Download or read book The Long Flight Home written by Alan Hlad and published by A John Scognamiglio Book. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A USA Today Bestseller Inspired by fascinating, true, yet little-known events during World War II, The Long Flight Home is a testament to the power of courage in our darkest hours—a moving, masterfully written story of love and sacrifice. It is September 1940—a year into the war—and as German bombs fall on Britain, fears grow of an impending invasion. Enemy fighter planes blacken the sky around the Epping Forest home of Susan Shepherd and her grandfather, Bertie. After losing her parents to influenza as a child, Susan found comfort in raising homing pigeons with Bertie. All her birds are extraordinary to Susan—loyal, intelligent, beautiful—but none more so than Duchess. Hatched from an egg that Susan incubated in a bowl under her grandfather’s desk lamp, Duchess shares a special bond with Susan and an unusual curiosity about the human world. Thousands of miles away in Buxton, Maine, young crop-duster pilot Ollie Evans decides to join Britain’s Royal Air Force. His quest brings him to Epping and the National Pigeon Service, where Susan is involved in a new, covert mission to air-drop hundreds of homing pigeons in German-occupied France. Many will not survive. Those that do will bring home crucial information. Soon a friendship between Ollie and Susan deepens, but when his plane is downed behind enemy lines, both know how remote the chances of reunion must be. Yet Duchess will become an unexpected lifeline, relaying messages between Susan and Ollie as war rages on—and proving, at last, that hope is never truly lost. “Hlad adeptly drives home the devastating civilian cost of the war.” —Booklist

Download or read book The Long Flight Home written by Alan Hlad and published by Kensington Publishing Corp. This book was released on 2024-12-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The USA Today bestselling story of a time when hope truly was a thing with feathers... Inspired by fascinating, true, yet little-known events during World War II, The Long Flight Home is a testament to the power of courage in our darkest hours—a moving, masterfully written story of love and sacrifice. It is September 1940—a year into the war—and as German bombs fall on Britain, fears grow of an impending invasion. Enemy fighter planes blacken the sky around the Epping Forest home of Susan Shepherd and her grandfather, Bertie. After losing her parents to influenza as a child, Susan found comfort in raising homing pigeons with Bertie. All her birds are extraordinary to Susan—loyal, intelligent, beautiful—but none more so than Duchess. Hatched from an egg that Susan incubated in a bowl under her grandfather’s desk lamp, Duchess shares a special bond with Susan and an unusual curiosity about the human world. Thousands of miles away in Buxton, Maine, young crop-duster pilot Ollie Evans decides to join Britain’s Royal Air Force. His quest brings him to Epping and the National Pigeon Service, where Susan is involved in a new, covert mission to air-drop hundreds of homing pigeons in German-occupied France. Many will not survive. Those that do will bring home crucial information. Soon a friendship between Ollie and Susan deepens, but when his plane is downed behind enemy lines, both know how remote the chances of reunion must be. Yet Duchess will become an unexpected lifeline, relaying messages between Susan and Ollie as war rages on—and proving, at last, that hope is never truly lost.

Download or read book Long Flight Home written by Lainie Anderson and published by Wakefield Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First World War is over and air mechanic Wally Shiers has promised to return home to his fiancee, Helena Alford. But Wally never reckoned on charismatic fighter pilot Ross Smith, and an invitation to compete in the world's most audacious air race. A £10,000 prize has been offered for the first airmen to fly from England to Australia. Smith is banking on an open-cockpit Vickers Vimy, a biplane with a fuselage that looks ominously like a coffin. And who can resist a hero? Wally writes to Helena to say he won't be home for another year - and the love of his life is left holding her hand-stitched wedding dress ... Using war diaries, letters and Churchill Fellowship research from along the race route, Long Flight Home recreates one of the most important - and largely forgotten - chapters in world aviation history. Lainie Anderson's ambitious and moving novel is told through her narrator, Wally Shiers. The tale spans the decades and crosses the globe, and at his journey's end we're left peering down from an open cockpit on two beacons of truth. There is no heroism without honour. There is no legacy without love.

