A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier

Darwin took his books aboard the Beagle. Swift and Defoe used his experiences as inspiration in writing Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Captain Cook relied on his observations while voyaging around the world. Coleridge called him a genius and “a man of exquisite mind.” In the history of exploration, nobody has ventured further than Englishman William Dampier. Yet while the exploits of Cook, Shackleton, and a host of legendary explorers have been widely chronicled, those of perhaps the greatest are virtually invisible today—an omission that Diana and Michael Preston have redressed in this vivid, compelling biography.

The Oxford American is an American quarterly literary magazine "dedicated to featuring the very best in Southern writing while documenting the complexity and vitality of the American South."

Billed as "The Southern Magazine of Good Writing," and "The New Yorker of the South," it has won two National Magazine Awards and other high honors since it began publication in 1992. Its pages have featured original work by William Faulkner, Walker Percy, John Grisham, John Updike, Roy Blount, Susan Sontag, Steve Martin, Charles Portis and many other distinguished authors, while also discovering and launching the most promising writers in the region.

It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war - and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan. This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.

This completely revised International Express, with 100% new material, meets all the practical language needs of adult professional learners. The series retains the popular student-centred approach and strong communicative focus, while adding a range of new features.