This is the compelling story of America's first home-grown terrorist cell traces six young Yemeni Americans from a New York state backwater to an Al-Qaeda training camp. They called themselves the Arabian Knights, just a gang of high schoolers who spray-painted the name onto the back of their jackets, Arab hip hop asserting itself in the grimy side streets of Lackawanna - a depressed neighbourhood in a run-down steel town in upper New York state. Then, in Spring of 2001, they became something more. A handful of Arabian Knights decided to go on an adventure. They told their parents they were travelling to Pakistan to study at a madrassa. The elders in the neighbourhood saw their new interest in Islam as a positive step, an alternative to hanging around a town where job prospects - any prospects - were so few. But their adventure became more dramatic. There was a clandestine border crossing into Afghanistan, stays in jihadi guesthouses and then training at an infamous Al-Qaeda camp outside Kandahar. Then, just weeks after the last of the Arabian Knights returned to Lackawanna, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers. What had been a lark, a religious curiosity, took on a new meaning. Suddenly, six guys from Lackawanna became much more. To former US Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Lackawanna Six were the country's first home-grown Islamic terror cell. The city of Lackawanna and local parents were shocked. They couldn't believe that Al-Qaeda could claim any of their own. Dina Temple-Raston has retraced their journey, discovered what lured them into an Al-Qaeda camp and a face-to-face meeting with Osama bin Laden, and tracks their return to the US. Some of the men were just grateful to be home. Others considered the world through newly radicalized eyes288pp..
Public Affairs, 2007, Cloth, Book Condition: New, Jacket Condition: New. First Edition. . 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

ISBN: 9781586484033

Inventory #18267

Price: £ 8.99 GBP ($ 14.20 approx. - € 10.86 approx.)

FORGETTING IRELAND is both a history and mystery, a story of western Ireland's Connemara coast and of Graceville, a small town in western Minnesota. In 1880, at the height of Ireland's second famine, a ship of paupers was sent from Galway to take up land granted them by a Catholic bishop in Minnesota. There they encountered the worst winter in the state's history and nearly froze to death in shanties on the prairie. National and international newspapers featured their plight as the welfare scandal of the year, and priests and politicians traded accusations as to who was responsible. The immigrants were at last removed from the colony; their name became the town's shorthand for lying, drunken failures. By chance more than a century later, Bridget Connelly, who grew up in Graceville, discovers her Connemara past. As Connelly uncovers the deliberately suppressed history of her family's emigration, she exposes an old scandal that surrounded the settling of the land around Graceville, one that pitted Masons, Protestants, Germans, and Yankees against Irish Catholics -- and one that set lace-curtain Irish against the Connemara paupers. She also learns of an archbishop who was, according to farmer lore, 'worse than Jesse James'. In this compelling combination of history and memoir, Connelly tells stories of an epochal blizzard, a famous Irish bard, an infamous Irish woman pirate, feuding frontier communities, and an archbishop's questionable legacy. She also learns why her family tried so hard to forget Ireland. 263pp.
Borealis Books, 2003, Cloth, Book Condition: New, Jacket Condition: As New. First Edition. . 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

ISBN: 0873514491

Inventory #21933

Price: £ 12.50 GBP ($ 19.75 approx. - € 15.10 approx.)

Title page and ffep slightly marked. Head and tail of D/J spine slightly rubbed. 224pp.
The Kensal Press, 1986, Cloth, Book Condition: Very Good, Jacket Condition: Very Good/Price Clipped. First Edition. D/J in Protective Wrapper. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

ISBN: 0946041458

Inventory #22827

Price: £ 8.50 GBP ($ 13.43 approx. - € 10.27 approx.)

Rubbing and some slight staining to boards and spine.160pp.Decorative title page.Previous owner's signature on ffep.Bottom three inches front hinge a little shaken.
J.B.Nicholls and Son, 1841, Cloth, Book Condition: Good, Jacket Condition: No Jacket. . . 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

ISBN:

Inventory #22761

Price: £ 40.00 GBP ($ 63.20 approx. - € 48.32 approx.)

"Thames: Sacred River" is about the river from source to sea. It covers history from prehistoric times to the present, the flora and fauna of the river, paintings and photographs inspired by the Thames, its geology, smells and colours, its literature, laws and landscape, its magic and myths, its architecture, trade and weather. The reader learns about the fishes that swim in the river and the boats that ply on its surface; about floods and tides; hauntings and suicides; miasmas and sewers; locks, weirs and embankments. 'My fair lady' of London Bridge is Falling Down is identified as Eleanor, Queen of Henry lll; Mapledurham House near Henley as Toad Hall of Wind in the Willows.In AD 54, the river was 14 feet shallower than it is now, flowing sluggishly at low tide through sandbanks and swamps: thus Caesar and his legions could cross the Thames and defeat the British tribes. 1700 years later, malaria in the marshes of the estuary was so terrible that some men had 'from 5 to 6, to 14 or 15 wives' consequence, as Ackroyd writes drily, of mortality not profligacy. Here is Shelley floating on the river under poetical beech trees, Hogarth getting roaring drunk on a boatrip to Gravesend, William Morris wondering whether the same Thames water flowed past his windows in Hammersmith as flowed past his house at Kelmscott 100 miles upriver.Did you know that Pepys (in 1661) was the first to mention a dock on the Thames? That 'toe-rag' (meaning despised individual) derives from sacking worn over the boots of workers in the grain and corn warehouses of Milwall Docks? That hangings continued at Execution Dock until 1834? Peter Ackroyd has a genius for digging out the most surprising and entertaining details, and for writing about them in magisterial prose. N.B. Top corner of front board bumped. D/J is 3/4 sized. 490pp.
Chatto & Windus, 2007, Cloth, Book Condition: Fine, Jacket Condition: Fine. First Edition. . 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

ISBN: 9780701172848

Inventory #23433

Price: £ 15.00 GBP ($ 23.70 approx. - € 18.12 approx.)