A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like “a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.” For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays that recall us to more humane ways of being in the world. Franzen’s great loves are literature and birds, and The End of the End of the Earth is a passionate argument for both. Where the new media tend to confirm one’s prejudices, he writes, literature “invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.” Whatever his subject, Franzen’s essays are always skeptical of received opinion, steeped in irony, and frank about his own failings. He’s frank about birds, too (they kill “everything imaginable”), but his reporting and reflections on them—on seabirds in New Zealand, warblers in East Africa, penguins in Antarctica—are both a moving celebration of their beauty and resilience and a call to action to save what we love. Calm, poignant, carefully argued, full of wit, The End of the End of the Earth provides a welcome breath of hope and reason.

In 1981, while working as New Mexico State Historian, Stanley M. Hordes began to hear stories of Hispanos who lit candles on Friday night and abstained from eating pork. Puzzling over the matter, Hordes realized that these practices might very well have been passed down through the centuries from early crypto-Jewish settlers in New Spain. After extensive research and hundreds of interviews, Hordes concluded that there was, in New Mexico and the Southwest, a Sephardic legacy derived from the converso community of Spanish Jews. In To the End of the Earth, Hordes explores the remarkable story of crypto-Jews and the tenuous preservation of Jewish rituals and traditions in Mexico and New Mexico over the past five hundred years. He follows the crypto-Jews from their Jewish origins in medieval Spain and Portugal to their efforts to escape persecution by migrating to the New World and settling in the far reaches of the northern Mexican frontier. Drawing on individual biographies (including those of colonial officials accused of secretly practicing Judaism), family histories, Inquisition records, letters, and other primary sources, Hordes provides a richly detailed account of the economic, social and religious lives of crypto-Jews during the colonial period and after the annexation of New Mexico by the United States in 1846. While the American government offered more religious freedom than had the Spanish colonial rulers, cultural assimilation into Anglo-American society weakened many elements of the crypto-Jewish tradition. Hordes concludes with a discussion of the reemergence of crypto-Jewish culture and the reclamation of Jewish ancestry within the Hispano community in the late twentieth century. He examines the publicity surrounding the rediscovery of the crypto-Jewish community and explores the challenges inherent in a study that attempts to reconstruct the history of a people who tried to leave no documentary record.

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE EARTH, Introducing William Seymour -- Jerry Newman doesn't mean to keep getting into trouble-it just sort of happens. But when a practical joke goes wrong, burning down a church in his small east Texas town, Jerry's widowed mother quickly sends him to live with his journalist uncle in Los Angeles. Jerry is secretly pleased-not only to avoid being punished for his crime but also to live in California . . . the end of the earth! On the night before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Jerry and his uncle go to investigate a popular warehouse church in Los Angeles. There, they hear a man predict the coming quake. But Jerry is even more impressed by the powerful preacher, William Seymour, and by the hundreds of blacks and whites worshiping and praying together in strange "tongues." Jerry wants to believe Seymour's message, but will he do so when it means confessing his dangerous secret? A simple message that shakes the world ...

"Matthiessen chronicles two voyages into the frozen seas that surround a landmass larger than the continental United States, most of it buried under eternal snow and ice as much as three miles deep. Ninety percent of the world's fresh water is locked in this immense ice cap, a remote region profoundly important to our environment. The author addresses the subject with authority and passion, discussing everything from global warming and the ozone layer to the vital role of krill, the teeming crustacean that is the cornerstone of the marine food chain." "Nature lovers - birders especially - will be fascinated by descriptions of more than half of the penguin species and an astonishing array of seabirds, from tiny storm-petrels to magnificent albatrosses, which may soar for years without alighting on land; here too are close encounters with whales, leopard seals, and elephant seals, and elusive creatures such as the oceanic orca. There are also remarkable descriptions of the seldom seen polar rookeries where thousands of emperor penguins stand motionless for months at a time, brooding their giant eggs through the long, cold darkness of Antarctic winter."--BOOK JACKET.

Account of the Transglobe Expedition, 1979-1982, led by Ranulph Fiennes. This was the first expedition to circumnavigate the earth via both poles.

"An expert on nomadic peoples, Malcolm Hunter shares stories from a lifetime of working in some of the world's most remote, colorful, and neglected communities. In the early 1960s Malcolm and his wife, Jean, arrived in Ethiopia with only their professional skills--medicine and engineering--and a desire to show God's love to those in need. Over the next forty years God would lead them across Africa, through lush hills and scorched bush, to a dozen people groups who hadn't heard the gospel. Wherever the Hunters went, they found that God had been there first." - description of the first edition.

'An epic of survival' -- MICHAEL PALIN 'A "grade-A classic"' -- SUNDAY TIMES 'Utterly enthralling' -- GEOFF DYER, GUARDIAN 'Deeply engrossing' -- NEW YORK TIMES LISTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, SUNDAY TIMES The harrowing, survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly wrong, with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter August 1897: The Belgica set sail, eager to become the first scientific expedition to reach the white wilderness of the South Pole. But the ship soon became stuck fast in the ice of the Bellinghausen sea, condemning the ship's crew to overwintering in Antarctica and months of endless polar night. In the darkness, plagued by a mysterious illness, their minds ravaged by the sound of dozens of rats teeming in the hold, they descended into madness. In this epic tale, Julian Sancton unfolds a story of adventure gone horribly awry. As the crew teetered on the brink, the Captain increasingly relied on two young officers whose friendship had blossomed in captivity - Dr. Frederick Cook, the wild American whose later infamy would overshadow his brilliance on the Belgica; and the ship's first mate, soon-to-be legendary Roald Amundsen, who later raced Captain Scott to the South Pole. Together, Cook and Amundsen would plan a last-ditch, desperate escape from the ice-one that would either etch their names into history or doom them to a terrible fate in the frozen ocean. Drawing on first-hand crew diaries and journals, and exclusive access to the ship's logbook, the result is equal parts maritime thriller and gothic horror. This is an unforgettable journey into the deep.

This book purports to be a manuscript dictated by a strange being named I-Am-The-Man to a man named Llewyllyn Drury. Drury's adventure culminates in a trek through a cave in Kentucky into the core of the earth. It blends passages on the nature of physical phenomena, such as gravity and volcanoes, with spiritualist speculation and adventure-story elements (like traversing a landscape of giant mushrooms).

To the Ends of the Earth, William Golding's great sea trilogy, presents the extraordinary story of a warship's troubled journey to Australia in the early 1800s. Told through the pages of Edmund Talbolt's journall--with equal measure of wit and disdain--it records the mounting tensions and growing misfortunes aboard the ancient ship. An instant maritime classic, and one of Golding's finest achievements, the trilogy was adapted into a major three-part Mastpiece Theatre drama in 2006.