Selkirk, an unruly, selfish pirate, is the sailing master of the Esperanza, an English galley sailing the South Seas in search of treasures. When Captain Bullock decides to abandon him on an uninhabited island, he discovers a new outlook on the world and learns to survive alone, becoming the real Robinson Crusoe.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Weller covered World War II across Europe, Africa, and Asia. At war's end, correspondents were forbidden to enter Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but Weller, presenting himself as a U.S. colonel, set out to explore the devastation. As Nagasaki's first outside observer, he witnessed the bomb's effects. He interviewed doctors trying to cure those dying mysteriously from "Disease X." He sent his forbidden dispatches back to MacArthur's...

Bibliography: p. 146-151. Places Defoe's works in the context of his life and times in an effort to provide the historical background necessary to a complete understanding of his oeuvre.

Presents six retellings of classic tales of action and adventure intended for boys.

An original look at how literary characters can transcend their books to guide our lives in a style both charming and erudite, examines how literary characters live with us from childhood on. Throughout the years, they change their identities and emerge from behind their stories to teach us about the complexities of love, loss, and the world itself. Manguel's favorite characters include Jim from Huckleberry Finn, Phoebe from The Catcher in the Rye,...

"Werner Herzog, one of the most revered filmmakers of all time, in his first book in many years, tells the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who continued to defend a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War Two In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts there asked, whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former solider famous for having quixotically...

Estes Park was hardly more than a post office in 1899, when young Joe Mills first saw Colorado's Front Range. A would-be Robinson Crusoe, Joe scaled peaks, watched wild animals, hunted and trapped, and generally roughed it in the region that would become Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915.A Mountain Boyhood, the true story of his adventures there, is as rich in human as in natural history. Joe meets a colorful bunch of early settlers, living for...

This book is filled with exotic adventures, exciting stories, beautiful poems, and funny fables.

Like Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe, Shylock is one of the great familiar figures of world drama, known even to people who have never read or seen The Merchant of Venice. He is also one of the most controversial characters ever conceived; his ambiguities have been a challenge to actors, directors, critics, and playgoers for more than four centuries. Is he villain or victim? Tragic or comic? What was Shakespeare's attitude toward the character described...