The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265-146BC (Cassell Military Paperbacks)

?Adrian Goldsworthy is one of the best young historians writing today. John Keegan The Fall of Carthage was the greatest conflict of the ancient world, and thanks to one of the finest historians of our time, this sweeping saga comes to life anew for modern audiences. The cast of endlessly fascinating characters includes the generals Hannibal and Scipio, as well as treacherous chieftains, beautiful princesses, scheming politicians, and tough professional warriors.

Brand: Cassell

A Short History of World War II

Despite the numerous books on World War II, until now there has been no one-volume survey that was both objective and comprehensive. Previous volumes have usually been written from an exclusively British or American point of view, or have ignored the important causes and consequences of the War. A Short History of World War II is essentially a military history, but it reaches from the peace settlements of World War I to the drastically altered postwar world of the late 1940's. Lucidly written and eminently readable, it is factual and accurate enough to satisfy professional historians. A Short History of World War II will appeal equally to the general reader, the veteran who fought in the War, and the student interested in understanding the contemporary political world.

Brand: William Morrow

100 Years of Flight: A Chronology of Aerospace History, 1903-2003 (Library of Flight Series)

In just 100 years, air and space exploration has progressed from a 12-second, 120-foot flight by two brothers to a 30-year sustained flight, now 7 billion miles from Earth, traveling at 300,000 mph. Drawing on the extensive collection of the National Air and Space Museum and personal collections, this full-colour book chronicles the most significant accomplishments in aerospace history over the past 100 years. In timeline fashion, you'll read brief excerpts from hundreds of news articles reporting on significant accomplishments in flight. Through brief introductory essays, you will learn what made each decade of flight most significant. Concluding essays look at what lies ahead. The book was commissioned in celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Powered Flight.

Brand: Amer Inst of Aeronautics &

African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender and Development (Africa in the New Millennium)

Compared with Asia or Latin America, Africa has experienced much higher rates of emigration of its intelligentsia to North America and Europe, and frequent displacement within the continent. This rare overview of the history, fate and future roles explores their relationship to nationalism and the Pan African project; the indigenous language of African intellectuals; women intellectuals; and the role of the expanding African academic diaspora.

Brand: Zed Books

1001 Inventions That Changed the World

We take thousands of inventions for granted, using them daily and enjoying their benefits. But how much do we really know about their origins and development? This absorbing new book tells the stories behind the inventions that have changed the world, with details about- Convenience items, such as safety pins, toothbrushes, and bifocals Weapons of war, including explosives, gunpowder, and shrapnel shells Industrial advances, such as the steam engine and the power loom for weaving Transportation advances, including the airplane, the diesel engine, the automobile, and the air-inflated rubber tire Electronic marvels, including color television, the microprocessor, the personal computer, the compact disc, and the cell phone Medical advances, from antiseptic surgery to the electron microscope. and much more. Inventors and pioneers of science and technology, including Eli Whitney, James Watt, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Bessemer, Thomas Edison, J.B. Dunlop, the Wright Brothers, Werner von Braun, Jonas Salk, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and many others are also discussed. Fascinating photos and illustrations complement authoritative summaries of each invention, and remarkable quotations from many of the inventors add to this chronicle of human ingenuity that began some 6,000 years ago with the invention of the wheel. Approximately 700 photos and illustrations in color and black and white.

Brand: Barron's Educational Series

A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989-2001

The all-too-brief period of relative tranquility that extended from the end of the Cold War to the beginning of the War on Terror is the subject of William L. O'Neill's brilliant new study of recent American history. Mr. O'Neill's sharp eye for the telling incident and the apt quotation combine with an acute historical judgment to make A Bubble in Time a compellingly readable informal history. The first Gulf War and President Clinton's interventions abroad notwithstanding, American spirits were freer from fear than they had been since the 1920s, the author argues. No world war loomed before the United States, and after the Berlin Wall came down the specter of nuclear annihilation faded as well. A brief recession in the 1990s gave way to the most prosperous years Americans had known for decades. Unlike in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, the increase in national wealth trickled down to the middle class thanks to an unusual rise in productivity and large infrastructure investments by firms in the "new economy." To general amazement, crime rates began falling after almost thirty years of increases, so that Americans were happier, safer, and materially better off than before. Although the Republican party turned to the dark side, Mr. O'Neill writes, peace and prosperity enabled people to enjoy the finer things in life and to lavish their concerns on political correctness, the decline of the military, the troubles of higher education, and the manifestations of an out-of-control popular culture he calls "Tabloid Nation"?the trials of O.J. Simpson and President Clinton, SUVs, cell phones, and bimbo eruptions. Mr. O'Neill explores them all, and more, with insight and wit. "It was all too good to last," he tells us. "Reality intruded again with the dot. com crash in 2000 and the terrorist attacks of 2001. Still, we will always have Paris Hilton." With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.

