This is not a children’s book, as may be supposed from the title, but a collection of essays first published in The Idler magazine, in which over twenty well-known writers describe with characteristic style and humour their experiences in producing their first book… and getting it published. The book is profusely illustrated, not only with portraits of the authors, but also with scenes and illustrations from the books discussed. Authors include Jerome K. Jerome, R. L. Stevenson, Bret Harte, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Braddon...

In 1822, Aaron Smith, a young English seaman, was taken captive by Cuban pirates when his ship was boarded en route from Jamaica to England. Forced to work as a navigator and as a member of pirate boarding parties, he witnessed unspeakable acts of murder and torture. Befriended by a young Cuban woman, he managed to escape with his life, but was arrested as a pirate in Havana and sent back to England in chains. There, he found himself on trial for his life at the Old Bailey courthouse—with the attorney general himself leading the prosecution. Smith's dramatic account of his personal experience is a brutally honest, unromanticized [sic] look at piracy in the 19th century.

At the outset of the American Civil War, [the writer Ambrose] Bierce enlisted in the Union Army's 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment....In February 1862 he was commissioned First Lieutenant, and served on the staff of General William Babcock Hazen as a topographical engineer, making maps of likely battlefields. Bierce fought at the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862), a terrifying experience that became a source for several later short stories and the memoir, "What I Saw of Shiloh". In June 1864, he sustained a serious head wound at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, and spent the rest of the summer on furlough, returning to active duty in September. He was discharged from the army in January 1865.

Abigail Adams lived the American Revolution as the wife of one of its central figures--John Adams. Her family correspondence, published along with a memoir by her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, brings that era into eloquent focus. What was it like to hear the cannon's roar from your window? to face pestilence? food shortages? rampant inflation? devalued coinage? to raise four children alone--and earn the money to keep your household afloat, while your husband was engaged in politics and diplomacy miles and oceans away ...

Louis Hughes was born a slave near Charlottesville, Virginia to a white father and a black slave woman. Throughout his life he worked mostly as a house servant, but was privy to the intimate details and workings of the entire McGee cotton plantation and empire.In Thirty Years A Slave Hughes provides vivid descriptions and explicit accounts of how the McGee plantation in Mississippi, and the McGee mansion in Tennessee functioned--accounts of the lives of the many slaves that lived, suffered and sometimes died under the cruel and unusual punishments meted out by Boss and his monstrously unstable and vindictive wife...

Pierre Loti [Julien Viaud] (1850-1923) was a French naval officer and novelist. The present book is one of his few works of non-fiction, a small collection of letters and diary entries that describe his views and experiences in the wars and military operations in which he participated. Besides World War I, he also sheds light upon his views and involvement in the preparations for the Turkish Revolution of 1923, for which until today a famous hill and popular café in Istanbul are named after him.

The recollections of a British infantryman who served in the British army during the Napoleonic Wars.

National Geographic Magazine Volume 1 Number 1 published in 1889. Topics of articles are:Announcement by the National Geographic SocietyIntroductory Address by the PresidentGeographic Methods in Geologic InvestigationClassification of Geographic Forms by GenesisThe Great Storm of March 11 to 14, 1888The Great Storm off the Atlantic Coast of the United States, March 11th to 14th, 1888The Survey of the CoastThe Survey and Map of Massachusetts

Hiram Chase is a well liked Reverend in a small ministry in Utica. When his mental and physical health deteriorates, he is taken to Utica lunatic asylum. After his stay in the asylum, Hiram documents his experiences and those of other patients in the asylum. He describes his daily routine and the negative experiences he had, along with praising certain individuals whom he met during his "Two Years and Four Months in a Lunatic Asylum".

An account of World War I and the experience of filming it by an early cinematographer (and, after the war, successful director) who was there.

