It's pretty rare to come across a motor racing book that tempts you to read the thing in one sitting but "Prof" Watkins has produced a gem ... [he] is a superb raconteur, not afraid to speak him mind yet peppering the gravity with occasionally side-splitting humour. No true motorsport fan should be without this book.' Autosport Grand Prix racing has undergone sweeping changes in the last thirty years. Many of these involve safety and medical rescue. The man behind them - a champion in the racing world although he has never won a race - is the eminent neurosurgeon Sid Watkins. Life at the Limit is his remarkable story. It spans the most exciting years in Grand Prix racing and includes intimate portraits of motorsport's greatest names, from Jackie Stewart and Niki Lauda to Alain Prost and Damon Hill. Sid Watkins has also witnessed, at first hand, some of the most severe and spectacular racing accidents. His account of these is made all the more poignant by the fact that some of the men he has rescued, sometimes at the point of death, have been personal friends. From Monza, in 1978, where Ronnie Petersen suffered a fatal accident, to Imola in May 1994 where Ayrton Senna met his untimely death, the high, and low, points of Grand Prix racing are vividly described. For all fans of Formula One, this is the inside story of the world's most dangerous sport.

LONGLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018 This is my life, not the stuff you've seen, but the things you haven't. This is my childhood growing up in the West Country, my struggles, my doubts and my hopes. It's the people I've met in my seventeen years in Formula One, many of whom I've loved, some of whom I definitely haven't. It's the laughs I've shared, the battles I've fought, some on the track with rivals and friends like Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel. It's the pressure I struggled with as I closed in on my World Championship in 2009, it's the calm I felt every time I settled into the cockpit. It's my dad - the many times he saved me, the one moment he doubted me, the hole in my life he left me. It's everything in one go, the good days as well as the bad. A life lived not just as a racing driver but, ultimately, as a human being.

•*Reveals the long view from an icon who, with age, has added wisdom to his list of accomplishments •*Messner climbing firsts: the world’s fourteen peaks taller than 8000 meters; Everest solo; Everest without supplemental oxygen •*Author of more than 60 books Reinhold Messner: My Life at the Limit, the newest book by the famed mountaineer, is a conversation between Messner and interviewer Thomas Hüetlin, an award-winning German journalist. It reveals a more thoughtful and conversational Messner than one finds in his previous books, with the “talk” between Messner and Hüetlin covering not only the highlights of Messner’s climbing career, but also his treks across Tibet, the Gobi, and Antarctica; his five-year-stint as a member of the European Parliament; his encounter with and study of the yeti; his thoughts on traditional male/female roles; and much more. Readers learn about Messner’s childhood, his thoughts about eating ice cream with girls (against), politics (mostly liberal), and his technique for killing chickens (sharp scissors). Messner is known as one of history’s greatest Himalayan mountaineers, a man who pushed back the frontiers of the possible for a whole generation of climbers. While the interest in My Life at the Limit is that it exposes much more of the man than his climbing career, that career is still utterly remarkable——and Mountaineers Books is proud to present this book, which is core to our mission, to audiences across North America. ***For a limited time, donors to our Legends and Lore series will receive a signed copy of My Life at the Limit. Click here > to learn more.***

In the years since Sid Watkins' first bestselling book of Formula One memoirs, Life at the Limit, was published the sport has seen enormous changes. The FIA's President, Max Mosley, has launched a zero option policy with the goal of zero mortality and much research and development has gone into technical changes to the cars, circuit design, safety barrier development and personal protection in the cockpit. The Prof has been intimately involved with this work, and discusses it in detail here, but as he knows only too well, uncertainty and unpredictability provide the thrills both the fans and the drivers crave. In Beyond the Limit, Watkins also looks at some of the extraordinary Grands Prix the sport has seen in the last four years, including Schumacher's epic crash at Silverstone in 1999. He also looks back over his twenty or more years in the sport and discusses some of the great drivers he has known. Here, too, is a race-by-race account of the Millenium season offering a completely up-to-date picture of Formula One at the beginning of the 21st century. 'Makes fascinating reading' Planet F1 'Lively and entertaining...will make the reader laugh out loud' F1 Magazine '[Sid Watkin's] anecdotes are littered with humour and show us that one of the most respected men in F1 is also one of the funniest' Motorsport News

When his family exceeds its legal debt limit, thirteen-year-old Matt is sent to the Federal Debt Rehabilitation Agency workhouse, where he discovers illicit activities are being carried out using the children who have been placed there.