Brand: Ivan R. Dee

Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

In Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Paul Lettow explores the depth and sophistication of President Ronald Reagan?s commitment to ridding humankind permanently of the threat of nuclear war. Lettow?s narrative spans the start of Reagan?s presidency and the 1986 Reykjav k summit between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, during which America?s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a defining issue. Lettow reveals SDI for what it was: a full-on assault against nuclear weapons waged as much through policy as through ideology. While cabinet members and advisers played significant roles in guiding American defense policy, it was Reagan himself who presided over every element, large and small, of this paradigm shift in U.S. diplomacy. Lettow conducted interviews with several former Reagan administration officials, and he draws upon the vast body of declassified security documents from the Reagan presidency; much of what he quotes from these documents appears publicly here for the first time. The result is the first major work to apply such evidence to the study of SDI and superpower diplomacy. This is a survey that doesn?t merely add nuance to the existing record, but revises our very understanding of the Reagan presidency.

Brand: Random House Trade Paperbacks

The Choice: How Bill Clinton Won

The Choice is Bob Woodward's classic story of the quest for power, focusing on the 1996 presidential campaign as a case study of money, public opinion polling, attack advertising, handlers, consultants, and decision making in the midst of electoral uncertainty. President Bill Clinton is examined in full in the contest with Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee. The intimacy and detail of Woodward's account of the candidates and their wives show the epic human struggle in this race for the White House.

Brand: Simon & Schuster

A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World (The Making of the Modern World)

In this powerful new look at modern China, Rana Mitter goes back to a pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from pre-modern to modern. Mitter identifies May 4, 1919, as the defining moment of China's twentieth-century history. On that day, outrage over the Paris peace conference triggered a vast student protest that led in turn to "the May Fourth Movement." Just seven years before, the 2,000-year-old imperial system had collapsed. Now a new group of urban, modernizing thinkers began to reject Confucianism and traditional culture in general as hindrances in the fight against imperialism, warlordism, and the oppression of women and the poor. Forward-looking, individualistic, and embracing youth, this "New Culture movement" made a lasting impact on the critical decades that followed. Throughout each of the dramatically different eras that followed, the May 4 themes persisted, from the insanity of the Cultural Revolution to China's recent romance with space-age technology.

Brand: Oxford University Press, USA

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression

Finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism: from Agee to Astaire, Steinbeck to Ellington, the creative energies of the Depression against a backdrop of poverty and economic disaster. Only yesterday the Great Depression seemed like a bad memory, receding into the hazy distance with little relevance to our own flush times. Economists assured us that the calamities that befell our grandparents could not happen again, yet the recent economic meltdown has once again riveted the world?s attention on the 1930s. Now, in this timely and long-awaited cultural history, Morris Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer called? one of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature,? explores the anxiety and hope, the despair and surprising optimism of a traumatized nation. Dickstein?s fascination springs from his own childhood, from a father who feared a pink slip every Friday and from his own love of the more exuberant side of the era: zany screwball comedies, witty musicals, and the lubricious choreography of Busby Berkeley. Whether analyzing the influence of film, design, literature, theater, or music, Dickstein lyrically demonstrates how the arts were then so integral to the fabric of American society. While any lover of American literature knows Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, Dickstein also reclaims the lives of other novelists whose work offers enduring insights. Nathanael West saw Los Angeles as a vast dream dump, a Sargasso Sea of tawdry longing that exposed the pinched and disappointed lives of ordinary people, while Erskine Caldwell, his books Tobacco Road and God?s Little Acre festooned with lurid covers, provided the most graphic portrayal of rural destitution in the 1930s. Dickstein also immerses us in the visions of Zora Neale Hurston and Henry Roth, only later recognized for their literary masterpieces. Just as Dickstein radically transforms our understanding of Depression literature, he explodes the prevailing myths that 1930s musicals and movies were merely escapist. Whether describing the undertone of sadness that lurks just below the surface of Cole Porter?s bubbly world or stressing the darker side of Capra?s wildly popular films, he shows how they delivered a catharsis of pain and an evangel of hope. Dickstein suggests that the tragic and comic worlds of Broadway and Hollywood preserved a radiance and energy that became a bastion against social suffering. Dancing in the Dark describes how FDR?s administration recognized the critical role that the arts could play in enabling? the helpless to become hopeful, the victims to become agents. Along with the WPA, the photography unit of the FSA represented a historic partnership between government and art, and the photographers, among them Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, created the defining look of the period. The symbolic end to this cultural flowering came finally with the New York World?s Fair of 1939?40, a collective event that presented a vision of the future as a utopia of streamlined modernity and, at long last, consumer abundance. Retrieving the stories of an entire generation of performers and writers, Dancing in the Dark shows how a rich, panoramic culture both exposed and helped alleviate the national trauma. This luminous work is a monumental study of one of America?s most remarkable artistic periods. 24 illustrations

