War/Soldier Accounts

Civil War II

Bendis, Brian Michael/ Marquez, David (ILT)

A Very Expensive Poison

Harding, Luke

On November 1, 2006, journalist and Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. He died twenty-two days later. The cause of death was Polonium--a rare, lethal, and highly radioactive substance. This is the inside story of the life and death of Litvinenko. And it is the story of the aftermath: a decade of geopolitical disruptions still felt today. In A Very Expensive Poison, Luke Harding guides readers through a maze of spies, intrigue, organized crime, and political power players to uncover the truth about Litvinenko's murder. In doing so, not only does he also become a target, but he also unearths a chain of corruption and death leading straight to Vladimir Putin, which sheds terrifying light on Russia's secret war with the West.

Shoot Like A Girl

Hegar, Mary Jennings.

An Air National Guard officer describes her experiences after being shot down on a Medevac mission in Afghanistan and her efforts to convince the U.S. government to allow women to serve openly on the front lines.

World War I And America

Hegar, Mary Jennings.

Few Americans appreciate the significance and intensity of America's experience of World War I, the global cataclysm that transformed the modern world. Published to mark the centenary of the American entry into the conflict, World War I: Told by the Americans Who Lived It brings together a wide range of writings by American participants and observers to tell a vivid and dramatic firsthand story from the outbreak of war in 1914 through the Armistice, the Paris Peace Conference, and the League of Nations debate. The eighty-eight men andwomen collected in the volume--soldiers, airmen, nurses, diplomats, statesmen, political activists, journalists--provide unique insights into how Americans of every stripe perceived the war, why they supported or opposed intervention, how they experienced the nightmarish reality of industrial warfare, and how the conflict changed American life. Richard Harding Davis witnesses the burning of Louvain; Edith Wharton tours the front in the Argonne and Flanders; John Reed reports from Serbia and Bukovina; Charles Lauriat describes the sinking of the Lusitania; Leslie Davis records the Armenian genocide; Jane Addams and Emma Goldman protest against militarism; Victor Chapman and Edmond Genet fly with the Lafayette Escadrille; Floyd Gibbons, Hervey Allen, and Edward Lukens experience the ferocity of combat in Belleau Wood, Fismette, and the Meuse-Argonne; and Ellen La Motte and Mary Borden unflinchingly examine the "human wreckage" brought into military hospitals. W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Claude McKay protest the racist treatment of black soldiers and the violence directed at African Americans on the home front; Carrie Chapman Catt connects the war with the fight for women suffrage; Willa Cather explores the impact of the war on rural Nebraska; Henry May recounts a deadly influenza outbreak onboard a troop transport; Oliver Wendell Holmes weighs the limits of free speech in wartime; Woodrow Wilson envisions a world without war. A coda presents three iconic literary works by Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos" --

The Way Of The Strangers

Wood, Graeme

The Way of the Strangers is an intimate journey into the minds of the Islamic State's true believers. From the streets of Cairo to the mosques of London, Wood interviews supporters, recruiters, and sympathizers of the group. We meet an Egyptian tailor who once made bespoke suits for Paul Newman and now wants to live, finally, under Shariah; a Japanese convert who believes that the eradication of borders--one of the Islamic State's proudest achievements--is a religious imperative; and a charming, garrulous Australian preacher who translates the group's sermons and threats into English and is accused of recruiting for the organization. We also learn about a prodigy of Islamic rhetoric, now stripped of the citizenship of the nation of his birth and determined to see it drenched in blood. Wood speaks with non-Islamic State Muslim scholars and jihadists, and explores the group's idiosyncratic, coherent approach to Islam. The Islamic State is bent on murder and apocalypse, but its followers find meaning and fellowship in its utopian dream. Its first caliph, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, has declared that he is the sole legitimate authority for Muslims worldwide. The theology, law, and emotional appeal of the Islamic State are key to understanding it--and predicting what its followers will do next. Through character study and analysis, Wood provides a clear-eyed look at a movement that has inspired so many people to abandon or uproot their families.

Bill O'Reilly's Legends & Lies

Fisher, David

From the birth of the Republican Party to the Confederacy's first convention, the Underground Railroad to the Emancipation Proclamation, the Battle of Gettysburg to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies: The Civil War reveals the amazing and often little known stories behind the battle lines of America's bloodiest war and debunks the myths that surround its greatest figures, including Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, General Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Stonewall Jackson, John Singleton Mosby, Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, John Wilkes Booth, William Tecumseh Sherman, and more. An epic struggle between the past and future, the Civil War sought to fulfill the promise that "all men are created equal." It freed an enslaved race, decimated a generation of young men, ushered in a new era of brutality in war, and created modern America. Featuring archival images, eyewitness accounts, and beautiful artwork that further brings the history to life, The Civil War is the action-packed and ultimate follow-up to the #1 bestsellers The Patriots and The Real West"--

The World Remade

Meyer, G. J.

