Beyond: A Times Book of the Year 2021

Biographies & Memoirs

Walker, Stephen

Historical

William Collins

‘Thrilling … High-definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched’ SUNDAY TIMES 
‘This book is a triumph’ DAN SNOW 
9.07 a.m., April 12, 1961. A top-secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile – originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead – and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin and he is about to make history. 
Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour – ten times faster than a rifle bullet – Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing he has become a world celebrity – the first human to leave the planet. 
Beyond tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its sixtieth anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took enormous risks to get a man into space first – the Americans in the full glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Both trained their teams of astronauts to the edges of the endurable. In the end the race between them would come down to the wire. 
Drawing on extensive original research and the vivid testimonies of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before, Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that were hidden for decades and takes the reader into the drama – featuring the scientists, engineers and political leaders on both sides, and above all the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER\n‘A stunning book, among the most immediate and thrilling works of history I have ever read’ At 8:15am on August 6th 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant, the temperature at its core rose to millions of degrees. Sixty-thousand buildings were obliterated. A third of the city’s population died, by heat, by the blast, and by a terrible new weapon in the history of warfare: radiation.\nIn this riveting account, Stephen Walker follows the stories of real people in the extraordinary weeks leading up to the explosion and in its aftermath. From the atomic engineer who armed the bomb in mid-air to the Japanese doctors treating thousands of burnt bodies on the ground. From the flight crews and scientists to world leaders and civilian victims. With intimate testimony and remarkable stories, this is the startling narrative behind the dawn of the atomic age.

Shockwave

At 31,000 feet above Japan, Tom Ferebee sits hunched over his bombsight. Below him lies the primary target of an operation called "Special Mission Number 13" by the few military personnel aware of its existence -- Hiroshima, a city of over 300,000. He waits until the aiming point is directly below the crosshairs and releases his cargo -- a five-ton bomb known as Little Boy by the scientists who built it. If all goes as theorized, the resulting destruction will lead to Japan's surrender and the end of World War II. But right now, a very real question occupies the minds of everyone involved:
Will it work?
The historical record is clear: It did work. On a quiet Monday morning in August 1945, the bomb detonated as expected, resulting in the deaths of nearly 100,000 people.The Japanese Supreme Council surrendered nine days later, after a second bomb, to similarly devastating effect, had leveled Nagasaki. But if, in retrospect, the bombing of Hiroshima represents the climax of one of the signal events of the twentieth century -- indeed, in the history of mankind -- at the time it was but another episode in an unprecedented drama whose final act had begun three weeks earlier, at Los Alamos, a secret laboratory in the high plains of New Mexico.
Shockwave is the story of those terrible three weeks, as seen through the eyes of the pilots, victims, scientists, and world leaders at the center of the drama. Extraordinary interviews with American and Japanese witnesses tell the story of the bombing of Hiroshima with unparalleled immediacy and veracity -- including the story of the copilot, who writes a minute-by-minute diary on board the Enola Gay; the atomic scientist who arms the bomb in midair, equipped with a screwdriver; and the Japanese student desperately searching for his lover in the ruins of the city.
Combining a brilliant gift for storytelling and a keen eye for detail, Walker constructs a shocking and unforgettably moving portrait of an event that changed the world forever.

Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima

History

Americas

Harper

A riveting, minute-by-minute account of the momentous event that changed our world forever
On a quiet Monday morning in August 1945, a five-ton bomb—dubbed Little Boy by its creators—was dropped from an American plane onto the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On that day, a firestorm of previously unimagined power was unleashed on a vibrant metropolis of 300,000 people, leaving one third of its population dead, its buildings and landmarks incinerated. It was the terrifying dawn of the Atomic Age, spawning decades of paranoia, mistrust, and a widespread and very real fear of the potential annihilation of the human race.
Author Stephen Walker brilliantly re-creates the three terrible weeks leading up to the wartime detonation of the atomic bomb—from the first successful test in the New Mexico desert to the cataclysm and its aftermath—presenting the story through the eyes of pilots, scientists, civilian victims, and world leaders who stood at the center of earth-shattering drama. It is a startling, moving, frightening, and remarkable portrait of an extraordinary event—a shockwave whose repercussions can be felt to this very day.

