This gripping memoir by salvage Captain Ian Tew recounts the danger and glory that salvage crews face every day as fight to save huge ships from distress, whether the 'casualty' ships be on fire, filled with combustible fluids, or in the midst of a war zone.

When the 236-metre long container ship Rena ploughed into and was impaled upon the Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga at 2.20am on 5 October 2011, it began one of the biggest salvage operations and environmental disasters in New Zealand history. The Rena was carrying 1368 containers, 1700 tonnes of heavy fuel oil and 200 tonnes of marine diesel, all of which threatened to enter the sea. Salvors worked round the clock to stem the black tide and thousands of New Zealanders volunteered to clean up beaches and rescue wildlife. In Black Tide John Julian investigates the real story behind the Rena catastrophe and attempts to answer the many questions surrounding the disaster. What really happened on that fateful night and why did the Rena run aground? Who is responsible? What could be done better and faster? And, importantly, is New Zealand able to effectively respond to maritime disasters? The Rena?s circumstances are complicated ? built in Germany, registered in Liberia, insured in Sweden and reinsured in England, owned by a Greek company, chartered to a Swiss group and crewed by Filipinos ? and the story of the shipwreck is no less fraught. Black Tide looks for information amid the flotsam and jetsam and addresses the most important question of all: what can be done to stop this happening again? When the 236-metre long container ship Rena ploughed into and was impaled upon the Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga at 2.20am on 5 October 2011, it began one of the biggest salvage operations and environmental disasters in New Zealand history. The Rena was carrying 1368 containers, 1700 tonnes of heavy fuel oil and 200 tonnes of marine diesel, all of which threatened to enter the sea. Salvors worked round the clock to stem the black tide and thousands of New Zealanders volunteered to clean up beaches and rescue wildlife. In Black Tide John Julian investigates the real story behind the Rena catastrophe and attempts to answer the many questions surrounding the disaster. What really happened on that fateful night and why did the Rena run aground? Who is responsible? What could be done better and faster? And, importantly, is New Zealand able to effectively respond to maritime disasters? The Rena?s circumstances are complicated ? built in Germany, registered in Liberia, insured in Sweden and reinsured in England, owned by a Greek company, chartered to a Swiss group and crewed by Filipinos ? and the story of the shipwreck is no less fraught. Black Tide looks for information amid the flotsam and jetsam and addresses the most important question of all: what can be done to stop this happening again?

Michigan Salvage is the first scholarly collection on celebrated writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, the author of two novels and three short story collections, including National Book Award finalist American Salvage (2009). Her writing captures a diverse and bustling rural America, brimming with complex characters who struggle with addiction, poverty, and land degradation—issues that have become, undeniably, part of the southwestern Michigan landscape that she calls home. The essays in this volume demonstrate many rich ways to approach Campbell’s writing, from historical and cultural overviews to essays examining the class and gender implications of her stories and novels, to teaching essays highlighting how to use her work in the classroom and beyond. Along with each essay, Michigan Salvage also features lesson plans and writing prompts meant to spark discussion and encourage further investigation into these stories and novels. This essential and teachable collection makes plain Campbell’s contributions to contemporary American literature.

This new history of the Royal Navy, published to coincide with the Golden Jubilee of the White Ensign Association, is a full and exciting account of all the many campaigns, operations and deployments conducted around the world from the Cold War and the Cod Wars to the Falklands War and the Gulf Wars. It has been written and compiled from privileged access to secret and confidential Admiralty Plans and Commanding Officers' reports and contains a wealth of previously unpublished material. The story of how the Royal Navy has adapted to meet the many new challenges of the modern world and how it has carried out its vital roles from manning the nation's strategic nuclear deterrent to guarding the vital offshore oil and gas facilities as well as protecting Britain's worldwide interests is a truly fascinating one, while the development of ships, submarines, aircraft, weapons, tactics and strategies as well as the changes in personnel and life at sea are brought to life by contributions from people who served over the period. Profusely illustrated throughout with many previously unpublished photographs and paintings, this beautifully-produced volume is a magnificent golden jubilee tribute to the Royal Navy.

This is the story of an extraordinary boat journey that two men made for the fun of it. They rowed and sailed through pack ice, past glaciers and icebergs. They survived whales, polar bears, starvation and capsize. In doing so, they completed the first circumnavigation of the Arctic Island of Spitsbergen in an open rowing boat. Along the way they learned about themselves and about life, experienced a frozen wilderness that will most likely disappear before the century is out. This is a story for small-boat sailors, for lovers of ice and snow, and for anybody who wanted to run away to sea.

Skinheads. Drug dealers. Cops. For two brothers-of-circumstance navigating the violent streets of this industrial wasteland, every urban tribe is a potential threat. Yet it is amongst the denizens of these unforgiving alleys, dangerous squat houses, and underground nightclubs that the brothers - and the small street tribe to which they belong - forge the bonds that will see them through senseless minor cruelties, the slow and constant grind of poverty, and savage boot culture violence. Friendship. Understanding. Affinity. For two brothers, these fragile ties are the only hope they have for salvation in the wake of a mutual girlfriend's suicide, an event so devastating that it drives one to seek solace far from his steel city roots, and the other to a tragic - yet miraculous - transformation, a heartbreaking metamorphosis from poet and musician to street prophet, emerging from a self-imposed cocoon an urban shaman, mad-eyed shaper of (t)ruthless reality. What We Salvage is a reckless, gritty, and unapologetic journey, a novel that seizes the poignant fragility of Catcher in the Rye and throws it into a merciless world reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. It is a work that author James Morrow dubbed "postmodern punk," a term that befits Baillie's poetry-as-street-prose style.