Brand: W.W. Norton & Company

A Battlefield Atlas of the Civil War

From Fort Sumter to Appomattox, this military history explains the principal campaigns of the Civil War and all the major battles in lively text. A clear, concise and authoritative volume ideal for battlefield tours or classroom studies.

Brand: Utical & Aviation Pub Co Of Amer

1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

From the author of Forrest Gump and A Storm in Flanders comes a riveting chronicle of America's most critical hour. On December 6, 1941, an unexpected attack on American territory pulled an unprepared country into a terrifying new brand of warfare. Novelist and popular historian Winston Groom vividly re-creates the story of America's first year in World War II. To the generation of Americans who lived through it, the Second World War was the defining event of the twentieth century, and the defining events of that war were played out in the year 1942. This account covers the Allies' relentless defeats as the Axis overran most of Europe, North Africa, and the Far East. But midyear the tide began to turn. America finally went on the offensive in the Pacific, and in the west the British defeated Rommel's panzer divisions at El Alamein while the U.S. Army began to push the Germans out of North Africa. By the year's end, the smell of victory was in the air. 1942, told with Groom's accomplished storyteller's eye, allows us into the admirals' strategy rooms, onto the battle fronts, and into the heart of a nation at war.

Brand: Grove Press

1776: The Illustrated Edition

With a new introduction by David McCullough, 1776: The Illustrated Edition brings 140 powerful images and 37 removable replicas of source documents to this remarkable drama. In 1776, David McCullough's bestselling account of a pivotal year in our nation's struggle, readers learned of the greatest defeats, providential fortune, and courageous triumphs of George Washington and his bedraggled army. Now, in 1776: The Illustrated Edition, the efforts of the Continental Army are made even more personal, as an excerpted version of the original book is paired with letters, maps, and seminal artwork. More than three dozen source documents - including a personal letter George Washington penned to Martha about his commission, a note informing the mother of a Continental soldier that her son has been taken prisoner, and a petition signed by Loyalists pledging their allegiance to the King - are re-created in uniquely designed envelopes throughout the book and secured with the congressional seal. Both a distinctive art book and a collectible archive, 1776: The Illustrated Edition combines a treasury of eighteenth-century paintings, sketches, documents, and maps with storytelling by our nation's preeminent historian to tell the story of 1776 as never before.

Brand: Simon & Schuster

The Trojan War

Different as the Trojan War was to Greeks and Romans, the two peoples united in an identical longing for a heroism that was attainable in the present only by reaching out for an impossible past. Carol G. Thomas and Craig Conant?s broad and varied account of the Trojan War allows readers to investigate the archaeological and historical foundations that underlie the epic poems featuring Achilles and Aeneas, and to examine how the poems altered understanding of the war for the many cultures and civilizations touched by their narrative power. Conceived as an introduction to this critical event in the Western tradition, The Trojan War offers readers and researchers an engaging mixture of descriptive chapters, biographical sketches, and annotated primary documents. Also provided are an annotated bibliography and index.