Download or read book Miracle in the Andes written by Nando Parrado and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-05-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A harrowing, moving memoir of the 1972 plane crash that left its survivors stranded on a glacier in the Andes—and one man’s quest to lead them all home—now in a special edition for 2022, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the crash, featuring a new introduction by the author “In straightforward, staggeringly honest prose, Nando Parrado tells us what it took—and what it actually felt like—to survive high in the Andes for seventy-two days after having been given up for dead.”—Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild “In the first hours there was nothing, no fear or sadness, just a black and perfect silence.” Nando Parrado was unconscious for three days before he woke to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team to Chile had crashed deep in the Andes, killing many of his teammates, his mother, and his sister. Stranded with the few remaining survivors on a lifeless glacier and thinking constantly of his father’s grief, Parrado resolved that he could not simply wait to die. So Parrado, an ordinary young man with no particular disposition for leadership or heroism, led an expedition up the treacherous slopes of a snowcapped mountain and across forty-five miles of frozen wilderness in an attempt to save his friends’ lives as well as his own. Decades after the disaster, Parrado tells his story with remarkable candor and depth of feeling. Miracle in the Andes, a first-person account of the crash and its aftermath, is more than a riveting tale of true-life adventure; it is a revealing look at life at the edge of death and a meditation on the limitless redemptive power of love.

Download or read book Airplane Reading written by Christopher Schaberg and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-29 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Airplane Reading, Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich bring together a range of essays about air travel. Discerning and full of wonder, this prismatic collection features perspectives from a variety of writers, airline workers, and everyday travelers. At turns irreverent, philosophical, and earnest, each essay is a veritable journey in and of itself. And together, they illuminate the at once strange and ordinary world of flight. Contributors: Lisa Kay Adam • Sarah Allison • Jane Armstrong • Thomas Beller • Ian Bogost • Alicia Catt • Laura Cayouette • Kim Chinquee • Lucy Corin • Douglas R. Dechow • Nicoletta-Laura Dobrescu • Tony D’Souza • Jeani Elbaum • Pia Z. Ehrhardt • Roxane Gay • Thomas Gibbs • Aaron Gilbreath • Anne Gisleson • Anya Groner • Julian Hanna • Rebecca Renee Hess • Susan Hodara • Pam Houston • Harold Jaffe • Chelsey Johnson • Nina Katchadourian • Alethea Kehas • Greg Keeler • Alison Kinney • Anna Leahy • Allyson Goldin Loomis • Jason Harrington • Kevin Haworth • Randy Malamud • Dustin Michael • Ander Monson • Timothy Morton • Peter Olson • Christiana Z. Peppard • Amanda Pleva • Arthur Plotnik • Neal Pollack • Connie Porter • Stephen Rea • Hugo Reinert • Jack Saux • Roger Sedarat • Nicole Sheets • Stewart Sinclair • Hal Sirowitz • Jess Stoner • Anca L. Szilágyi • Priscila Uppal • Matthew Vollmer • Joanna Walsh • Tarn Wilson

Download or read book Flights written by Olga Tokarczuk and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE A visionary work of fiction by "A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald" (Annie Proulx) "A magnificent writer." — Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of Secondhand Time "A beautifully fragmented look at man's longing for permanence.... Ambitious and complex." — Washington Post From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller's answer.

Download or read book Flight of Dreams written by Ariel Lawhon and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of I Was Anastasia, here is a suspenseful, heart-wrenching novel that brings the fateful voyage of the Hindenburg to life. On the evening of May 3rd, 1937, ninety-seven people board the Hindenburg for its final, doomed flight. Among them are a frightened stewardess who is not what she seems; the steadfast navigator determined to win her heart; a naive cabin boy eager to earn a permanent position; an impetuous journalist who has been blacklisted in her native Germany; and an enigmatic American businessman with a score to settle. Over the course of three champagne-soaked days, their lies, fears, agendas, and hopes for the future will be revealed—and one in their party will set a plot in motion that will have devastating consequences for them all.

