkish editions will appear in 2001.

A practical and engaging guide to dinghy cruising, covering everything from getting set up to embarking on more adventurous cruises. A wonderful read with a huge amount of useful advice.