Incident at Twenty-Mile PDF Download

Author: Trevanian
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312970239
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
For fifteen years he has been silent. Now, the legendary #1 New York Times bestselling author of such classic suspense novels as The Eiger Sanction and Shibumi returns-- unleashing a stunning thriller set against the backdrop of the American West. A godforsaken town. A young, eager-to-please stranger carrying a homemade shotgun and a staggering secret. And a madman escaped from the Territorial Prison at Laramie, cutting a swath of sadistic violence with two killers at his side. Now, for the people of Twenty-Mile-- the God-fearing and the godless, heroes, whores, lovers and a boy teetering on the edge of madness-- a siege is about to begin amidst a harrowing mountain storm. And when the killing, the thunder, and the terror are over, some will live, some will be buried, and the myth of the American frontier will never be the same...

Author: Sarah E. Olds
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
ISBN: 0874174619
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Twenty Miles From a Match, originally published in 1978, is the autobiography of an indomitable woman and her family’s twenty years of adventures and misadventures in a desert wilderness. In 1908, a venturesome woman named Sarah Olds packed up her brood and went homesteading in the deserts north of Reno, west of Sutcliffe on Pyramid Lake. Her ailing husband said, welcoming her to their new home, "There, old lady. There’s your home, and it’s damn near in the heart of Egypt." Olds tells of the hardships, frustrations, poverty, and other tribulations her family suffered from shortly after the turn of the century until well into the Great Depression. Through it all, however, runs a thread of humor, cheerfulness, and the ability to laugh at adversity. The foreword is by her daughter, Leslie Olds Zurfluh, the fourth of Sarah and A. J. Olds's six children.

Author: Trevanian
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307238466
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Part love story and part psychological thriller from best-selling author Trevanian, "a tour de force... A story that explores meticulously some of the darker corners of the human soul." -- The Washington Post In the quiet Basque countryside in 1914, Jean-Marc Montjean, a handsome young doctor, moves to the small French village of Salies to assist the village physician. It's there that he meets the seductive, beautiful Katya Treville. Jean-Marc is bewitched, driven to know everything about her. But as he and her family become friendly, he realizes they are haunted by an old, dark secret. When Jean-Marc learns that the Trevilles are planning to leave the village forever, he insists on a final meeting with Katya. That meeting and the events that follow turn what was an idyllic romance into an unending nightmare. And when Katya’s secret is revealed, the chilling climax will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned. "A most exquisite, elegant, ingenious thriller." -- The New York Daily News

Author: Neil Swidey
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307886735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job—with deadly results A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of “black mayonnaise.” Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as “beach whistles.” In the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel—its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench—to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, a team of commercial divers was sent on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in; not all of them came out alive. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected over five years of reporting, award-winning writer Neil Swidey takes us deep into the lives of the divers, engineers, politicians, lawyers, and investigators involved in the tragedy and its aftermath, creating a taut, action-packed narrative. The climax comes just after the hard-partying DJ Gillis and his friend Billy Juse trade assignments as they head into the tunnel, sentencing one of them to death. An intimate portrait of the wreckage left in the wake of lives lost, the book—which Dennis Lehane calls "extraordinary" and compares with The Perfect Storm—is also a morality tale. What is the true cost of these large-scale construction projects, as designers and builders, emboldened by new technology and pressured to address a growing population’s rapacious needs, push the limits of the possible? This is a story about human risk—how it is calculated, discounted, and transferred—and the institutional failures that can lead to catastrophe. Suspenseful yet humane, Trapped Under the Sea reminds us that behind every bridge, tower, and tunnel—behind the infrastructure that makes modern life possible—lies unsung bravery and extraordinary sacrifice.

Author: J. Samuel Walker
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520239401
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
On March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of commercial nuclear power in the United States occurred at Three Mile Island. For five days, the citizens of central Pennsylvania and the entire world, amid growing alarm, followed the efforts of authorities to prevent the crippled plant from spewing dangerous quantities of radiation into the environment. This book is the first comprehensive, moment-by-moment account of the causes, context, and consequences of the Three Mile Island crisis. Walker captures the high human drama surrounding the accident, sets it in the context of the heated debate over nuclear power in the seventies, and analyzes the social, technical, and political issues it raised. He also looks at the aftermath of the accident on the surrounding area, including studies of its long-term health effects on the population.--From publisher description.

Author: Jim Collins
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062121006
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns withanother groundbreaking work, this time to ask: why do some companies thrive inuncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research,buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins andhis colleague Morten Hansen enumerate the principles for building a truly greatenterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous and fast-moving times. This book isclassic Collins: contrarian, data-driven and uplifting.

Author: Trevanian
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 030723844X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Jonathan Hemlock lives in a renovated Gothic church on Long Island. He is an art professor, a mountain climber, and a mercenary, performing assassinations (i.e., sanctions) for money to augment his black-market art collection. Now Hemlock is being tricked into a hazardous assignment that involves an attempt to scale one of the most treacherous mountain peaks in the Swiss Alps, the Eiger. In a breathtakingly suspenseful story that is part thriller and part satire, the author traces Hemlock’s spine-tingling adventures, introducing a cast of intriguing characters—villains, traitors, beautiful women—into the highly charged atmosphere of danger. The accumulating threads of suspicion, accusation, and evidence gradually knit themselves into a bizarre and death-defying climax in this exciting, entertaining novel that will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the last absorbing page.

Author: Ethan Lou
Publisher: ECW Press
ISBN: 1770415394
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
A true story. Fast-paced. Immersive. The definitive parable of everything Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain. There is the Bitcoin story of the headlines, but there is a more important one behind them: tangled plots sprawling like roots deep underground, entire worlds in which we are just passersby. In Once a Bitcoin Miner, journalist and author Ethan Lou takes readers on a richly told first-person narrative through the proverbial cryptocurrency Wild West. From investing in Bitcoin in university to his time writing for Reuters, and then mining the digital asset ― Lou meets the likes of the late Gerald Cotten (of QuadrigaCX) and a co-founder of Ethereum, and hangs out in North Korea with Virgil Griffith, the man later arrested for allegedly teaching blockchain to the totalitarian state. Coming of age in the 2008 financial crisis, Lou’s generation has a natural affinity with this rebel internet money, this so-called millennial gold, created in the wake of that economic storm. At once a personal story of adventure and fortune, this book is also a work of journalistic rigor, a deep dive into this domain that everyone hears about, yet which nobody truly knows, into the lives of the fast-talkers, the exiles, the ambitious, and the daring, forging their paths in a new world harsh and unpredictable.

Author: Allan W. Eckert
Publisher: Turtleback Books
ISBN: 9780881035179
Category : Badgers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A shy, lonely 6-year-old with an uncanny ability to handle animals wanders into the Canadian prairie and spends an incredible summer under the care and protection of a female badger. A Newbery Honor Book.

Author: Charles Perrow
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140082849X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety--building in more warnings and safeguards--fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. (At Chernobyl, tests of a new safety system helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.) By recognizing two dimensions of risk--complex versus linear interactions, and tight versus loose coupling--this book provides a powerful framework for analyzing risks and the organizations that insist we run them. The first edition fulfilled one reviewer's prediction that it "may mark the beginning of accident research." In the new afterword to this edition Perrow reviews the extensive work on the major accidents of the last fifteen years, including Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Challenger disaster. The new postscript probes what the author considers to be the "quintessential 'Normal Accident'" of our time: the Y2K computer problem.