AGAINST ALL ODDS -- Milestone, series

The urge to escape is, of course, the urge to liberty, to be free --indeed, to survive!...The nine men and one woman in this book...have one thing in common--they are spirited people...they persistently opposed their captors--and they continued to have a very high opinion of themselves."" Some of Mr. Jacobs' escapees are famous--Benevenuto Cellini, Charles II of England, Casanova, Napoleon III, Winston Churchill--while others are less well-known. The most ingenious of them all was Baron Trenck of eighteenth-century Prussia, who almost escaped from a cell at the bottom of a most where he was chained neck, hands and ankles to the wall and fed only bread and water; his determination lessened neither by his past confinements not his present fetters, he used physical strength and cunning to find the weaknesses in his chains and to break them, then cut through three doors with his knife: this is only one of many daring escapes he attempted before he was finally freed--by bribery. Told in vivid but spare prose which moves swiftly from event to event, these ten true stories will hold and excite an adventure-hungary audience.