Download or read book Flight of the Last Dragon written by Robert Burleigh and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-10-11 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if there was but one dragon left in the world? What if dragons were more than just imaginary creatures? What if long ago they soared through our skies? And what if there was only one dragon left? Where might it hide from our machines, from our technology, from us? And where would it go if it spread its wings for one last flight? New York Times bestselling writer Robert Burleigh and Harry Potter artist Mary GrandPre answer these questions by taking us on one last great journey into the starry night. Read this book with a child and wait for the inevitable moment when he looks to the sky . . . and wonders.

Download or read book Churchill s Secret Messenger written by Alan Hlad and published by A John Scognamiglio Book. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting story of World War II and the courage of one young woman as she is drafted into Churchill’s overseas spy network, aiding the French Resistance behind enemy lines and working to liberate Nazi-occupied Paris… London, 1941: In a cramped bunker in Winston Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms, underneath Westminster’s Treasury building, civilian women huddle at desks, typing up confidential documents and reports. Since her parents were killed in a bombing raid, Rose Teasdale has spent more hours than usual in Room 60, working double shifts, growing accustomed to the burnt scent of the Prime Minister’s cigars permeating the stale air. Winning the war is the only thing that matters, and she will gladly do her part. And when Rose’s fluency in French comes to the attention of Churchill himself, it brings a rare yet dangerous opportunity. Rose is recruited for the Special Operations Executive, a secret British organization that conducts espionage in Nazi-occupied Europe. After weeks of grueling training, Rose parachutes into France with a new codename: Dragonfly. Posing as a cosmetics saleswoman in Paris, she ferries messages to and from the Resistance, knowing that the slightest misstep means capture or death. Soon Rose is assigned to a new mission with Lazare Aron, a French Resistance fighter who has watched his beloved Paris become a shell of itself, with desolate streets and buildings draped in Swastikas. Since his parents were sent to a German work camp, Lazare has dedicated himself to the cause with the same fervor as Rose. Yet Rose’s very loyalty brings risks as she undertakes a high-stakes prison raid, and discovers how much she may have to sacrifice to justify Churchill’s faith in her . . . "A rousing historical novel." - The Akron Beacon Journal, Best Books of the Year for Churchill's Secret Messenger

Download or read book Steal Away Home written by Karolyn Smardz Frost and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of The Underground Railroad, The Known World, Bound for Canaan and The Book of Negroes comes the harrowing story of fifteen-year-old escaped slave Cecelia Reynolds, who slips away to freedom in Canada only to return to her childhood home as a free woman many years later. “Karolyn Smardz Frost deftly situates Cecelia in history. Her evocative descriptions of landscapes and cityscapes capture the various times and places of Cecelia’s story.” —Winnipeg Free Press In this compelling work of narrative non-fiction, Governor General’s Award winner Karolyn Smardz Frost captures Cecelia’s epic story of courage. She was a teenager when she made her dangerous bid for freedom. Escape meant that she would never see her mother or brother again. She would be cut off from Fanny, the young mistress with whom she grew up, but who also owned her. This was a time when people could be property, and when a beloved father could be separated from his wife and children, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Cecelia found a new life in Toronto’s vibrant African-American expatriate community. There she fell in love with her dashing rescuer, and initiated a correspondence with her former owner that would endure for more than two decades. Widowed, she braved the Fugitive Slave Law to cross back into the United States. When she eventually returned to the Kentucky she had known as a child, she found her home much changed in the wake of war. Reunited with her mother, Cecelia also renewed her complicated relationship with her former mistress. After years apart, the two lived within a few blocks of each other until Fanny’s death. Smardz Frost’s impeccable research and vivid description takes the reader through the Civil War, the shameful backdrop of slavery and the very real and stirring tale of one woman’s struggle for freedom—and her return to her former home on her own terms, despite the risk involved.

