Bøker av Darren Baker

Two brothers, one woman, one submarine. Loughton Stairs joins the Navy to see the world. Lisa, the girlfriend he leaves behind, eventually winds up with his brother Demain, a gourmet cook more interested in family than adventure. Loughton feels betrayed and breaks off relations with them. A change in fortunes leads Demain into uniform and to assignment aboard the same boat as Loughton, who's still got Lisa on his mind. Their ups and downs, which include some California swinging and true acts of brotherly love, are played out against the backdrop of a fast attack submarine commissioned at the height of Reagan's renewed Cold War with the Soviet Union. The boat sees service in the Grenada campaign before making a long tour around the Pacific Rim, where its mission is to find the elusive "Red Whale".

In 2001, Michal Slezák left the Czech Republic to work in America. He became a lift operator in Sun Valley, Idaho, a playground of the rich and famous. The celebrities he encountered on the job included Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom he described as a total dick. He later became a snowboard instructor there and in Australia before returning home to get married and settle down. He had a beautiful family, home, great circle of friends and career he loved. Then in 2019, when he was forty-two years old, he was diagnosed with ALS, commonly known in the U.S. as Lou Gehrig's disease. Like Gehrig, he felt lucky for the life given to him and set out to find the cause and cure for the elusive, fatal illness. From trauma onions and quantum meditation to the pyramids of Bosnia, this is his story.

A giant unseen hand is what forces the captain of a private jet full of billionaires to ditch her plane in the Atalntic. It goes to the bottom with the billionaires, but the crew survives and makes it to a desert isle. There they have to deal with drug addiction, pregnancy, childbirth, and the failure to live up to one other's expectations. When they are finally rescued, they learn that the world is in the grips of a global pandemic, global warming, and global meltdown in general. The madness sends them back to the island, not to regain their sanity, rather to settle a score. The other four plays in this volume follow a similar format. In Coconuts, a man washes ashore on an island after his plane crashes. He survives for five years by talking to coconut shells. When he finally makes it back to civilization, he takes the shells with him. No Ship in Sight presents an early twentieth-century passenger liner that might well be the Titanic. It leaves port with three men on a stag voyage, two women eager for the same adventure, their snobbish aunt, and a ship's officer out to cash in on the lot of them. Locked Down is the fate of an office worker trapped in an elevator. He emerges with a new perspective on his apparently uncaring friends and family courtesy of the psychiatrist who appeared out of nowhere. And Four Out of Three finds an investigative bureau stumped by an unseen sexual predator who may be one or all of them.

Richard of Cornwall was born in 1209 as the youngest son of King John. His life of adventure made him one of the wealthiest and most widely travelled men of his era. Praised for his diplomatic and organisational skills, he led the last successful crusade to the Holy Land and was elected king of Germany. At home he was indispensable to his brother Henry III, but he resented his dependence on him and often equivocated his support. When his brother-in-law Simon de Montfort raised rebellion against the regime, Richard took a neutral stance, and it ended up costing both him and the king. He emerged from that low point to exert what was his greatest and lasting influence on his German subjects. He took one of them as his third wife, a teenage beauty who was forty years younger than him. Ever a seeker of glory, luxury and pleasure, Richard turned Wallingford and Berkhamsted into the famous castles they became later on and sired numerous children with mistresses. He gladly squeezed the peasants to finance his ventures and lifestyle, but also came to their rescue when famine beset the realm. As with any complicated individual of that era, he was both admired and hated when he died in 1272. In this first biography of Richard of Cornwall in more than fifty years, Darren Baker explores Richard's accomplishments, going much further into his life than any previous work, and shows why the only Englishman to carry the prestigious title of king of the Romans is always worth another look.

First book ever written on the de Montfort family as a whole.

This book explores an England in the aftermath of Magna Carta

It's a tale that covers three decades at its heart, with loyalty to family and principles at stake, in a land where foreigners are subject to intense scrutiny and jealousy.

Simon de Montfort's combination of charisma, determination, and fearlessness made him one of the greatest men of his age. This new biography marks 750 years since Montfort established the earliest forerunner of our modern parliament.