"The Island of Desire" is an island adventure cum romance novel by author Robert Dean Frisbie, based on his own real life adventures. Frisbie begins with the tale of his courtship of his Polynesian wife on the idyllic setting of the Puka Puka Island. Thereafter, the couple moves with their four children to Suvarrow Island in the Cook Islands. It is there that they learn to survive on the island, hunting and gathering for their needs. But their blissful life on the island will face its greatest challenge when a furious hurricane storms the island, bringing untold destruction in its wake...

"In 1924, Robert Frisbie arrived on the island of Puka-Puka, one of the most remote in the South Pacific, to run a trading post. Within months he had learned the language and become absorbed into the ways of its ancient, indigenous community - fishing, picnicking, swimming, sleeping and falling in love."--Back cover.

Miss Ulysses from Puka-Puka (2nd edition) by Florence (Johnny) Frisbie is the first book written by a Polynesian woman. It tells the amazing story of a young girl growing up on a remote island in the Cook Islands group. Written when Johnny was between the ages of 12 and 14, and published in 1948 when she was 15, Johnny likens her travels through South Pacific islands to those of Ulysses in the Odyssey. Through Johnny's fresh and unspoiled eyes, we read of a Garden-of-Eden existence on a remote atoll, where the land and the sea provide all that is necessary for life. The sea brings danger as well; Johnny describes the terror of a hurricane that all but destroys a deserted island where she and her family are marooned. The sea rises and floods the entire island to a depth of six feet; they barely survive by tying themselves to the topmost branches of a tall tree. Johnny's writing sparkles. She has humor and wisdom beyond her years as she describes life and customs on the island where she grew up. Her grandmother's extended family, the trading station operated by her father, the local witch doctor, a native missionary, her father's mistress after the death of her mother, and her first boyfriend are among the characters she describes with unflinching honesty. Cut off from the outside world, the island is so remote that six months pass between visits by passing ships. She learns at an early age to be self-reliant. Struck early by tragedy (her mother died when Johnny was nine years old), she helps her father care for four brothers and sisters until he falls ill and dies when she is sixteen. Friends including James A. Michener arrange a foster family in Hawaii where she pursues her education and re-unites with her two sisters. Out of print for more than sixty years, Johnny has added two new chapters to this classic and compelling book and illustrated it with family photos and three maps.

"A treasure of a book."—David McCullough The harrowing story of a pathbreaking naval expedition that set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean, dwarfing Lewis and Clark with its discoveries, from the New York Times bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricane's Eye. A New York Times Notable Book America's first frontier was not the West; it was the sea, and no one writes more eloquently about that watery wilderness than Nathaniel Philbrick. In his bestselling In the Heart of the Sea Philbrick probed the nightmarish dangers of the vast Pacific. Now, in an epic sea adventure, he writes about one of the most ambitious voyages of discovery the Western world has ever seen—the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842. On a scale that dwarfed the journey of Lewis and Clark, six magnificent sailing vessels and a crew of hundreds set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean and ended up naming the newly discovered continent of Antarctica, collecting what would become the basis of the Smithsonian Institution. Combining spellbinding human drama and meticulous research, Philbrick reconstructs the dark saga of the voyage to show why, instead of being celebrated and revered as that of Lewis and Clark, it has—until now—been relegated to a footnote in the national memory. Winner of the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize

Story, told in beautiful poetic prose, of the training of a present-day Navajo Indian boy who feels a vocation to become a medicine man.

“An extraordinary real-life adventure of men battling the elements and themselves, told with ice-cold precision.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review) In the dark years following the Civil War, America’s foremost Arctic explorer, Charles Francis Hall, became a figure of national pride when he embarked on a harrowing, landmark expedition. With financial backing from Congress and the personal support of President Grant, Captain Hall and his crew boarded the Polaris, a steam schooner carefully refitted for its rigorous journey, and began their quest to be the first men to reach the North Pole. Neither the ship nor its captain would ever return. What transpired was a tragic death and whispers of murder, as well as a horrifying ordeal through the heart of an Arctic winter, when men fought starvation, madness, and each other upon the ever-shifting ice. Trial by Ice is an incredible adventure that pits men against the natural elements and their own fragile human nature. In this powerful true story of death and survival, courage and intrigue aboard a doomed ship, Richard Parry chronicles one of the most astonishing, little known tragedies at sea in American history. “ABSORBING . . . Suspense builds as Parry describes the events leading up to Hall’s ‘murder,’ then climaxes in horrifying detail.” –Publishers Weekly “RIVETING.” –Library Journal

For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. Too often they reflect a fragmented outlook that fails to convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own history. This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding and its aspirations; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative to its young effectively. Of course, it goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale of the past. It will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But as Land of Hope brilliantly shows, there is no contradiction between a truthful account of the American past and an inspiring one. Readers of Land of Hope will find both in its pages.

The story of the world's largest, longest, and best financed scientific expedition of all time, triumphantly successful, gruesomely tragic, and never before fully told The immense 18th-century scientific journey, variously known as the Second Kamchatka Expedition or the Great Northern Expedition, from St. Petersburg across Siberia to the coast of North America, involved over 3,000 people and cost Peter the Great over one-sixth of his empire's annual revenue. Until now recorded only in academic works, this 10-year venture, led by the legendary Danish captain Vitus Bering and including scientists, artists, mariners, soldiers, and laborers, discovered Alaska, opened the Pacific fur trade, and led to fame, shipwreck, and "one of the most tragic and ghastly trials of suffering in the annals of maritime and arctic history.