Book Summaries

  ABOUT THIS: A History of the Russian-American Company  P. A. Tikhmenev  Translated and edited by Richard A. Pierce and Alton S. Donnelly  The Russian-American Company was chartered by the Russian government in 1799 to conduct monopoly trading in the Aleutians and Alaska and played a major role in the affairs of the North Pacific during the following half century. This new and long-awaited translation of Tikhmenev's comprehensive history of the Company, acknowledged by scholars as a fundamental source on Russian-American history, will be indispensable to further study in that field.  The original Russian text of this classic work was written, at Company behest, a few years before the sale of Alaska to the United States and the liquidation of the Company. Under-taken to "glorify" the activities of the Company, in the mistaken hope of winning a renewal of the monopoly charter, Tikhmenev's history is based on documents then in Company archives, but later destroyed...

 ABOUT THIS: Discusses California’s mountains, hills, woods, streams, birds, and animals. It also covers the state’s unparalleled climate and the reasons for it, the sea and the islands, hunting, fishing, camping, and many other subjects of interest to nature lovers. The book contains photographs, illustrations, and footnotes. 229 Pages. Buy on Ebay

  ABOUT THIS: To live with your true love on an island in the sun! Robb and Rodie White have lived out the secret dream of many young couples. Their first home was the tiny island of Marina Cay, part of the British Virgin Islands, and they bought it for a song — 60 dollars down. Their desert paradise proved a daily challenge, but together Robb and Rodie fished in the Caribbean, struggled to farm the land and built a house of concrete and local stone. A thirteen-foot sailboat was for three happy years their only link with the 'civilization' of the Depression and their eccentric neighbours. Mrs Bones, an intimate (or so she said) of the Elizabethan explorer Sir Francis Drake, invited the newly-weds to English tea ; an Arawak friend turned his hand to every mechanical contrivance — including a cistern to collect precious rain-water. In their splendid isolation Rodie nearly died of appendicitis and Robb swam a shark-infested strait to find a doctor. Later, as war clouds gathered ov...

 Oskar Schindler, a Catholic German, lies in Jerusalem as one of Israel's honored dead. On the Avenue of Righteous People, a tree bears his name. Schindler was a German industrialist who during World War II responded to the "Jewish question" by building from his own resources a concentration camp-cum factory in Cracow. Within its confines he sheltered thousands of Jews, finally transferring them to another safe haven in Czechoslovakia as a besieged Reich consigned 60,000 souls a day to the ovens of Auschwitz in a last mad attempt to effect the Final Solution. A place on "Schindler's list" meant at least the hope of a future to an impris-oned Jew. Throughout the war years Schindler ex-pended an enormous fortune on bribes to the SS and on black- market food and drugs for his prisoners. Living a life of risk, he played with astounding skill the strings that linked him to high German officials, and when bluff and bribery failed, he sometimes gambled at cards to ...

 ABOUT THIS: On December 14, 1986, Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan took off from Edwards Air Force Base, in California's Mojave Desert, on their history-making flight—the first to circle the globe non-stop without refueling. The flight required almost superhuman physical and psychological effort the two pilots spending nine days in an unpressurized cockpit, 3'/2 feet wide by 7 feet long. The plane weighed less than an automobile (2,000 pounds empty) and carried 1,200 gallons of fuel. The nine-day flight took them west over the Pacific through violent winds and turbulences, through life-threatening mechanical failures, at times over forbidden countries. Both pilots experienced high spirits and exhausting emotional let-downs... until finally, on December 23, 48 hours ahead of schedule, Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan completed the circle with their triumphal landing. Now they tell in vivid detail what it was like to make the flight, what happened during the years of dreaming, planning, a...

