Call of the Last Survivor


Book Description

Will Mikaleh and her friends unravel the mystery of the ruby key and discover who—or what—is the Lone Survivor? Of all the squads in what remains of the known world—that is, after the onset of “The Storm” and the mysterious zombie hordes that came with it—no squad has a reputation like Squad #43! Helmed by the valiant Mikaleh (a mighty Soldier) and her sidekick Janet (a stalwart and even-tempered Constructor), they’re known across the multiverse of servers as the deadliest dispatchers of Mist Monsters and Husks in all the land. Their reputation for finding and freeing survivors is unmatched, and they’re second-to-none when it comes to discovering clever tricks and secrets. Rounded out by Sam (an Outlander) and Sammy (a Ninja)—a quirky pair, who fight like brothers but always reconcile like best friends—Squad #43 seems on an unstoppable trajectory to combat The Storm and restore the world, bit by bit, to something like its former self. Yet Mikaleh can hardly believe her eyes when she returns to base camp one morning—after a long evening of satisfying zombie-killing—to find that the Husks appear to have. . . reached out to them! A mysterious message, seeming to be from the very monsters themselves, urges Squad #43 to attend a secret rendezvous in Canny Valley where more will be revealed. Never one to turn down a mystery, Mikaleh soon finds her squad plunged into a strange intrigue beyond her wildest dreams




The Last Escape


Book Description

They were dead. All of them. In the wake of a massacre, Ella, Bray, and William flee into the wild, hoping to escape the brutal vengeance of an unforgiving leader. In Brighton, political and economic tensions boil. Famine is approaching. The monsters are amassing. And a costly decision must be made, one that will threaten the lives of humanity's last survivors...




The Last Survivor


Book Description

THE LAST SURVIVOR is the incredible story of a man who survived three concentration camps and a major maritime disaster at the end of WW II. Stowed away on top of a train, twenty-year-old Wim Aloserij escapes the obligatory ‘Arbeitseinsatz’ (forced or “slave” labor) in Germany in 1943. The young man from Amsterdam then goes into hiding on a farm and sleeps for months in a wooden chest hidden underground. Despite his efforts to stay there, he is captured during a raid and taken to the infamous Gestapo prison in Amsterdam, after which he is imprisoned in Camp Amersfoort. A few weeks later he is sent on a transport to northern Germany. There, he is forced to work in Camp Husum and Camp Neuengamme, an experience many men will not survive but Wim nevertheless does, in part thanks to the harsh lessons he learned from his alcoholic and physically abusive stepfather. With the end of the war in sight, Wim ends up on the German luxury cruise liner the Cap Arcona, anchored in the Bay of Lübeck. While the Allies force Nazi Germany into submission on the docks, the RAF make a terrible mistake at sea. Fighter planes bomb several of the anchored ships, including the Cap Arcona, and in what soon becomes a veritable inferno 7,000 prisoners die. Together with just a few hundred other passengers, Wim survives one of the worst maritime disasters of all time.




A Million Windows


Book Description

“The house of fiction,” wrote Henry James, “has . . . not one window, but a million.” In this, his latest work, Gerald Murnane, one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary authors, takes these words as his starting point, and asks: Who, exactly, are that house’s residents, and what do they see from their respective rooms? His answer, A Million Windows, is a gorgeous (if unsettling) investigation into the glories and pitfalls of storytelling. Focusing on the importance of trust and the inevitability of betrayal in writing as in life, its nested stories explore the fraught relationships between author and reader, child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane’s fiction is woven from images-the reflections of the setting sun on distant windowpanes, seemingly limitless grasslands, a procession of dark-haired women, a clearing in a forest, the colors indigo and silver-grey, and the mysterious death of a young woman-which build to an emotional crescendo that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of its patterning.




Triangle


Book Description

Esther Gottesfeld is the last living survivor of the notorious 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire and has told her story countless times in the span of her lifetime. Even so, her death at the age of 106 leaves unanswered many questions about what happened that fateful day. How did she manage to survive the fire when at least 146 workers, most of them women, her sister and fiancé among them, burned or jumped to their deaths from the sweatshop inferno? Are the discrepancies in her various accounts over the years just ordinary human fallacy, or is there a hidden story in Esther's recollections of that terrible day? Esther's granddaughter Rebecca Gottesfeld, with her partner George Botkin, an ingenious composer, seek to unravel the facts of the matter while Ruth Zion, a zealous feminist historian of the fire, bores in on them with her own mole-like agenda. A brilliant, haunting novel about one of the most terrible tragedies in early-twentieth-century America, Triangle forces us to consider how we tell our stories, how we hear them, and how history is forged from unverifiable truths.




Lone Survivors


Book Description

A leading researcher on human evolution proposes a new and controversial theory of how our species came to be In this groundbreaking and engaging work of science, world-renowned paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer sets out a new theory of humanity's origin, challenging both the multiregionalists (who hold that modern humans developed from ancient ancestors in different parts of the world) and his own "out of Africa" theory, which maintains that humans emerged rapidly in one small part of Africa and then spread to replace all other humans within and outside the continent. Stringer's new theory, based on archeological and genetic evidence, holds that distinct humans coexisted and competed across the African continent—exchanging genes, tools, and behavioral strategies. Stringer draws on analyses of old and new fossils from around the world, DNA studies of Neanderthals (using the full genome map) and other species, and recent archeological digs to unveil his new theory. He shows how the most sensational recent fossil findings fit with his model, and he questions previous concepts (including his own) of modernity and how it evolved. Lone Survivors will be the definitive account of who and what we were, and will change perceptions about our origins and about what it means to be human.










Report from a Last Survivor


Book Description

Fred Harris is the last surviving member of the Kerner Rights Commission, famously created by President Lyndon Johnson following the terrible riots, disorders, and violent protests that exploded in so many of America’s cities in the “long hot summer” of 1967. He is the last survivor of the 1964 “Four Back Bench US Senators,” which consisted of Walter Mondale of Minnesota, Joseph Tydings of Maryland, Fred Harris of Oklahoma, and Robert Kennedy of New York. He is also the senior surviving former member of the US Senate and one of two “last surviving” Democratic presidential candidates to run in 1976—the other being President Jimmy Carter Jr. Report from a Last Survivor tells Fred Harris’s many stories: some serious, some funny, and all true. Each story forms a part of this report of a last survivor, a long look back over ninety-three years and counting of a rich life of public service and personal commitment.




Lone Survivor


Book Description

This is the story of fire team leader Marcus Luttrell, the sole survivor of Operation Redwing, and the desperate battle in the Afghanistan mountains in 2005, that led to the largest loss of life in Navy SEAL history.