Brand: University of Oklahoma Press

The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

Was the fall of Rome a great catastrophe that cast the West into darkness for centuries to come? Or, as scholars argue today, was there no crisis at all, but simply a peaceful blending of barbarians into Roman culture, an essentially positive transformation? In The Fall of Rome, eminent historian Bryan Ward-Perkins argues that the "peaceful" theory of Rome's "transformation" is badly in error. Indeed, he sees the fall of Rome as a time of horror and dislocation that destroyed a great civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Attacking contemporary theories with relish and making use of modern archaeological evidence, he looks at both the wider explanations for the disintegration of the Roman world and also the consequences for the lives of everyday Romans, who were caught in a world of marauding barbarians, and economic collapse. The book recaptures the drama and violence of the last days of the Roman world, and reminds us of the very real terrors of barbarian occupation. Equally important, Ward-Perkins contends that a key problem with the new way of looking at the end of the ancient world is that all difficulty and awkwardness is smoothed out into a steady and positive transformation of society. Nothing ever goes badly wrong in this vision of the past. The evidence shows otherwise. Up-to-date and brilliantly written, combining a lively narrative with the latest research and thirty illustrations, this superb volume reclaims the drama, the violence, and the tragedy of the fall of Rome.

Brand: Oxford University Press, USA

1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War

This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective, and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of the military engagements, it also focuses on the war's political dimensions. Benny Morris probes the motives and aims of the protagonists on the basis of newly opened Israeli and Western documentation. The Arab side?where the archives are still closed?is illuminated with the help of intelligence and diplomatic materials. Morris stresses the jihadi character of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Throughout, he examines the dialectic between the war's military and political developments and highlights the military impetus in the creation of the refugee problem, which was a by-product of the disintegration of Palestinian Arab society. The book thoroughly investigates the role of the Great Powers?Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union?in shaping the conflict and its tentative termination in 1949. Morris looks both at high politics and general staff decision-making processes and at the nitty-gritty of combat in the successive battles that resulted in the emergence of the State of Israel and the humiliation of the Arab world, a humiliation that underlies the continued Arab antagonism toward Israel.

Brand: Yale University Press

Daily Life in the Mongol Empire (The Daily Life Through History Series)

'This book could readily serve as a basic history course text owing to its introductory and explanatory character. However, it differs from other general, introductory history texts for two important reasons. First, it covers topics related to daily life and the social and cultural history of the Mongols while intentionally avoiding descriptive factual and narrative history for which there are many other books. Second, it is a general history book, but one which uses primary source material throughout. It introduces students to the importance of primary sources and stresses how these early texts provide the evidence and foundations for all the words, ideas, and thoughts which make up traditional history books. The excellent biographies, including one listing many of the translated primary source materials, ensure that this book will be an essential component in any library of the Mongol Empire' - "Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies".

Brand: Hackett Pub Co

11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944

It was truly a white Christmas in the Ardennes Forest in 1944, but that was cold comfort to the Allied soldiers trying to stop the Nazis from retaking Belgium in one of the most decisive battles of World War II. While a German loudspeaker taunted, ?How would you like to die for Christmas the Allied forces dug in, despite freezing conditions. They needed a miracle. In a medieval chapel, General Patton, who needed clear skies to allow airborne reinforcements to reach his trapped men, uttered what would become a famous prayer: ?Sir, whose side are you on His soldiers wouldn?t be home for Christmas, but as the skies cleared, they went on to win a battle? and a war.

Brand: L Trade

Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib

Since September 11, 2001, Seymour M. Hersh has riveted readers - and outraged the Bush Administration - with his stories in The New Yorker, including his breakthrough pieces on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Now, in Chain of Command, he brings together this reporting, along with new revelations, to answer the critical question of the last three years: how did America get from the clear morning when hijackers crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to a divisive and dirty war in Iraq? Hersh established himself at the forefront of investigative journalism thirty-five years ago when he broke the news of the massacre at My Lai, Vietnam, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Ever since, he's challenged America's power elite by publishing the stories that others can't, or won't, tell. In expos s on subjects ranging from Saudi corruption to nuclear black marketeers and - months ahead of other journalists - the White House's false claims about weapons of mass destruction, Hersh has cemented his reputation as the indispensable reporter of our time. In Chain of Command, Hersh takes an unflinching look behind the public story of President Bush's "war on terror" and into the lies and obsessions that led America into Iraq. He reveals the connections between early missteps in the hunt for Al Qaeda and disasters on the ground in Iraq. The book includes a new account of Hersh's pursuit of the Abu Ghraib story and of where, he believes, responsibility for the scandal ultimately lies. Hersh draws on sources at the highest levels of the American government and intelligence community, in foreign capitals, and on the battlefield for an unparalleled view of a crucial chapter in America's recent history. With an introduction by The New Yorker 's editor, David Remnick, Chain of Command is a devastating portrait of an Administration blinded by ideology and of a President whose decisions have made the world a more dangerous place for America.