  ABOUT THIS: Wild About Harry reads, at times, like fiction. It's the tale of an improbable hero, the nation's only Chinese-American Sheriff, a brash, 350-pound cowboy who sings with Willie Nelson, hunts with Steven Seagal, threw parties on the White House lawn with Bill Clinton and uses his political power to raise big money, most of which he gives to charity. Born in the back room of a Chinese laundry in New Orleans, Harry Lee followed the ritual of expectation set by his immigrant parents. One of eight children and the eldest son, Harry became a successful businessman, attorney, elected official, civic leader and philanthropist. While protecting the people of Jefferson Parish since 1979, Lee has elevated political incorrectness to high art, and yet, as an elected public official, has earned the highest populari-ty rating in the state's history. Deno Seder presents a vivid portrait of a man who embraces life with gusto — a man who has been loved, honored, vilified, satir...

 Garry ("allergic to everything but success") Marshall takes the reader on an intimate, often painfully honest, behind-the-scenes journey into the world of show business from Lucy to Laverne to Pretty Woman. He reveals his childhood, growing up in a family where his grandmother once said, "Garry, I'll give you a dollar if you'll stop bleeding," his early days in the 1960s as a shy and nervous writer on New York's nightclub circuit where a comedian once set his jokes on fire, and moves on to the peak of sitcom success in the late 1970s when he produced four of the five top-rated network television series. Suffering from the pain of TV burnout. he switches to the world of movies where he has directed Julia Roberts. Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer, Richard Gere, Jackie Gleason, Tom Hanks, Bette Midler. Goldie Hawn. and others. Marshall's book mixes in advice on how to create comedy (pain plus time equals humor). tricks on how to swim the TV waters (he was ...

 In this superbly written guide, Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New York Times, takes readers on a guided walking tour of Manhattan, beginning in the financial district and traveling uptown—stopping to provide historical information and aesthetic evaluations of some four hundred buildings along the way. Goldberger's lively, knowledgeable commentary and provocative opinions make delightful armchair reading, but it will be hard to resist putting the guide in your pocket and strolling through the city to appreciate its splendid streets, neighborhoods, buildings, parks, bridges, and other sights that Goldberger describes in such arresting detail. From the World Trade Center ("so utterly banal as to be unworthy of the headquarters of a bank in Omaha") to the Woolworth Building ("the Mozart of skyscrapers, a lyrical tower that weds Gothic ornament to exquisite massing and scale"), from the Chrysler Building ("there is something that makes that odd s...

  ABOUT THIS: Here is an irresistible treat and a must for sf fans the world around. It's a great big cornucopia of stories, poems, and cartoons celebrating the lighter side of science fiction. There are contributions by such well-known writers as Bill Pronzini, Robert Sheckley, Russell Baker, Theodore Sturgeon, and Damon Knight; cartoons and comics by the likes of Virgil Partch and Johnny Hart; poems by L. Sprague de Camp; as well as happy discoveries by lesser-known authors and artists whose small master-pieces of comedy have been rescued from possible oblivion by Isaac and Janet. There are satires, spoofs, outrageous puns, old chestnuts and new plums, tales intellectual and bawdy, something to tickle every fancy. And to wrap it all up, Isaac has provided an introduction to each piece in his own highly personal, inimitable manner. Buy on Ebay

 ABOUT THIS: For nearly forty years Jim Harrison has been one of America's most beloved writers, a literary giant who has given us American classics like Dalva, Legends of the Fall, and The Road Home. And he is perhaps just as loved for the spirit from which he writes—devoted to the senses, staunchly unpretentious, and ever mindful of the dangers of straying too far from our origins. It is this spirit of which The Oregonian wrote, "The magic of writing as good as Harrison's is that it can bridge the gulf of human separation." Now, for the first time, Jim Harrison has put pen to paper to write about his own life—a life that he captures with a riveting directness and a delightful, resonant music. In Off to the Side, which Publishers Weekly praised as "a worthy capstone to a fascinating career," Harrison writes about his upbringing in Michigan, the austerities of life amid the Depression and the Second World War, and the seemingly greater austerities of his sta...

Science. Vintage.  Metal Products Department.  61 pages, spiral bound booklet. Size: 6" x 9". Printed in the USA. Dow, Midland Michigan.