BESTSELLERS

An inspiring tale of one man’s courage and determination... Easter1963. The end of the school holidays are approaching, butinstead of returning to school, Billy “Scratch” Hitchen ran away to sea - hewas just fourteen years old. Before the age of nineteen, he had sailed aroundthe world five times. “Scratch”Salcombe Boy takes us on a wild ride around the world: from themountainous seas off Cape Horn, to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, from themost southerly tip of New Zealand to the North Atlantic and Canada, from oildrilling and exploration in Argentina to the construction of oil pipelines inthe swamps and jungles of West Africa. In 1973, Scratch finally returned hometo Salcombe in South Devon and went on to spend the next three decades fishingin every sea area, from Dover to Rockall. As Scratch tells the story, the reader will be drawn to thecharismatic writing and inspired by the sheer determination of the man whoovercame many obstacles, not least his lifelong struggles with dyslexia.Without reference to any written document or diary, the story he tells iswritten from the heart and carried in his soul. Readers who delight in seaexploration and travel, as well as vivid, well-written autobiographies, will enjoythis fascinating life well lived.

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Un viaggio alla scoperta dei misteri che per anni hanno affascinato la nostra mente, per scoprire una realta che troppo spesso ci viene nascosta anche se, apparentemente, puo sembrare a portata di mano. Accanto al desiderio di scoprire i segreti del nostro vicino di casa, in questo libro ci soffermiamo ad analizzare alcuni intricati temi politici e scottanti casi ancora insoluti dei quali, ad oggi, non si e fatto ancora chiarezza. Il caso Aldo Moro, la misteriosa scomparsa di Lady Diana,l'omicidio del Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America J.F.Kennedy, l'atterraggio sulla luna...che grazie agli "infallibili" occhiali "agl'infrarossi", non sono piu un segreto.

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This is a collection of the blogs that were written every day whilst undertaking the Mongol Rally, with my school friend Mikey, in the summer of 2016. These blogs are a frank and truthful account of what it is like to spend five weeks on the road in a tiny red car, travelling over 10,000 miles, across a third of the world's surface, through 20 countries. The Mongol Rally is one of the toughest adventures in the world and this book gets you to the highs and lows as if you were in the passenger seat. The rally wasn't just about travelling the world. The pair managed to raise over GBP2000 for three charities: Cool Earth, The Back Up Trust and The Max Levene Trust. This Was helped by many sponsors, who took pride of place on the exterior of the little red car. Fletcher's Solicitors were the main contributors, more sponsors are given in the book.

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Composed in Germany in the early thirteenth century by Judah ben Samuel he-hasid, Sefer Hasidim, or "Book of the Pietists," is a compendium of religious instruction that portrays the everyday life of Jews as they lived together with and apart from Christians in towns such as Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Regensburg. A charismatic religious teacher who recorded hundreds of original stories that mirrored situations in medieval social living, Judah's messages advocated praying slowly and avoiding honor, pleasure, wealth, and the lures of unmarried sex. Although he failed to enact his utopian vision of a pietist Jewish society, his collected writings would help shape the religious culture of Ashkenazic Judaism for centuries.In "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe, Ivan G. Marcus proposes a new paradigm for understanding how this particular book was composed. The work, he contends, was an open text written by a single author in hundreds of disjunctive, yet self-contained, segments, which were then combined into multiple alternative versions, each equally authoritative. While Sefer Hasidim offers the clearest example of this model of composition, Marcus argues that it was not unique: the production of Ashkenazic books in small and easily rearranged paragraphs is a literary and cultural phenomenon quite distinct from anything practiced by the Christian authors of northern Europe or the Sephardic Jews of the south. According to Marcus, Judah, in authoring Sefer Hasidim in this manner, not only resisted Greco-Roman influences on Ashkenazic literary form but also extended an earlier Byzantine rabbinic tradition of authorship into medieval European Jewish culture.

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Sefer Yeṣirah, or "Book of Formation," is one of the most influential Jewish compositions of late antiquity. First attested to in the tenth century C.E. and attributed by some to the patriarch Abraham himself, Sefer Yeṣirah claims that the world was created by the powers of the decimal number system and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This short, enigmatic treatise was considered canonical by Jewish philosophers and Kabbalists and has fascinated Western thinkers and writers as diverse as Leibnitz and Borges. Nonetheless, Sefer Yesirah is nearly impossible to contextualize, mainly owing to its unique style and the fact that it does not refer to, nor is it referenced by, any other source in late antiquity. After a century and a half of modern scholarship, the most fundamental questions regarding its origins remain contested: Who wrote Sefer Yeṣirah? Where and when was it written? What was its "original" version? What is the meaning of this treatise?In "Sefer Yeṣirah" and Its Contexts, Tzahi Weiss explores anew the history of this enigmatic work. Through careful scrutiny of the text's evolution, he traces its origins to the seventh century C.E., to Jews who lived far from rabbinic circles and were familiar with the teachings of Syriac Christianity. In addition, he examines the reception of Sefer Yeṣirah by anonymous commentators and laypeople who, as early as the twelfth century C.E., regarded Sefer Yeṣirah as a mystical, mythical, or magical treatise, thus significantly differing from the common rabbinic view in that period of the text as a philosophical and scientific work. Examined against the backdrop of this newly sketched historical context, Sefer Yeṣirah provides a unique and surprising aperture to little-known Jewish intellectual traditions of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages which, despite their distance from the rabbinic canon, played a vital role in the development of medieval Jewish learning and culture.

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