"Every day Iona, a larger-than-life magazine advice columnist, travels the ten stops from Hampton Court to Waterloo Station by train, accompanied by her dog, Lulu. Every day she sees the same people, whom she knows only by nickname: Impossibly-Pretty-Bookworm and Terribly-Lonely-Teenager. Of course, they never speak. Seasoned commuters never do. Then one morning, the man she calls Smart-But-Sexist-Manspreader chokes on a grape right in front of her....

McPhee begins his adventure riding with Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of an 18-wheeler hauling nearly 30 tons of highly toxic chemicals from North Carolina to Washington. He continues his journey on a towboat pushing over 1,000 feet of barge up the narrow channel of the Illinois River. He rounds out his account crawling through Nebraska, Kansas, and the Powder River Basin of Wyoming in massive coal trains. Along the way, he tells the stories of...

John Sedgwick recounts the decade-long fight between General William J. Palmer, the Civil War hero leading the "little family" of his Rio Grande, coming down from Denver, hoping to showcase the majesty of the Rockies, and William Barstow Strong, the hard-nosed manager of the corporate-minded Santa Fe, venturing west from Kansas. What begins as an accidental rivalry when the two lines cross in Colorado soon evolves into an all-out battle as each man...

Ten years after writing a memoir about her life travelling throughout the American West with her railroad promoter and writer husband, Carrie Strahorn reflects on the truths of her pioneering life that she didn't tell, such as her relationship with her strong-willed husband, struggles with faith, and efforts to build a life in the untamed West.

There may be an occasional flaw in the auto expert advice of brothers Tom and Ray Maggliozzi, but the complaint box remains empty, with no factory recall in sight. The next entry in the ever popular Car Talk Classics series features four all time favorite Car Talk episodes, hand-picked by host Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, and presented here together for the first time. Car Talk continues to be one of public radio's most popular and laugh-inducing...

In 1987, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, also known as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, made the leap from nursing the motley car population of New England to creating the nationally beloved public radio phenomenon that we all know as Car Talk. The advice may be a little suspect, and the memories in desperate need of a tune-up, but the laughs are genuine as Click and Clack look back on an illustrious-if not industrious-25 years of delighting NPR audiences...

On the terrifying, chaotic night of April 14, 1912, while the Titanic was sinking, Bruce J. Ismay, the ship's owner, made a decision that would save his life - and end it. Ismay boarded a lifeboat meant for women and children, and within days became 'The Most Talked-of Man in the World.' Branded a coward, he became a flesh-and-blood embodiment of Joseph Conrad's legendary eponymous character, Lord Jim. How to Survive the Titanic interweaves numerous...

The Brothers Grimm told tales that in their original, unedited form were strange, sometimes rambling, and of dubious moral integrity-in other words, they're the perfect model for our Brothers Grime, the Tappet Brothers. America's favorite auto mechanics share reminiscences, rants, and hate mail in another time-wasting yet genuinely useful collection of highlights from their long-running radio show.So one day the guys were at a restaurant enjoying...

"In the late nineteenth century, as cities like Boston and New York grew larger, the streets became increasingly clogged with horse-drawn carts. When the great blizzard of 1888 brought New York City to a halt, a solution had to be found. Two brothers--Henry Melville Whitney of Boston and William Collins Whitney of New York City--pursued the dream of his city being the first American metropolis to have a subway and the great race was on. The competition...

As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she craved--to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician--had gone extinct. From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth; there was nothing left to be discovered. Looking beyond this planet, she decided to become a scientist and go to Mars. In between studying at Oxford and MIT, Harris set off by bicycle...