In The Limit, Michael Cannell tells the enthralling story of Phil Hill-a lowly California mechanic who would become the first American-born driver to win the Grand Prix-and, on the fiftieth anniversary of his triumph, brings to life a vanished world of glamour, valor, and daring. With the pacing and vivid description of a novel, The Limit charts the journey that brought Hill from dusty California lots racing midget cars into the ranks of a singular breed of men, competing with daredevils for glory on Grand Prix tracks across Europe. Facing death at every turn, these men rounded circuits at well over 150 mph in an era before seat belts or roll bars-an era when drivers were "crushed, burned, and beheaded with unnerving regularity." From the stink of grease-smothered pits to the long anxious nights in lonely European hotels, from the tense camaraderie of teammates to the trembling suspense of photo finishes, The Limit captures the 1961 season that would mark the high point of Hill's career. It brings readers up close to the remarkable men who surrounded Hill on the circuit-men like Hill's teammate and rival, the soigné and cool-headed German count Wolfgang Von Trips (nicknamed "Count Von Crash"), and Enzo Ferrari, the reclusive and monomaniacal padrone of the Ferrari racing empire. Race by race, The Limit carries readers to its riveting and startling climax-the final contest that would decide it all, one of the deadliest in Grand Prix history.

We are fascinated by the seemingly impossible places in which organisms can live. There are frogs that freeze solid, worms that dry out and bacteria that survive temperatures over 100 ̊C. What seems extreme to us is, however, not extreme to these organisms. In this captivating account, the reader is taken on a tour of extreme environments, and shown the remarkable abilities of organisms to survive a range of extreme conditions, such as high and low temperatures and desiccation. This book considers how organisms survive major stresses and what extreme organisms can tell us about the origin of life and the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. These organisms have an extreme biology, which involves many aspects of their physiology, ecology and evolution.

From the author of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and the host of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a memoir about growing up and a young man's budding scientific curiosity. This is the absorbing story of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s lifelong fascination with the night sky, a restless wonder that began some thirty years ago on the roof of his Bronx apartment building and eventually led him to become the director of the Hayden Planetarium. A unique chronicle of a young man who at one time was both nerd and jock, Tyson’s memoir could well inspire other similarly curious youngsters to pursue their dreams. Like many athletic kids he played baseball, won medals in track and swimming, and was captain of his high school wrestling team. But at the same time he was setting up a telescope on winter nights, taking an advanced astronomy course at the Hayden Planetarium, and spending a summer vacation at an astronomy camp in the Mojave Desert. Eventually, his scientific curiosity prevailed, and he went on to graduate in physics from Harvard and to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Columbia. There followed postdoctoral research at Princeton. In 1996, he became the director of the Hayden Planetarium, where some twenty-five years earlier he had been awed by the spectacular vista in the sky theater. Tyson pays tribute to the key teachers and mentors who recognized his precocious interests and abilities, and helped him succeed. He intersperses personal reminiscences with thoughts on scientific literacy, careful science vs. media hype, the possibility that a meteor could someday hit the Earth, dealing with society’s racial stereotypes, what science can and cannot say about the existence of God, and many other interesting insights about science, society, and the nature of the universe. Now available in paperback with a new preface and other additions, this engaging memoir will enlighten and inspire an appreciation of astronomy and the wonders of our universe.

The past is not just, as has been famously said, another country with foreign customs: it is a contested and colonized terrain. Indigenous histories have been expropriated, eclipsed, sometimes even wholly eradicated, in the service of imperialist aims buttressed by a distinctly Western philosophy of history. Ranajit Guha, perhaps the most influential figure in postcolonial and subaltern studies at work today, offers a critique of such historiography by taking issue with the Hegelian concept of World-history. That concept, he contends, reduces the course of human history to the amoral record of states and empires, great men and clashing civilizations. It renders invisible the quotidian experience of ordinary people and casts off all that came before it into the nether-existence known as "Prehistory." On the Indian subcontinent, Guha believes, this Western way of looking at the past was so successfully insinuated by British colonization that few today can see clearly its ongoing and pernicious influence. He argues that to break out of this habit of mind and go beyond the Eurocentric and statist limit of World-history historians should learn from literature to make their narratives doubly inclusive: to extend them in scope not only to make room for the pasts of the so-called peoples without history but to address the historicality of everyday life as well. Only then, as Guha demonstrates through an examination of Rabindranath Tagore's critique of historiography, can we recapture a more fully human past of "experience and wonder."

The action-packed true story of Australia's very own top gun pilot, Matt Hall. "I would sit there at the controls and think: I'm going to go left, and I can. I want to go right, and I will. I don't have to follow the road. I don't have to follow rules. I don't have to ask anyone - I can go left when I want, I can go right when I want. I had discovered the freedom that has kept me flying to this day." Since he was old enough to notice planes, Matt Hall wanted to be a pilot. Flying with his Dad in a glider, making models at home and meeting officers from the Air Force fuelled his ambition. So when he was accepted into the RAAF's grueling training school it seemed a dream come true. But dreams take hard work and focus - and the willingness to make your own luck. From the rigours of his first professional job as a top Gun fighter in the Battle of Baghdad where he experienced extreme fear and loss for the first time, to his post Air Force career as a professional racer where he has survived near fatal situations to become one of the most renowned pilots in the world, Matt Hall has led an extraordinary life. His story is a rare glimpse into a normally closed world where skill, quick thinking and a cool head can mean the difference between life and death. 'A must read for anyone interested in flying' COURIER MAIL