Brand: Harper

African Myths of Origin (Penguin Classics)

Gathering a wide range of traditional African myths, this compelling new collection offers tales of heroes battling mighty serpents and monstrous birds, brutal family conflict and vengeance, and desperate migrations across vast and alien lands. From accounts of the inventive wiles of animal-creators and a community forced to flee a giant crocodile to the heroic story of the cripple Sunjata who rose to found an empire, all the narratives here concern origins. They offer a kaleidoscopic picture representative of the rich cultures and societies of the African continent: the ways of life, the peoples?from small hunting bands to great empires?and the states that have taken shape over many generations and environments. First time in Penguin Classics Stories span the centuries and range across the entire continent, from ancient Egypt and Ethiopia through the Sahara to Zimbabwe Includes individual prefaces to each section, putting the stories in their geographical and social context; maps; suggestions for further reading, and an index of people, places, and themes

Brand: Penguin Classics

A Soldier of the Great War

An old man's magnificent tale of love and war-a recapitulation of a life and a reckoning with mortality told by one of America's most acclaimed novelists.

Brand: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War

March 2003: The United States invades Iraq. October 2006: The world finds out why. What was really behind the U.S-led invasion of Iraq? As George W. Bush steered the nation to war, who spoke the truth and who tried to hide it? Hubris takes us behind the scenes at the Bush White House, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and Congress to answer all the vital questions about how the Bush administration came to invade Iraq. Filled with new revelations, Hubris is a gripping narrative of intrigue that connects the dots between George W. Bush?s expletive-laden outbursts at Saddam Hussein, the bitter battles between the CIA and the White House, the fights within the intelligence community over Saddam?s weapons of mass destruction, the startling influence of an obscure academic on top government officials, the real reason Valerie Plame was outed, and a top reporter?s ties to wily Iraqi exiles trying to start a war. Written by veteran reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn, this is the inside story of how President Bush took the nation to war using faulty and fraudulent intelligence. It is a news-making account of conspiracy, backstabbing, bureaucratic ineptitude, journalistic malfeasance, and, especially, arrogance.

Brand: Crown

1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (P.S.)

The brilliance of the Renaissance laid the foundation of the modern world. Textbooks tell us that it came about as a result of a rediscovery of the ideas and ideals of classical Greece and Rome. But now bestselling historian Gavin Menzies makes the startling argument that in the year 1434, China?then the world's most technologically advanced civilization?provided the spark that set the European Renaissance ablaze. From that date onward, Europeans embraced Chinese ideas, discoveries, and inventions, all of which form the basis of Western civilization today. The New York Times bestselling author of 1421 combines a long-overdue historical reexamination with the excitement of an investigative adventure, bringing the reader aboard the remarkable Chinese fleet as it sails from China to Cairo and Florence, and then back across the world. Erudite and brilliantly reasoned, 1434 will change the way we see ourselves, our history, and our world.

Brand: William Morrow Paperbacks

1969: The Year Everything Changed

An original look at a pivotal year in America?on its fortieth anniversary. For the fortieth anniversary of 1969, Rob Kirkpatrick takes a look back at a year when America witnessed many of the biggest landmark achievements, cataclysmic episodes, and generation-defining events in recent history. 1969 was the year that saw Apollo 11 land on the moon, the Cinderella stories of Joe Namath?s Jets and the? Miracle Mets,? the Harvard student strike and armed standoff at Cornell, the People?s Park riots, the first artificial heart transplant and first computer network connection, the Manson family murders and cryptic Zodiac Killer letters, the Woodstock music festival, Easy Rider, Kurt Vonnegut?s Slaughterhouse-Five, the Battle of Hamburger Hill, the birth of punk music, the invasion of Led Zeppelin, the occupation of Alcatraz, death at Altamont Speedway, and much more. It was a year that pushed boundaries on stage ( Oh! Calcutta! ), screen ( Midnight Cowboy ), and the printed page ( Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex ), witnessed the genesis of the gay rights movement at Stonewall, and started the era of the? no fault? divorce. Richard Nixon became president, the New Left squared off against the Silent Majority, William Ayers co-founded the Weatherman Organization, and the nationwide Moratorium provided a unifying force in the peace movement. Compelling, timely, and quite simply a blast to read, 1969 chronicles the year through all its ups and downs, in culture and society, sports, music, film, politics, and technology. This is a book for those who survived 1969, or for those who simply want to feel as alive as those who lived through this time of amazing upheaval.

