Business, like any adventure, begins with a leap into the unknown Brian Tracy's first dream was of a journey. Not a leisurely drive to the beach or a weekend campout-a wide open adventure that would take him 17,000 miles from his home on Canada's Pacific Coast all the way to South Africa. His journey- a harrowing series of false starts, long days, and narrow escapes- taught him about "becoming unstoppable," not only in pursuing adventure but in daily life and business as well. The road to business success is just as exciting and dangerous and rewarding as a trek across the Sahara. Succeeding-sometimes even surviving-requires vision, courage, persistence, and the willingness to accept responsibility for your own actions. In the end, Brian's arduous trek changed his life- and his way of thinking about life and business.

"Go anyplace. . . . To travel, to move around — that's the thing. No matter where." Be prepared to laugh and guffaw and hold your sides and, perhaps, depending on your age, reminisce a bit. Take this 1965 car trip around North America.

How Many Miles to Babylon? uses the writing of European travelers to Egypt between c. 1300 and c. 1600 to give a picture of the country in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods, drawing on sources that have hitherto been inaccessible to English-speaking audiences. These accounts portray an Egypt ruled by the despotic Mamluk sultans and the early Ottoman governors, a society at once cruel and sophisticated, dangerous and alluring. The Europeans’ wonderment at the exotic flora and fauna, the ancient ruins of temples and pyramids, and the astonishing summer rise of the Nile to irrigate the crops and replenish the lakes and waterways of Cairo is well conveyed by these travelers’ tales. How Many Miles to Babylon? is a fascinating picture of the people, customs and culture of Egypt from the fourteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth.

It was hard writing this book because it brought tears, laughter, and most of all healing. When I was a child, I wanted to be like my mother. I wanted to cook and clean like her. One morning, my whole life change in an instant. Putting on my mother’s clothes and prancing around the house, I wanted to cook just like mama. When I opened the door of the stove, I stuck a stick inside and played with the fire. Somehow, my clothes caught fire. My life just didn’t get any better after that day.

Quincy Troupe's candid account of his friendship with Miles Davis is a revealing portrait of a great musician and an intimate study of a unique relationship. It is also an engrossing chronicle of the author's own development, both artistic and personal. As Davis's collaborator on Miles: The Autobiography,Troupe--one of the major poets to emerge from the 1960s--had exceptional access to the musician. This memoir goes beyond the life portrayed in the autobiography to describe in detail the processes of Davis's spectacular creativity and the joys and difficulties his passionate, contradictory temperament posed to the men's friendship. It shows how Miles Davis, both as a black man and an artist, influenced not only Quincy Troupe but whole generations. Troupe has written that Miles Davis was "irascible, contemptuous, brutally honest, ill-tempered when things didn't go his way, complex, fair-minded, humble, kind and a son-of-a-bitch." The author's love and appreciation for Davis make him a keen, though not uncritical, observer. He captures and conveys the power of the musician's presence, the mesmerizing force of his personality, and the restless energy that lay at the root of his creativity. He also shows Davis's lighter side: cooking, prowling the streets of Manhattan, painting, riding his horse at his Malibu home. Troupe discusses Davis's musical output, situating his albums in the context of the times--both political and musical--out of which they emerged. Miles and Me is an unparalleled look at the act of creation and the forces behind it, at how the innovations of one person can inspire both those he knows and loves and the world at large.

From a Whitbread Award–winning author: A WWI novel of loyalty and friendship “graced with the immanent lyrical talent of the Irish writers at their best” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Born to an aristocratic family on an estate outside of Dublin, Alexander Moore feels the constraints of his position most acutely in his friendship with Jerry Crowe, a Catholic laborer in town. Jerry is one of the few bright spots in Alec’s otherwise troubled life. The boys bond over their love of swimming and horses, despite the admonitions of Alec’s cold and overbearing mother, who scolds her son for venturing outside of his class. When the Great War begins, he seizes the opportunity to escape his overbearing mother and taciturn father, and enlists in the British army. Jerry, too, enlists—not out of loyalty to Britain, but to prepare himself for the Republican cause. Stationed in Flanders, the young men are reunited and find that, while encamped in the trenches, their commonalities are what help them survive. Now a lieutenant and an officer, Alec and Jerry again find their friendship under assault, this time from the rigid Major Glendinning, whose unyielding adherence to rank leads the two men toward a harrowing impasse that will change their lives forever.