THE TRUE STORY OF UNITED STATES NAVY RADIOMAN GEORGE TWEED AND HIS 31 MONTHS OF SURVIVAL ON JAPANESE-HELD GUAM DURING WORLD WAR II “DANIEL DEFOE would have admired George Ray Tweed, the American seaman whose ingenuity and self-reliance have caught the imagination of modern America as Robinson Crusoe’s fascinated eighteenth century England. Defoe’s hero was engaged almost solely in a struggle for survival against nature. “Crusoe and Tweed were most alike in the genius for contrivance, and Tweed doesn’t suffer from comparison with his famous prototype. To construct his shelter and furniture, Crusoe brought from his ship planks and boards and a complete carpenter’s chest of tools, in addition to two saws, an ax, “an abundance of hatchets,” a hammer, nails and several knives. Tweed built his equipment without benefit of nails, using only a handsaw, a machete, and a pocketknife. He went on to fashion, with crude materials, a lamp, a lantern, and an ingenious alarm system. At one time he had electric lights in a part of the country where not even the best homes enjoyed such luxury. He kept in repair an almost worn-out typewriter, on which he produced a one-page underground newspaper. He tore apart an apparently useless radio, put it together again, and brought in news from a station thousands of miles away. “Tweed was born with common sense. A roustabout life as lumberman, stevedore, and mechanic gave him self-reliance; hunting expeditions in Oregon and California taught him woodsmanship; the Navy instructed him in the techniques of communication. It was as if all his early life had been preparation for the grueling experience which he alone, of those who fled before the invading Japanese, survived. “I am glad to be the one to tell Tweed’s story. In all important respects it is related here exactly as he gave it to me.”

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.

In this second volume of the best-selling Vault of Walt series, Disney historian Jim Korkis reveals even more forgotten tales of Walt Disney and the Disney Company to entertain and enlighten Disney fans.

Restless Classics presents the Three-Hundredth Anniversary Edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic Caribbean adventure story and foundational English novel, with new illustrations by Eko and an introduction by Jamaica Kincaid that recontextualizes the book for our globalized, postcolonial era. Description: Three centuries after Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, this gripping tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being ultimately rescued, remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel. But the book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about entrenched attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized that still resound today. As celebrated Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid writes in her bold new introduction, “The vivid, vibrant, subtle, important role of the tale of Robinson Crusoe, with his triumph of individual resilience and ingenuity wrapped up in his European, which is to say white, identity, has played in the long, uninterrupted literature of European conquest of the rest of the world must not be dismissed or ignored or silenced.” Review Quotes: “The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe who, shipwrecked on a lonely island, with a knife and a pipe in his pocket, becomes an architect, carpenter, knife-grinder, astronomer, and cleric. He is the true prototype of the British colonist just as Friday (the faithful savage who arrives one ill-starred day) is the symbol of the subject race. All the Anglo-Saxon soul is in Crusoe; virile independence, unthinking cruelty, persistence, slow yet effective intelligence, sexual apathy, practical and well-balanced religiosity, calculating dourness.” —James Joyce “[Robinson Crusoe] is a masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece largely because Defoe has throughout kept consistently to his own sense of perspective… The mere suggestion—peril and solitude and a desert island—is enough to rouse in us the expectation of some far land on the limits of the world; of the sun rising and the sun setting; of man, isolated from his kind, brooding alone upon the nature of society and the strange ways of men.” —Virginia Woolf “Like Odysseus embarked for Ithaca, like Quixote mounted on Rocinante, Robinson Crusoe with his parrot and umbrella has become a figure in the collective consciousness of the West, transcending the book which—in its multitude of editions, translations, imitations, and adaptations (“Robinsonades”)—celebrates his adventures. Having pretended once to belong to history, he finds himself in the sphere of myth.” —J.M. Coetzee “Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology and, if need be, racism and imperialism.” —Carlos Fuentes “I thought it that Robinson Crusoe should be the only instance of a universally popular book that could make no one laugh and could make no one cry . . . I will venture to say that there is not in literature a more surprising instance of utter want of tenderness and sentiment, than the death of Friday.” —Charles Dickens “Was there every anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?” —Samuel Johnson

In the years before the outbreak of the war in the Pacific, Guam was a paradise for the Navy, Marine and civilian employees of Pan American Airways, who found themselves stationed on the island. However their apprehension about the fate of the island increased as they anticipated a Japanese attack in the fall of 1941. Shortly after attack on Pearl Harbor, Guam was bombed and the Japanese invasion soon followed. Since Guam was not heavily fortified it soon fell to the invading Japanese. In the takeover of the island, the Japanese practiced a swift brutality against the captive Americans as well as native population, and then immediately removed the American military and civilian personnel to Japan. Only a lucky few escaped, including five Navy nurses and dependent Ruby Hellmers and her baby Charlene, who were transported back to America aboard the Swedish ship Gripsholm in mid-1942. In Captured, Mansell tells the story of the captives from Guam, whose story until now has largely been forgotten. Drawing upon interviews with survivors, diaries and archival records, Mansell documents the movements of American military and civilian men as they went from one Japanese POW camp to another, slowly starving as they performed slave labor for Japanese companies. Meanwhile, he describes the brutal horrors suffered by Guamian natives during Japan’s occupation of the island, especially as the Japanese prepared for American forces to re-take this U.S. possession in 1945. Moving stories of liberation, transportation home, and the aftermath of these horrific experiences are narrated as the book draws to a close. Mansell concludes that America’s lack of military preparation, disbelief in Japan’s ambitions in the Pacific, and focus on Europe all contributed to the captivity of more than three years of suffering for the forgotten Americans from Guam as the Pacific War raged around them. Captured was completed by historian Linda Goetz Holmes after the death of Roger Mansell.

For the first time ever, more than one hundred Disney movie posters are collected in one magnificent volume. The Disney Poster: The Animated Film Classics, from Mickey Mouse to Aladdin celebrates the art of the Disney poster - tracing in graphic form the evolution of traditional Disney characters and providing an evocative, exciting look back through Disney history.

A collection of well-known fairy tales with Disney illustrations.