An indispensable, sharply drawn tour through America's epoch-defining involvement in the Great War, enlivened by fresh insights into the key issues, events, and personalities of the period. After years of bitter debate and provocations on all sides, the U.S. declaration of war on Imperial Germany on April 6, 1917, plunged the country into the savage European conflict that would destroy--and remake--the world. The World Remade is an engrossing account of America's pivotal, still controversial, intervention into WWI, encompassing the prelude to war, its conduct abroad and at home, and its aftermath; and including the tumultuous politics and seismic shifts of the era and the towering personalities of the day--a briskly paced, timely treatment of the seminal conflict of the twentieth century, which set the stage for America's emergence as a world power and the global tragedies and triumphs to come"--

Lincoln's Lieutenants

Sears, Stephen W.

Presents a group portrait of the commanders who led the Army of the Potomac to explore how interpersonal tensions and their disagreements with Washington politics rendered them pawns to a vindictive Congress.

The Ragged Edge

Zacchea, Michael

Presents a group portrait of the commanders who led the Army of the Potomac to explore how interpersonal tensions and their disagreements with Washington politics rendered them pawns to a vindictive Congress.

The Frozen Hours

Shaara, Jeff

June, 1950: the North Korean army, a formidable force backed by Soviet arms and training, invades South Korea, with the intent of uniting the country under Communist rule. In response, the United States mobilizes a force to defend the overmatched South Korean troops. But the US is no better equipped than their allies. The American and United nations troops are fighting for their lives against the most brutal weather conditions imaginable, and an enemy that outnumbers them more than six to one. This struggle, and how the Americans respond, form the core of this novel. The Frozen Hours tells the story of "Frozen Chosin" from multiple points of view: Oliver P. Smith, the commanding general of the American 1st Marine Division, who famously redefined defeat as "advancing in a different direction"; Marine Private Pete Riley, a World War II veteran who now faces the greatest fight of his life; and the Chinese commander Sung Shi-Lun, charged with destroying the Americans he has so completely surrounded, ever aware that above him, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung watches his every move"--

The Prisoner In His Palace

Bardenwerper, Will

In the haunting tradition of In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song, this remarkably insightful and surprisingly intimate portrait of Saddam Hussein lifts away the top layer of a dictator's evil and finds complexity beneath as it invites us to take a journey with twelve young American soldiers in the summer of 2006. Trained to aggressively confront the enemy in combat, the men learn, shortly after being deployed to Iraq, that fate has assigned them a different role. It becomes their job to guard the country's notorious leader in the months leading to his execution.

Human Rights After Hitler

Plesch, Daniel

Human Rights after Hitler is a groundbreaking history about the forgotten work of the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), which operated during and after World War II in response to Axis atrocities. He explains the commission's work, why its files were kept secret, and demonstrates how the lost precedents of the commission's indictments should introduce important new paradigms for prosecuting war crimes today. The UNWCC examined roughly 36,000 cases in Europe and Asia. Thousands of trials were carried out at the country-level, and hundreds of war criminals were convicted. This rewrites the history of human rights in the wake of World War II, which is too focused on the few trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo. Until a protracted lobbying effort by Plesch and colleagues, the UNWCC's files had been kept out of public view in the UN archives under pressure from the US government. The US initially wanted the files closed to smooth the way for post-war collaboration with Germany and Japan, and the few researchers who did gain permission to see the files were not permitted to even take notes until the files' recent release. Now revealed, the precedents set by these cases should have enormous practical utility for prosecuting war crimes today.

Passchendaele

Lloyd, Nick

The definitive account of Passchendaele, one of the most influential and tragic battles of the First World War Passchendaele. The name of a small, seemingly insignificant Flemish village echoes across the twentieth century as the ultimate expression of meaningless, industrialized slaughter. In the summer of 1917, upwards of 500,000 men were killed or wounded, maimed, gassed, drowned, or buried in this small corner of Belgium. On the centennial of the battle, military historian Nick Lloyd brings to vivid life this epic encounter along the Western Front. Drawing on both British and German sources, he is the first historian to reveal the astonishing fact that, for the British, Passchendaele was an eminently winnable battle. Yet the advance of British troops was undermined by their own high command, which, blinded by hubris, clung to failed tactics. The result was a familiar one: stalemate. Lloyd forces us to consider that trench warfare was not necessarily a futile endeavor, and that had the British won at Passchendaele, they might have ended the war early, saving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. A captivating narrative of heroism and folly, Passchendaele is an essential addition to the literature on the Great War.

