Books with author john macdonald

It began the way all McGee's adventures began. From left field. Only this time it was right in front of his car. This lovely young thing, wearing little more than a frightened look, streaked out of darkness into his headlights. McGee hit the brakes, missed the nymphet's tawny haunch by one micro-second, and landed upside down in ten feet of swamp water. Two minutes later, with McGee upright and limping along the deserted Florida road, someone zoomed by in an old truck and took a couple of shots at him. Well, this was not McGee's idea of Southern hospitality. So he went to the local sheriff to complain--and found himself arrested for murder. Then...well, read it yourself.

The prevailing image of food at sea in the age of sail features rotting meat and weevily biscuits, but this highly original book proves beyond doubt that this was never the norm. Building on much recent research Janet Macdonald shows how the sailor's official diet was better than he was likely to enjoy ashore, and of ample calorific value for his highly active shipboard life. When trouble flared and food was a major grievance in the great mutinies of 1797 the usual reason was the abuse of the system. This system was an amazing achievement. At the height of the Napoleonic Wars the Royal Navy's administrators fed a fleet of more than 100,000 men, in ships that often spent months on end at sea. Despite the difficulty of preserving food before the advent of refrigeration and meat-canning, the British fleet had largely eradicated scurvy and other dietary disorders by 1800. This was the responsibility of the Victualling Board, a much-maligned but generally efficient bureaucracy that organized the preparing and packing of meat, the brewing of beer, the baking of ship's biscuit, and all the logistics of the Navy and on an industrial scale unparalleled elsewhere. Once aboard ship food and drink was subject to stringent controls to ensure fairness, and this book takes a fresh look at the tarnished reputations of Purser and Cook, before turning to the ways both officers and men were able to supplement their official rations, including the keeping of livestock on board. A chapter compares provisions in the other major navies of the time, and the book concludes with recipes for some of the exotic sounding dishes, like lobscouse, prepared by naval cooks. While Feeding Nelson's Navy contains much of value to the historian, it is written with a popular touch that will enthral anyone with an interest in life at sea in the age of sail.

The Deep Blue Good-by is the first of 21 novels in the Travis McGee series by American author John D. MacDonald. Commissioned in 1964 by Fawcett Publications editor Knox Burger, the book establishes for the series an investigative protagonist in a residential Florida base. All titles in the 21-volume series include a color, a mnemonic device which was suggested by his publisher so that when harried travelers in airports looked to buy a book, they could at once see those MacDonald titles they had not yet read. (MacDonald also included color in a further two unrelated novels: A Flash of Green and The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything).

In Greenmantle (1916), a classic tale of espionage and adventure, Richard Hannay, hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, travels across war-torn Europe on the trail of a German plot and an Islamic Messiah. He is joined by three more of Buchan's heroes: Peter Pienaar, the old Boer scout; John S. Blenkiron, the American determined to fight the Kaiser; and Sandy Arbuthnot--Greenmantle himself--a character modelled on Lawrence of Arabia. Together they move in disguise through Germany to Constantinople and the Russian border in order to face their enemies: the grotesque Stumm and the evil femme fatale Hilda von Einem.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.