This is your captain speaking

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Marc Dierikx

The name Fokker is synonymous with early aviation warfare. Rising to prominence as a builder of biplanes and triplanes used extensively by Germany in World War I, Anthony Fokker (1890-1939) made aerial combat possible by inventing a device to synchronize machine gun fire with propellers. By 1918 he was the manufacturer of Germany's top fighter planes. A decade later, with his business interests extending from Germany and his native Holland to the United States, he headed. The world's largest aircraft manufacturing conglomerate, renowned for an innovative trimotor plane. Arguing that Fokker's early success was due as much to good timing and marketing strategies as to engineering genius, Marc Dierikx draws from archives in Europe and the United States to trace Fokker's mixed career as an aviation businessman. He shows how Fokker's reluctance to invest in research and development, his propensity for producing small-series, highly customized. Aircraft, and his struggle with quality control led to the eventual decline of his empire. The book describes how Fokker's eccentricities and constant travels had dramatic consequences on his personal life and how his financial strategies affected the sales of his planes. Dierikx also details Fokker's unfounded confidence in the giant F-32.

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Thomas & Nanette Kinkade with Larry Libby

The acclaimed "Painter of Light" artist and his wife of twenty years relate their experiences of courtship and marriage, discussing the various forms of marital love while sharing thought-provoking and inspirational anecdotes.

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Rob Stewart

Documentary filmmaker Rob Stewart tells the story of his life so far, from a person whose focus was saving sharks to one on a mission to save humanity.

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Andrew Wilson

While much has been written about the Titanic, her shocking demise, and those who perished, very little has been devoted to the hundreds of survivors. In Shadow of the Titanic, Andrew Wilson offers a look at how their lives were affected by living through this catastrophic event. Those who lived to tell the tale reveal how they coped in the aftermath. Using archival research and interviews with family members, Wilson tells their stories. He shows how some survivors used their experience to propel themselves on to fame and how others were wracked with guilt and refused to acknowledge they had been there. Some reputations were destroyed, and some survivors were so psychologically damaged that they took their own lives years later. From the famous survivors like Bruce Ismay and Madeline Astor -- who became a bride, a widow, and a mother all within a year -- to lesser known survivors Dorothy Gibson and the Navartil brothers -- who were traveling under assumed names because they were being abducted by their father -- Shadow of the Titanic offers a host of stories that add a new dimension to our understanding of this legendary disaster.