The Chinese economic miracle is happening despite, not because of, China's 900 million peasants. They are missing from the portraits of booming Shanghai, or Beijing. Many of China's underclass live under a feudalistic system unchanged since the fifteenth century. They are truly the voiceless in modern China. They are also, perhaps, the reason that China will not be able to make the great social and economic leap forward, because if it is to leap it must carry the 900 million with it. Chinese journalists Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi returned to Wu's home province of Anhui, one of China's poorest, to undertake a three-year survey of what had happened to the peasants there, asking the question: Have the peasants been betrayed by the revolution undertaken in their name by Mao and his successors? The result is a brilliant narrative of life among the 900 million, and a vivid portrait of the petty dictators that run China's villages and counties and the consequences of their bullying despotism on the people they administer. Told principally through four dramatic narratives of particular Anhui people, Will the Boat Sink the Water? gives voice to the unheard masses and looks beneath the gloss of the new China to find the truth of daily life for its vast population of rural poor.

This is an expose of the inequality and injustice experienced by 900 million Chinese peasants, as told through a series of dramatic personal narratives that describe the arbitrary violence and powerlessness in the face of colossal corruption and grinding poverty."

Besides the sea, on Mr Peffer's place, there lived a cow, a donkey, a sheep, a pig, and a tiny little mouse. One warm sunny morning for no particular reason, they decided to go for a row in the bay . . .

From January to July 1942, more than seventy-five ships sank to North Carolina's "Graveyard of the Atlantic" off the coast of the Outer Banks. German U-boats sank ships in some of the most harrowing sea fighting close to America's shore. Germany's Operation Drumbeat, led by Admiral Karl Donitz, brought fear to the local communities. A Standard oil tanker sank just sixty miles from Cape Hatteras. The U-85 was the first U-boat sunk by American surface forces, and local divers later discovered a rare Enigma machine aboard. Author Jim Bunch traces the destructive history of world war on the shores of the Outer Banks.

Depicts life among the nine hundred million peasants who inhabit the rural areas of China, revealing the destitute conditions under which they live and the reasons why they have been excluded from China's economic revolution.

Introduces the concepts of floating and sinking by following a fictional captain on the high seas who wonders why his boat floats and his treasure sinks.

Buying a 42' ferro-cement boat for £1500 and what started as a retort to a wind-up led to the adventure of a lifetime. RYA Yachtmaster Max Liberson had been drawn to the sea all his life, but it was the chance acquisition of a yacht that apparently only he could see the potential of that allowed him to fulfil a dream. What followed was a true story of ingenuity, persistence and more anecdotal tales of woe than most sailors would want to admit to as their own. For anyone aiming to make a similar voyage, the story goes into detail of his plans beforehand and the many pitfalls and triumphs he encountered on his 9-month round trip from Battlesbridge in Essex over to the Carribean.

When a dive off the coast of Alabama goes horribly wrong, 12-year-old Julie and one of her father's scuba clients struggle to survive after reaching an abandoned oil rig.

Readers will be encouraged to actively test items to see if they sink or float.