Download or read book Flight of the Dragon Kyn written by Susan Fletcher and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a story about Kara and dragons. When she was four, she came down with vermillion fever. Her parents, thinking there was no cure, left her in a cave to die. A month, later she walked back into her parents’ home as healthy as if she had never been sick. It is said that a mother dragon lived in that cave, and she nursed young Kara back to life. Now, eleven years later, the only reminder of Kara’s illness is a small scar on her cheek. Of her contact with the dragon, there is more. Her eyes, which once were blue, are now green. And she can call down birds, which many believe is a sign that she can also call down dragons, for the two are distant cousins. Only Kara has her doubts. How can a beast as huge and terrifying as a dragon be related to a sweet, gentle bird? But could this explain why the king has sent for her? Does he think she has power over dragons? For Kara, the answer to this question means life or death—not only for her, but for all the dragons.

Download or read book The Flight from the Enchanter written by Iris Murdoch and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A charismatic businessman casts a dark spell over others in this psychologically suspenseful novel by the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Black Prince. Mischa Fox’s name is known throughout London, though he himself is rarely seen. Enigmatic and desired, vicious yet sympathetic, he is a model of success, wealth, and charisma. When Fox turns his entrepreneurial gaze on a small feminist magazine known as the Artemis, his intoxicating influence quickly begins to affect the lives of those involved with the paper: the fragile editor, Hunter; generous Rosa, who splits her time and affections between her brother and two other men; innocent Annette, whose journey from school to the real world ends up being more fraught than she could have foreseen; and their circle of friends and acquaintances, all of whom find themselves both drawn to and repulsed by Fox. Told with dark humor, keen wit, and intense insight into the seductive nature of power, The Flight from the Enchanter is an intricate and dazzling work of fiction from the author of The Sea, The Sea and Under the Net, “one of the most significant novelists of her generation” (The Guardian).

Download or read book The Long Flight Home written by Alan Hlad and published by A John Scognamiglio Book. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: September, 1940. German bombs fall on Britain, and enemy fighter planes blacken the sky around the Epping Forest home of Susan Shepherd and her grandfather, Bertie. The two raise homing pigeons, and Susan's favorite is Duchess. Hatched from an egg that Susan incubated in a bowl under her grandfather's desk lamp, Duchess shares a special bond with Susan. A Maine crop-duster pilot, Ollie Evans travels to Britain to join the Royal Air Force. In the National Pigeon Service, Susan is involved in an assignment code-named Source Columba, to air-drop hundreds of homing pigeons in German-occupied France, hopefully to convey crucial information on German troop movements. Friendship between Ollie and Susan deepens, but when Ollie's plane is downed behind enemy lines both know the chance of reunion is remote.

Download or read book Skyfaring written by Mark Vanhoenacker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poetic and nuanced exploration of the human experience of flight that reminds us of the full imaginative weight of our most ordinary journeys—and reawakens our capacity to be amazed. The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flight—a once remarkable feat of human ingenuity—to the realm of the mundane. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who left academia and a career in the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flight, asks us to reimagine what we—both as pilots and as passengers—are actually doing when we enter the world between departure and discovery. In a seamless fusion of history, politics, geography, meteorology, ecology, family, and physics, Vanhoenacker vaults across geographical and cultural boundaries; above mountains, oceans, and deserts; through snow, wind, and rain, renewing a simultaneously humbling and almost superhuman activity that affords us unparalleled perspectives on the planet we inhabit and the communities we form.

Download or read book Fly Away Home written by Eve Bunting and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1991 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A homeless boy who lives in an airport with his father, moving from terminal to terminal trying not to be noticed, is given hope when a trapped bird finally finds his freedom. Full-color illustrations.

Download or read book The Home Place written by J. Drew Lanham and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic

Download or read book A Light Beyond the Trenches written by Alan Hlad and published by A John Scognamiglio Book. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A German Red Cross nurse joins the world's first guide dog training school for the blind and begins a quest to show a Jewish pianist who was blinded on the battlefield that life is worth living"--