Blue Skies, Green Hell, a thriller written by a bush pilot's wife, is a riveting tale set in the 1950s when pioneers of the sky flew single-engine aircraft over unforgiving wilderness and impenetrable jungle in Venezuela. Marilyn and Frank live in a place called the last frontier on the Orinoco River where he establishes a multiaircraft service that flies food, supplies and medicine to remote and inaccessible communities. Together they challenge the odds and take the exhilaration of flying to new heights. Their world is fierce weather with no weather reports, aircraft with limited range radios, and planes with six basic instruments. A search and rescue effort ends when they make a forced landing in no-man's-land. A flight to Miami turns sour as their twin-engine C-46 conks out over the Caribbean. Best friends die in fiery crashes. A stone age Indian appears where he shouldn't be. This is drama from the cockpit of vintage aircraft.

This is the story of thousands of Melanesian, Australian, New Zealand, Japanese and American men who fought for a poor insignificant island in a faraway corner of the South Pacific Ocean. For the men who participated, the real battle was of man against jungle. This is the account of land, sea and air units covering the entire six-month battle-stories of ordinary privates and seamen, admirals and generals, who survived to claim the victory that was the turning point of the war in the Pacific.

Author Liu Sola pushed her way into Chinese culture with multimedia installations, rock operas (that always seemed to get cancelled), and stories about, well, self-indulgent artists that raise the

Isle aux Chiens, an island at the mouth of the Mississippi, is inhabited by an isolated populace of inbred French and Spanish fishermen who endure the hazards of nature and their own volatile passions.