Harper-perennial

Product Description 
“This remarkable account of the 1961 race into space is a thrilling piece of storytelling. . . . It is high definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched.”—The Times, London, Front Page Lead Review 
“Beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller, but it is vividly embedded in the historic tensions of the Cold War, and peopled by men and women brought sympathetically, and sometimes tragically, to life.”—Colin Thubron, author of Shadow of the Silk Road 
09.07 am. April 12, 1961. A top secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile—originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead—and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin. And he is about to make history. 
 Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour—ten times faster than a rifle bullet—Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows he sees the earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing its beauty and its fragility. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing he has become a world celebrity – the first human to leave the planet. 
Beyond tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its 60th anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took enormous risks to get a man into space first, the Americans in the full glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Both trained their teams of astronauts to the edges of the endurable. In the end the race between them would come down to the wire. 
Drawing on extensive original research and the vivid testimony of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before, Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that were hidden for decades and takes the reader into the drama of one of humanity’s greatest adventures – to the scientists, engineers and political leaders on both sides, and above all to the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens.\nReview 
“Dramatic and dynamic. Stephen Walker’s passion for his subject along with his exceptional research and attention to detail have brought my father’s extraordinary journey vividly to life.” 
 -- 
Elena Gagarina, daughter of Yuri Gagarin\n“A spellbinding and completely authoritative account of Gagarin’s unexpected journey to immortality, this masterful book had me enthralled from the outset. A guaranteed gem.” -- 
Colin Burgess, 
 author 
of Freedom 7: The Historic Flight of Alan B. 
 Shepard\n“Exciting, well researched, and fascinating. I loved every word.” -- 
Laura Shepard Churchley, daughter of Alan Shepard, America's first astronaut \n“ 
Beyond brings to life the space race and the extraordinary story of Yuri Gagarin. Using first-hand testimony, Walker evokes the personalities, the science and the atmosphere of the time in a history that reads like a thriller 
." 
 -- 
Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy\n“Vivid. . . .Dramatic. . . .This entertaining and carefully researched history achieves liftoff.” -- 
Publishers Weekly\n“This remarkable account of the 1961 race into space is a thrilling piece of storytelling….It is high definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched.” -- Sunday Times (London)\n“Energetic history of the first years of the space race, focusing on Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968)… A welcome addition to the literature of space exploration.” -- 
Kirkus Reviews\n“A thrilling account of the first manned space flight…A great introduction to the gripping tale of Gagarin’s flight and its impact on space exploration history.” -- 
Library Journal\n"A fine tale...told with verve and suspense...A cliffhanger." -- 
Wall Street Journal\n"Scintillating...The thrilling ride to be the first man

Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space

A neurotic British filmmaker recounts his up-and-down journey to Cannes as he tries to film a documentary about the legendary French film festival. Reprint.

King of Cannes: Madness, Mayhem, and the Movies

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Penguin??Books

Learning and Reinforcement (Essential Psychology)

Learning and reinforcement (Essential psychology)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

METHUEN

Stephen Walker is a neurotic British filmmaker with a mixed track record. His last documentary was a flop. Everyone hated it, and for a while Walker had fantasies of murdering the lot of them. But then he was inspired. He'd make a documentary that would offer a peek inside the crazy world of filmmaking. He'd direct a movie about four ambitious unknown filmmakers in their quest for fame and glory at the film festival of film festivals-Cannes.
King of Cannes is Walker's hilarious, uncensored diary of making that documentary-from finding fledgling directors who will agree to be filmed, to following their madcap adventures at the Cannes Film Festival. Walker's main cast of Cannes-hopefuls includes James Meredino, an American director who comes to Cannes with all the fanfare of a Hollywood prodigy; Mike Hakata, a young Rastafarian filmmaker from London who hijacks a telephone booth in Cannes and turns it into his office; Erick Zonca, a first-time French director who actually has a film in the official competition; and finally, Stephen Loyd, a taxi driver from East London who, along with a couple of buddies, drives to Cannes in a van emblazoned with a giant marijuana leaf, with hopes of raising money to make his film. And then there's Walker himself, practically on the verge of a nervous breakdown trying to film them in their lunatic determination to make their mark.

King of Cannes

Reference

RANDOM HOUSE UK

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Walker, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Walker, Stephen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Walker, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Beyond: A Times Book of the Year 2021

Beyond: A Times Book of the Year 2021

Shockwave

Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima

Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima

Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space

King of Cannes: Madness, Mayhem, and the Movies

Learning and reinforcement (Essential psychology)

Learning and Reinforcement (Essential Psychology)

King of Cannes