This two volume work is the autobiography of Lord Cochrane, a naval captain of the Napoleonic period. His adventures are seminal to the development of naval fiction as a genre. Marryat sailed with Cochrane, while later writers borrowed incidents from this biography for their fictions. Most notable among these is Patrick O'Brian, three of whose novels have clear parallels to incidents in the life of Cochrane. This first volume covers Cochrane's earlier life, during which he is most active militarily. (Introduction by Timothy Ferguson)

William Wells Brown was born a slave, near Lexington, Kentucky. His mother, Elizabeth, was a slave; his father was a white man who never acknowledged his paternity. Brown escaped slavery at about the age of 20. For many years he worked as a steam boatman and as a conductor for the Underground Railroad in Buffalo, New York. In 1843, he became a lecturer for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, and was a contemporary of Frederick Douglass.Brown went to Europe in 1849 to encourage British support for the anti-slavery movement in the United States...

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the premier movers in the original women’s rights movement, along with Susan B. Anthony, her best friend for over 50 years. While Elizabeth initially stayed home with her husband and many babies and wrote the speeches, Susan went on the road to bring the message of the women’s rights movement to an often hostile public. When black men were given the vote in 1870, Susan and Elizabeth led the women’s rights establishment of the time to withhold support for a bill that would extend to black men the rights still denied for women of all colors...

Recollections of Life in Ohio is the autobiography of William Cooper Howells (1807-1894), father of the American novelist William Dean Howells. The Howells were Welsh woolen mill owners. William Cooper's father brought the family to America in 1808--at a time when Great Britain actually forbid skilled workmen from emigrating, thus putting the father's practical knowledge of mill machinery in great demand. Small scale industries--paper and woolen mills, flour mills, and distilleries were sprouting apace with farms in the newly opened lands of Ohio, where the Howells settled in 1813...

Ambassador Morgenthau’s memoirs of his years in the service of the United States in Constantinople, (today Istanbul), are an important primary historical resource for the study of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Genocide. During this genocide, approximately 1,500,000 Armenians living in Anatolia were murdered in an attempt to rid Turkey of its non-Turkish populations. Mr. Morgenthau left Turkey a frustrated man, having done all that he was able through diplomatic circles to halt the murders, to no avail...

This book is a collection of Theodore Roosevelt’s published commentaries and public addresses on the general theme of the requirements for individual and collective success in the personal, civic, political, and social arenas. (Introduction by Bob Neufeld)

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873), British philosopher, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham's. He was a forceful proponent in the fight for government intervention in social reform.

"The White Heart of the Mojave" recounts a 1920's adventure "in the wind and sun and big spaces" of Death Valley by two independent minded women, Edna Brush Perkins and Charlotte Hannahs Jordan. Both women were early feminists, Edna as chairwoman of the greater Cleveland Woman's Suffrage Party (1916-18). At the end of the Great War, the two friends wanted nothing more than to escape "to the solitariness of some wild and lonely place far from city halls, smokestacks, national organizations, and streets of little houses all alike...

François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743-1803) rose to fame in 1791 during the Haitian struggle for independence. In this revolt, he led thousands of slaves on the island of Hispañola to fight against the colonial European powers of France, Spain and England. The former slaves ultimately established the independent state of Haiti and expelled the Europeans. L’Ouverture eventually became the governor and Commander-In-Chief of Haiti before recognizing and submitting to French rule in 1801...

Serialized in Shadowland from November 1921 to February 1922, Hollywood: Its Morals and Manners is Theodore Dreiser's shocking four part expose on the motion picture industry. In it, he shares his observations from his extended stay in Los Angeles, and gives us an intimate look at the seedier underside of Hollywood.

The diary of an upper middle class Austrian girl, this book describes her life between the ages of eleven and fourteen. It's a coming of age story full of angst, boys, and questions.

National Geographic Magazine Volume 1 Number 2 published in 1889. Topics of articles are:Africa, its Past and Future Reports on:Geography of the LandGeography of the SeaGeography of the AirGeography of Life

By Zorra, in the following sketches, is meant a little district in Oxford county, Ontario, some ten miles square, composed of part of East and part of West Zorra, and containing a population of about fourteen hundred. It was settled about the year 1830, chiefly by Highlanders from Sutherlandshire, Scotland.Within the last forty years there have gone from this district over one hundred young men who have made their mark in the world. With most of these it has been the writer's good fortune to be personally and intimately acquainted; and companionship with some of them has been to him a pleasure and a benefit...