Brand: Skyhorse Publishing

A Concise History of Australia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

Australia is the last continent to be settled by Europeans, but it also sustains a people and a culture tens of thousands years old. For much of the past 200 years the newcomers have sought to replace the old with the new. This book tells how they imposed themselves on the land, and brought technology, institutions and ideas to make it their own. It relates the advance from penal colony to a prosperous free nation and illustrates how, as a nation created by waves of newcomers, the search for binding traditions was long frustrated by the feeling of rootlessness, until it came to terms with its origins. The third edition of this acclaimed book recounts the key factors - social, economic and political - that have shaped modern-day Australia. It covers the rise and fall of the Howard government, the 2007 election and the apology to the stolen generation. More than ever before, Australians draw on the past to understand their future.

Brand: Cambridge University Press

A Holocaust Reader (Library of Jewish Studies)

Jewish book of studies.

Brand: Behrman House

A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism

This study, first published in 1980, offers a synthesis of Russian intellectual history from the reign of Catherine II to the end of the 19th century. It emphasizes philosophy but also discusses the European political, social and economic ideas that expanded Russian intellectual horizons. Andrzej Walicki is the author of four other books including "Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism".

Brand: Stanford University Press

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

In a grand gesture of reclamation and remembrance, Mr. Halberstam has brought the war back home." - The New York Times David Halberstam's magisterial and thrilling The Best and the Brightest was the defining book about the Vietnam conflict. More than three decades later, Halberstam used his unrivaled research and formidable journalistic skills to shed light on another pivotal moment in our history: the Korean War. Halberstam considered The Coldest Winter his most accomplished work, the culmination of forty-five years of writing about America's postwar foreign policy. Halberstam gives us a masterful narrative of the political decisions and miscalculations on both sides. He charts the disastrous path that led to the massive entry of Chinese forces near the Yalu River and that caught Douglas MacArthur and his soldiers by surprise. He provides astonishingly vivid and nuanced portraits of all the major figures-Eisenhower, Truman, Acheson, Kim, and Mao, and Generals MacArthur, Almond, and Ridgway. At the same time, Halberstam provides us with his trademark highly evocative narrative journalism, chronicling the crucial battles with reportage of the highest order. As ever, Halberstam was concerned with the extraordinary courage and resolve of people asked to bear an extraordinary burden. The Coldest Winter is contemporary history in its most literary and luminescent form, providing crucial perspective on every war America has been involved in since. It is a book that Halberstam first decided to write more than thirty years ago and that took him nearly ten years to complete. It stands as a lasting testament to one of the greatest journalists and historians of our time, and to the fighting men whose heroism it chronicles.

Brand: Hyperion

Napoleon at Bay, 1814: the Campaigns to the Fall of the First Empire

The fall of an empire-by a great historian Every history book offers-inevitably-a perspective. Some historians are rightly judged to offer more considered analysis and skill in its explanation than others, and so their names endure. One such was F. Loraine Petre whose work on the history of the Napoleonic Wars has endured and is regarded by scholars and students of the period alike, as being of the highest order. This book is no exception. Here the author has taken as his subject the campaign that led to the abdication of the Emperor, a campaign that Napoleon fought with his back to wall, hard pressed by determined enemies and woefully under resourced after the Russian debacle. Here we see a great soldier-still in possession of phenomenal powers as a battlefield commander-fighting a losing battle with consummate skill.

