Billy Connolly's Route 66 - The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip

From surviving a horrific terrorist attack in Northern Ireland, to the violence of the Gulf War and an assault course of harrowing experiences in Iraq, Bosnia and Columbia, Major Bill Shaw had seen it all. But Bill's strength and courage was tested to its absolute limits when he was arrested for a crime he did not commit.

Posted in Afghanistan after two years in Iraq, Bill was responsible for the safety of four hundred men in a full-scale danger zone in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. The married father and grandfather, who had risen through the ranks to become a commander of men and an MBE, had long accepted that each day could be his last. But he never expected to find his own life at risk under a corrupt legal system. Thrown into prison and forced to share a cramped, vermin-infested cell with sixteen Afghans, among them members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Bill had no idea when, or even if, he would see his family again.

This is the incredible true story of a brave soldier who survived some of the toughest war zones in the world only to face the nightmare of being wrongfully imprisoned a very long way from home. Gritty and gripping, this powerful military memoir is an eye-opening account of life on the frontline.

  No sooner had Chris Stewart set eyes on El Valero than he handed over a check.  Now all he had to do was explain to Ana, his wife that they were the proud owners of an isolated sheep farm in the Alpujarra Mountains in Southern Spain.  That was the easy part.

Lush with olive, lemon, and almond groves, the farm lacks a few essentials—running water, electricity, an access road.  And then there's the problem of rapacious Pedro Romero, the previous owner who refuses to leave.  A perpetual optimist, whose skill as a sheepshearer provides an ideal entrée into his new community, Stewart also possesses an unflappable spirit that, we soon learn, nothing can diminish.  Wholly enchanted by the rugged terrain of the hillside and the people they meet along the way—among them farmers, including the ever-resourceful Domingo, other expatriates and artists—Chris and Ana Stewart build an enviable life, complete with a child and dogs, in a country far from home.

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.

Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a bunkerlike room in Washington, D.C., where the world's largest collection of First Folios is housed.

Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases ("vanish into thin air," "foregone conclusion," "one fell swoop") that even today have common currency. His Shakespeare is like no one else's—the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.