Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Oliver" in All Categories

With an introduction by Will Self. A classic work of psychology, this international best seller provides a groundbreaking insight into the human mind. If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it. In this extraordinary book, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder.

As with his previous best seller, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, in An Anthropologist on Mars Oliver Sacks uses case studies to illustrate the myriad ways in which neurological conditions can affect our sense of self, our experience of the world and how we relate to those around us. Writing with his trademark blend of scientific rigour and human compassion, he describes patients such as the colour-blind painter or the surgeon with compulsive tics that disappear in the operating theatre - patients for whom disorientation and alienation but also adaptation are inescapable facts of life.

The Last of the Mohicans is a historical novel by James Fenimore Cooper, first published in January 1826. James Fenimore Cooper (1789 - 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century.

Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.

Twenty years ago a young war hero saved a life and began a passionate affair. Now that young war hero is president of the United States, and a souvenir from his past, a beautiful daughter he never knew existed, surfaces as the first of many secrets to be kept from public knowledge. But someone, somewhere, has uncovered the truth. The girl is seized by religious zealots, and unless the president complies with their demands, her execution is certain. Yet if he gives in, the Middle East will ignite in war. He calls in the only men who can help: Sean Dillon and Blake Johnson.

They gave Sean Dillon a choice: life in prison or a suicide mission. In the inky depths beneath Thunder Point, a diver discovers a priceless treasure: a German U-boat sunk in American waters three weeks after the end of the Second World War. Inside is final proof that Martin Bormann escaped Hitler's bunker and that he took with him the most explosive secrets of the Reich.

Sean Dillon is a hired killer. The IRA, the PLO, ETA - he's worked for them all. Now, with the Gulf War raging, the Iraqis need his services for an apocalyptic strike at the heart of the West. If it succeeds, it will shake the world to its foundations. Leaders will be wiped out, terror will spread: a devastating blow against democracy. Dillon has 10 Downing Street in his sights, but British intelligence are on his trail. They have hired a killer to stalk a killer - a mortal enemy who is hell-bent on revenge.

The novel that launched the astonishing career of one of the 20th century's greatest writers of action and suspense - an acclaimed classic of heroism and the sea in World War II. The story of men who rose to heroism, and then to something greater, HMS Ulysses takes its place alongside The Caine Mutiny and The Cruel Sea as one of the classic novels of the navy at war. It is the compelling story of Convoy FR77 to Murmansk - a voyage that pushes men to the limits of human endurance.

The atomic submarine Dolphin has impossible orders: to sail beneath the ice floes of the Arctic Ocean to locate and rescue the men of weather station Zebra, gutted by fire and drifting with the ice pack somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. But the orders do not say what the Dolphin will find if she succeeds - that the fire at Ice Station Zebra was sabotage and that one of the survivors is a killer....

Twelve hundred British soldiers isolated on the small island of Kheros off the Turkish coast, waiting to die. Twelve hundred lives in jeopardy, lives that could be saved if only the guns could be silenced. The guns of Navarone, vigilant, savage and catastrophically accurate. Navarone itself, grim bastion of narrow straits manned by a mixed garrison of Germans and Italians, an apparently impregnable iron fortress.

Oliver Sacks, the best-selling author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, is most famous for his studies of the human mind: insightful and beautifully characterised portraits of those experiencing complex neurological conditions. However, he has another scientific passion: the fern. 

The year is 1944. Just outside Delhi, a British Dakota crashes, taking lives and destroying a clandestine treaty signed by Lord Mountbatten and the Communist leader, Mao Tse-tung. A historic agreement, one set to change the course of history. Over 30 years later, a deathbed confession from a Mafia kingpin reveals the answers to untouched secrets about the treaty and just how much the British and Chinese governments would pay for its destruction. It's not long before Sean Dillon enters the fray.

Hailed as a medical classic, and the subject of a major feature film as well as radio and stage plays and various TV documentaries, Awakenings by Oliver Sacks is the extraordinary account of a group of 20 patients. Rendered catatonic by the sleeping-sickness epidemic that swept the world just after the First World War, all 20 had spent 40 years in hospital - motionless and speechless; aware of the world around them but exhibiting no interest in it - until Dr Sacks administered the then-new drug L-DOPA, which caused them, temporarily, to awake from their decades-long slumber.

The classic World War II thriller from the acclaimed master of action and suspense. One winter night, seven men and a woman are parachuted onto a mountainside in wartime Germany. Their objective: an apparently inaccessible castle, headquarters of the Gestapo. Their mission: to rescue a crashed American general before the Nazi interrogators can force him to reveal secret D-day plans.

New York: a woman waits in the shadows, a Colt .25 in her elegant hand. Her target: Senator Michael Cohan, member of an extremist organization dedicated to destroying the peace talks. Run by Britain's most wanted terrorist, Jack Barry, its secret links stretch all the way to the Oval Office. Washington: the president calls Blake Johnson, head of secret White House department 'the Basement'. He needs to see him now.

From the acclaimed master of action and suspense. The all-time classic. An airliner crashes in the polar ice cap. In temperatures 40 degrees below zero, six men and four women survive. But for the members of a remote scientific research station who rescue them, there are some sinister questions to answer – the first one being, who shot the pilot before the crash?

Sean Dillon in his most spectacular adventure yet, a no-holds-barred battle with a Mafia don. When the Mafia kill a reporter for getting too close, White House security insider Blake Johnson takes it personally. The reporter was his ex-wife, and with the help of undercover enforcer Sean Dillon and his intelligence colleagues he is hell-bent on revenge. In London, Beirut and Ireland, the daredevil friends risk everything as they combine to destroy the illegal businesses of Mafia front man Jack Fox.

The murderous Rashid family were forced to pay the ultimate price for their crimes by the British government's secret enforcer, Sean Dillon, and his undercover team. Yet one member of that oil-rich dynasty was allowed to live, and that could have been Dillon's fatal mistake. Kate Rashid witnessed her brothers being killed one by one, and now she has sworn vengeance. Sean Dillon, White House operative Blake Johnson, even the US president himself...their time is coming, and only she knows how - or when.

A tense and nerve-shattering classic from the highly acclaimed master of action and suspense. A rolling for Knox. is how the journalists describe the Presidential motorcade as it enters San Francisco across the Golden Gate. Even the ever-watchful FBI believe it is impregnable - as it has to be with the President and two Arab potentates aboard. But halfway across the bridge the unthinkable happens. Before the eyes of the world a master criminal pulls off the most spectacular kidnapping in modern times....

Whilst checking up on the volatile situation in Kosovo, the US president's right-hand man, Blake Johnson, meets Major Harry Miller, a member of the British Cabinet. Miller is there doing his own checks for the British Prime Minister. When both men get involved with a group of Russian soldiers about to commit an atrocity, Miller puts an end to the scuffle with a bullet in the forehead of the ringleader. But this action has dire consequences not only for Miller and Johnson but for their associates, too.