Brand: Leonaur

Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon

A richly detailed and dramatic account of one of the greatest achievements of humankind At 9:32 A.M. on July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 rocket launched in the presence of more than a million spectators who had gathered to witness a truly historic event. It carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins to the last frontier of human imagination: the moon. Rocket Men is the thrilling story of the moon mission, and it restores the mystery and majesty to an event that may have become too familiar for most people to realize what a stunning achievement it represented in planning, technology, and execution. Through interviews, twenty-three thousand pages of NASA oral histories, and declassified CIA documents on the space race, Craig Nelson re-creates a vivid and detailed account of the Apollo 11 mission. From the quotidian to the scientific to the magical, readers are taken right into the cockpit with Aldrin and Armstrong and behind the scenes at Mission Control. Rocket Men is the story of a twentieth-century pilgrimage; a voyage into the unknown motivated by politics, faith, science, and wonder that changed the course of history.

Brand: Viking Adult

The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche

Krist does wonders. [He] describes the frantic rescue efforts. and the malevolent, unending storm. In a thrilling, climactic chapter, he conjures forth the avalanche." -The New York Times In February 1910, a monstrous, record-breaking blizzard hit the Northwest. Nowhere was the danger more terrifying than near a tiny town called Wellington, perched high in the Cascade Mountains, where a desperate situation evolved: two trainloads of cold, hungry passengers and their crews found themselves marooned. For days, an army of the Great Northern Railroad's most dedicated men worked to rescue the trains, but just when escape seemed possible, the unthinkable occurred-a colossal avalanche tumbled down, sweeping the trains over the steep slope and down the mountainside. Centered on the astonishing spectacle of our nation's deadliest avalanche, The White Cascade is the masterfully told story of a never-before-documented tragedy.

Brand: Holt Paperbacks

Resort City in the Sunbelt, Las Vegas, 1930-2000, Second Edition

The thirty years since 1970 have been the most dramatic period in Las Vegas's history, according to renowned historian Eugene Moehring. In a new and expanded epilogue to Resort City in the Sunbelt, Moehring looks at the major events of the last three decades and their underpinnings. The population of this one-time Paiute oasis has exploded from 460,000 in 1970 to an astounding 1.2 million in 1999. This growth has fueled a construction boom that has yet to show signs of slowing down. Large new residential centers have been created in surrounding valleys. All of these events have strained the public sector, forcing the construction of more schools, parks, freeways, and libraries, as well as the enlargement of hospitals and the airport, through which pass 30 million passengers a year. In this new edition of Resort City in the Sunbelt, Moehring discusses how tourism and the spectacular expansion of the Strip continue to spur growth and dominate the casino market. He also addresses the downside of that growth: increased crime, traffic headaches, overcrowded schools, and underfunded social services. In addition, Moehring assesses the storms that may be looming on Las Vegas's horizon-the popularity of online gambling, the continued threat of increased federal regulation, the proliferation of Indian casinos, and the nationalization of casino gambling. In 2005, Las Vegas will celebrate it's centennial. Moehring's lively account, brilliantly updated in this new edition sheds light not only on the history of the city but also provides insight to its future.

Brand: University of Nevada Press

Marxism and Culture: The CPUSA and Aesthetics in the 1930s

Marxism and Culture attempts a history of the approach to literature as practiced by the Communist Party of the United States during the 1930s. It also attempts to set aside the distortion of cultural cold war which routinely labeled anything communist as tendentious and tainted.

Brand: iUniverse

Season's Greetings from the White House: The Collection of Presidential Christmas Cards, Messages and Gifts

More than just anecdotes and photos of Presidential Christmas cards, this highly researched volume presents a picture of life in the White House as viewed through a Christmas wreath. Some of the inside stories told here include but not limited to:

Brand: Presidential Christmas

What's So Scary About R.L. Stine?

R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series for children and Fear Street series for young adults have catapulted him to the top of the lists. Stine's books have convinced millions of young people that reading is fun. Yet rather than congratulate him, many parents, teachers, and librarians see Stine and his writing as dangerous and debasing. Many adults have attempted to ban his books from libraries and deny his talent. At the heart of the controversy of Stine is a much deeper controversy over quality in literature and art in general. Those who deny Stine's validity draw a sharp value distinction between high art and popular art, especially when the audience is young people. This fascinating debate is one which reaches beyond the confines of any one author or genre. In this spirited defense, Patrick Jones examines Stine's genius for writing pop culture, a craft that has its own skills and value. He traces Stine's career from joke writer to horror series author to media king. Each step in Stine's writing life is discussed with emphasis on the teen thrillers. Jones proposes that debate about Stine has become a prism through which we view questions about youth and popular reading, particularly horror and other paperback series.