With her usual wit and charm, Ms. Repplier recalls her days at Eden Hall, the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Torresdale, north of Philadelphia. She shares the highlights (and some of the low lights) of her time there. Perhaps this sharp eye, nurtured by her willfulness and independent spirit, was the reason she was not invited to return to Eden after her second year. Not only Catholics or boarding school alumnae will find this book entertaining; anyone who went to school or who looks back on their childhood will see their own experience somewhere in this memoir.

Historic Waterways, Six Hundred Miles of Canoeing down the Rock, Fox and Wisconsin Rivers.This volume is the record of six hundred miles of canoeing experiences on historic waterways in Wisconsin and Illinois during the summer of 1887. There has been no attempt at exaggeration, to color its homely incidents, or to picture charms where none exist. It is intended to be a simple, truthful narrative of what was seen and done upon a series of novel outings through the heart of the Northwest. If it may induce others to undertake similar excursions, and thus increase the little navy of healthy and self-satisfied canoeists, the object of the publication will have been attained.

A good book by the oil revolutionist of the 20th century. As they say "Men should listen to experience" and this book is all about the experience of the second highest taxpayer of the US during the 20's. Though it is not in the book, this is a small poem he wrote:I was early taught to work as well as play,My life has been one long, happy holiday;Full of work and full of play-I dropped the worry on the way- And God was good to me everyday.

This is about a three-hundred mile trip across the Rocky Mountains on horseback with Howard Eaton. It is about fishing, and cool nights around a camp-fire, and long days on the trail. It is about a party of all sorts, from everywhere, of men and women, old and young, experienced folk and novices, who had yielded to a desire to belong to the sportsmen of the road. And it is by way of being advice also. Your true convert must always preach. (Introduction by Mary Roberts Rinehart quoted from the text.)

Perhaps the first memoir written by a film celebrity, Pearl White's Just Me gives a first-person account of the actress' rise to stardom. White guides us through her early childhood, her development as a performer, and finally to her breakout role in The Perils of Pauline--a role that made her the most popular "serial queen" of early cinema. Although romanticized and somewhat embellished, this book gives us a fascinating glimpse into the film industry's earliest years and the various myths of film stardom.

A companion volume to F.A. Bruton's 'The Story of Peterloo', the full title of this short collection is 'Three Accounts of Peterloo by Eyewitnesses, Bishop Stanley, Lord Hylton, John Benjamin Smith with Bishop Stanley's Evidence at the Trial'. The three contemporary accounts, each with a short introduction by the editor, give different perspectives on the events of 16 August 1819, when a troop of Hussars accompanied by the local Yeomanry rode into a peaceful reform rally at St. Peter's Fields, Manchester, leaving 18 dead and more than 700 injured.

Phoebe Yates Pember served as a matron in the Confederate Chimborazo military hospital in Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War, overseeing a dietary kitchen serving meals to 300 or more wounded soldiers daily. Reminiscences of a Southern Hospital is her vivid recounting of hospital life and of her tribulations (and personal growth) as a female administrator. To follow her from day one, when she is greeted with “ill-repressed disgust” that “one of them had come,” and she, herself, “could...

Explorer Hiram Bingham discovered Machu Picchu in 1911, as recounted in his book Inca Lands, now released on Librivox at http://librivox.org/inca-lands-by-hiram-bingham/. In 1917, he became an aviator and organized the United States Schools of Military Aeronautics at eight universities to provide ground school training for aviation cadets, and then in Issoudun, France, Bingham commanded the primary Air Service flying school. He became a supporter of the Air Service in their post-war quest for independence from the Army and supported that effort, in part, with the publication of this book of his wartime experiences published in 1920 by Yale University Press.

This is the story of Charles Ball, an American slave who was born in 1780 and remained a slave for fifty years thereafter. Ball told his story to a lawyer who turned it into this written work.