The Sunken Gold

Williams, Joseph A.

The definitive account of Passchendaele, one of the most influential and tragic battles of the First World War Passchendaele. The name of a small, seemingly insignificant Flemish village echoes across the twentieth century as the ultimate expression of meaningless, industrialized slaughter. In the summer of 1917, upwards of 500,000 men were killed or wounded, maimed, gassed, drowned, or buried in this small corner of Belgium. On the centennial of the battle, military historian Nick Lloyd brings to vivid life this epic encounter along the Western Front. Drawing on both British and German sources, he is the first historian to reveal the astonishing fact that, for the British, Passchendaele was an eminently winnable battle. Yet the advance of British troops was undermined by their own high command, which, blinded by hubris, clung to failed tactics. The result was a familiar one: stalemate. Lloyd forces us to consider that trench warfare was not necessarily a futile endeavor, and that had the British won at Passchendaele, they might have ended the war early, saving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. A captivating narrative of heroism and folly, Passchendaele is an essential addition to the literature on the Great War.

Implacable Foes

Heinrichs, Waldo H.

At the end of World War Two, Americans clamored for their troops to come home. Politics intruded upon military policy while a new and untested president struggled to strategize among a military command that was often mired in rivalry. The task of defeating the Japanese seemed nearly unsurmountable, even while plans to invade the home islands were being drawn. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall warned of the toll that "the agony of enduring battle" would likely take. General Douglas MacArthur clashed with Marshall and Admiral Nimitz over the most effective way to defeat the increasingly resilient Japanese combatants. In the midst of this division, the Army began a program of partial demobilization of troops in Europe, which depleted units at a time when they most needed experienced soldiers. In this context of military emergency, victory was salvaged by means of a horrific new weapon. As one Army staff officer admitted, "The capitulation of Hirohito saved our necks." In Implacable Foes, award-winning historians Waldo Heinrichs (a veteran of both theatres of war in World War II) and Marc Gallicchio bring to life the final year of World War Two in the Pacific right up to the dropping of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, evoking not only Japanese policies of desperate defense, but the sometimes rancorous debates on the home front. They deliver a gripping and provocative narrative that challenges the decision-making of U.S. leaders and delineates the consequences of prioritizing the European front. The result is a masterly work of military history that evaluates the nearly insurmountable trials associated with waging global war and the sacrifices necessary to succeed."--Provided by publisher.

Never Call Me A Hero

Kleiss, N. Jack.

On the morning of June 4, 1942, high above the tiny Pacific atoll of Midway, Lt. (J.G.) "Dusty" Kleiss burst out of the clouds and piloted his SBD Dauntless into a near-vertical dive aimed at the heart of Japan’s Imperial Navy, which six months earlier had ruthlessly struck Pearl Harbor. The greatest naval battle in history raged around him, its outcome hanging in the balance as the U.S. desperately searched for its first major victory of the Second World War. Then, in a matter of seconds, Dusty Kleiss’s daring 20,000-foot dive helped forever alter the war’s trajectory. These pages are Dusty's remarkable legacy, providing a riveting eyewitness account of the Battle of Midway, and an inspiring testimony to the brave men who fought, died, and shaped history during those four extraordinary days in June, seventy-five years ago." --

The Cold War

Westad, Odd Arne

We tend to think of the Cold War as a bounded conflict: a clash of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, born out of the ashes of World War II and coming to a dramatic end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Bancroft Prize-winning scholar Odd Arne Westad argues that the Cold War must be understood as a global ideological confrontation, with early roots in the Industrial Revolution and ongoing repercussions around the world. In The Cold War, Westad offers a new perspective on a century when great power rivalry and ideological battle transformed every corner of our globe. From Soweto to Hollywood, Hanoi, and Hamburg, young men and women felt they were fighting for the future of the world. The Cold War may have begun on the perimeters of Europe, but it had its deepest reverberations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where nearly every community had to choose sides. And these choices continue to define economies and regimes across the world. Today, many regions are plagued with environmental threats, social divides, and ethnic conflicts that stem from this era. Its ideologies influence China, Russia, and the United States; Iraq and Afghanistan have been destroyed by the faith in purely military solutions that emerged from the Cold War. Stunning in its breadth and revelatory in its perspective, this book expands our understanding of the Cold War both geographically and chronologically, and offers an engaging new history of how today's world was created.