Brand: Scarecrow Press

100 Superlative Rolex Watches

The Rolex tagline, "an obsession with perfection," is upheld by the brand's popularity. Often copied but never surpassed, Rolex-headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with 28 affiliates worldwide and relying on 4,000 watchmakers in over 100 countries-has been the leading name in luxury watches and the symbol of exemplary performance and prestige for more than a century. John Goldberger, editor of 100 Superlative Rolex Watches, has spent many happy hours browsing through watch shops, flea markets, conventions and auctions around the world for the past 35 years, collecting and studying vintage watches. In this well-appointed volume he presents comprehensive descriptions of 100 of the finest Rolex watches ever made and provides an extensive overview of Rolex's production, demonstrating the company's innovation in the technical and aesthetic evolution of watch design. More than 600 color illustrations and 400 descriptions provide the collector and watch enthusiast with invaluable information: reference numbers, casing, movement, relative calibers and year of production for each watch. The book covers many styles, including the earliest models, the Oyster, chronograph and moon phases, the sports model and the Daytona.

Brand: Damiani

Fenton Special Orders, 1980-Present (Schiffer Book for Collectors)

Displayed in 900 beautiful color images are the Fenton Art Glass special order items produced from 1980 to today, ranging from baskets and chop plates to rose bowls and vases. These dazzling, much-coveted items were made-to-order for various companies, collectors' clubs, and individual customers. The company orders from Aladdin, Anheuser-Busch, Lenox, and QVC are featured. The text includes brief histories of the ordering companies, clubs, and individuals, Fenton logos used, a glossary of terms, a detailed bibliography, and values in the captions. For those who seek Fenton's popular glass, this book is an essential reference.

Brand: Schiffer Publishing

Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America

On the road to Survival City, Tom Vanderbilt maps the visible and invisible legacies of the cold war, exhuming the blueprints for the apocalypse we once envisioned and chronicling a time when we all lived at ground zero. In this road trip among ruined missile silos, atomic storage bunkers, and secret test sites, a lost battleground emerges amid the architecture of the 1950s, accompanied by Walter Cotten?s stunning photographs. Survival City looks deep into the national soul, unearthing the dreams and fears that drove us during the latter half of the twentieth century.A crucial and dazzling book, masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating. Dave Eggers? A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because [Vanderbilt] is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader. Los Angeles Ti mes? A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life. Greil Marcus, Bookforum

Brand: University of Chicago Press

The Dad I Never Knew, A War Orphan's Search For Inner Healing

A story of a couple's love that reaches across an ocean's divide and torn apart by war. It was agony for her to be away from him. The war was tearing them apart. Memoirs of struggles during World War II. The journey, the battles, the war.

Brand: Carolinas Ecumenical Healing Ministries

The 467th Bombardment Group (H) in World War II: in Combat with the B-24 Liberator over Europe

In this new 8th Air Force unit history, Perry Watts sets out the history of the USAAF 467th Heavy Bombardment Group, which was based at Rackheath, Norfolk, in the east of England, during 1944-1945. In contrast to the operational focus of many books on the

Brand: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.

The Last Zero Fighter: Firsthand Accounts from WWII Japanese Naval Pilots

Firsthand accounts from interviews conducted in Japan with five WWII Japanese Naval aviators. All are veterans of the pivotal battles of the Pacific War including; USS Panay, Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Rabaul, Port Darwin, Indian Ocean Raid, Ceylon, Midway, Guadalcanal, Marshall Islands, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Kamikaze in the Philippines, the home defense and the dropping of the atomic bomb. The book is 348 pages includes 78 photos (many from the veterans' own albums), 9 original maps and illustrations. Includes an introduction to the Japanese pilot training system for both officers and enlisted men. Each pilot is followed from the time he joined the navy until war's end. They explain in their own words; why they joined the navy, what they thought about the war, about the aircraft they flew, how they felt about their friends and their former adversaries. The interviews were conducted firsthand in their own language by KING who is a linguist and Pacific War historian who spent 10 years living in Japan.

Brand: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform