He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mercy.

    From the Nazi-prowled wastes of North Africa to the bloody corridors of Europe, they answered the call gladly. It was their duty, their job, their life. They marched off as boys, and they came back--those who made it--as soldiers and professionals forged in the heat of battle...

    The smallest of the extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany during World War II, Sobibor was where now-retired auto worker John Demjanjuk has been accused of working as a prison guard. Sobibor also was the scene of the war's biggest prisoner escape.   Richard Rashke's interviews with eighteen of  those who survived provide the foundation for this volume. He also draws on books, articles, and diaries to make vivid the camp, the uprising, and the escape. In the afterword, Rashke relates how the Polish government in October 1993, observed the fiftieth anniversary of the escape and how it has beautified the site since a film based on his book appeared on Polish television.

    A zookeeper recounts the story of John, Tonky, and Wanly, three performing elephants at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo, whose turn it is to die, and of their keepers, who weep and pray that World War II will end so their beloved elephants might be saved.

    He is lured back again and again by his enduring fascination for the country and for Lan, a beautiful Vietnamese mandarin's daughter he could never forget. Over five haunting decades Joseph's life becomes deeply enmeshed with Vietnam's turbulent, war-torn fate - until he attempts to salvage something of lasting value during the final desperate helicopter scramble to flee defeated Saigon. First published in 1982, it has stood the test of time as critics predicted, and is now providing a new generation of readers with insights into that historic conflict - and its tragic echoes in Iraq. It has since become a bestseller in 15 countries and in eight other languages.

    In this gripping novel, based on a true story, he reveals the extraordinary lives of the Russian, Polish and Jewish partisans trapped behind enemy lines during the Second World War. Wracked by fear, hunger and fierce rivalries, they link up, fall apart, struggle to stay alive, and to sabotage the efforts of the all-powerful German army. A compelling tale of action, resistance and epic adventure, it also reveals Levi's characteristic compassion and deep insight into the moral dilemmas of total war. It ranks alongside THE PERIOD TABLE and IF THIS IS A MAN as one of the rare authentic masterpieces of the 20th century.

    Raymond Briggs' now famous bestselling comic cartoon book depicts the effects of a nuclear attack on an elderly couple in his usual humorous yet macabre way.

    Though brought together in a friendship that neither jealousy nor violence could shatter, the Hazards and the Mains are torn apart by the storm of events that has divided the nation.

    Told with the same stylistic flair and attention to detail as the bestselling At Dawn We Slept, Miracle at Midway brings together eyewitness accounts from the men who commanded and fought on both sides. The sweeping narrative takes readers into the thick of the action and shows exactly how American strategies and decisions led to the triumphant victory that paved the way for the defeat of Japan. "A stirring, even suspenseful narrative . . . The clearest and most complete account so far." (Newsday) "Something special among war histories . . . No other gives both sides of the battle in as detailed and telling a manner."(Chicago Sun-Times) "A gripping and convincing account." (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

    With his officer, he charges toward the enemy, witnessing the horror of the battles in France. But even in the desolation of the trenches, Joey's courage touches the soldiers around him and he is able to find warmth and hope. But his heart aches for Albert, the farmer's son he left behind. Will he ever see his true master again?

    Dicken Quinney never forgot that first flight in a fragile contraption of sealing-wax and string, the start of a lifelong obsession with aviation. He was to spend the next four years in the deadly cut-and-thrust of aerial dogfights over France and Italy, collecting a chestful of medals, and a reputation as one of the Great War’s leading aces.He would hone his skills in an array of aircraft – the BE2, the 1½-Strutter, the Camel –  and as the war reaches its climax, Dicken is maturing into a daring pilot. But then he must undergo one final test in order to emerge victorious. And with his life intact… The Bright Blue Sky is a love letter to aviation, a brilliant read, perfect for fans of Thomas Wood, Wilbur Smith, and Mark Sullivan.

    Here they play at being soldiers in what seems to be complete isolation. That is, until the Germans begin revealing their whereabouts and leaving signs of their presence: a scarecrow, equipment the squad had dropped on a retreat from a reconnaissance mission and, strangest of all, a small fir tree hung with fruit, candles, and cardboard stars. Suddenly, Knott and the others must unravel these mysteries, learning as they do about themselves, about one another, and about the "enemy," until A Midnight Clear reaches its unexpected climax, one of the most shattering in the literature of war.

    Bryan, author of "Friendly Fire"" "The 13th Valley" is dynamite! This is the most sensuously honest interpretation of the Vietnam experience I've ever read." --Al Santoli, author of "Everything We Had"

    This volume constitutes the first collection of original Hasidic tales to be published in a century."An important work of scholarship and a sudden clear window onto the heretofore sealed world of the Hasidic reaction to the Holocaust. Its true stories and fanciful miracle tales are a profound and often poignant insight into the souls of those who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis and who managed somehow to use that very suffering as the raw material for their renewed lives." -- Chaim Potok"A beautiful collection." -- Saul Bellow"Yaffa Eliach provides us with stories that are wonderful and terrible -- true myths. We learn how people, when suffering dying, and surviving can call forth their humanity with starkness and clarity. She employs her scholarly gifts only to connect the tellers of the tales, who bear witness, to the reader who is stunned and enriched." -- Robert J. Lifton"In the extensive literature on the Holocaust, this is a unique book. Through it we can attain a glimpse of the victims' inner life and spiritual resources. Yaffa Eliach has done a superb job." -- Jehuda Reinharz

    A fearless young Swede whose efforts saved countless Hungarian Jews from certain death at the hands of Adolf Eichmann, Raoul Wallenberg was one of the true heroes to emerge during the Nazi occupation of Europe.

    It was an appropriate greeting to the young man, enjoying his first taste of freedom after spending time in three concentration camps, including the infamous Bergen-Belsen. A short time later, suddenly abandoned again to a Virginia military school, Spanjaard, then 16 years old, felt compelled to confront his past, particularly the loss of his beloved father, who died a few days after being released from Bergen-Belsen. This true story is unique because Barry Spanjaard is believed to be the only American citizen to be confined in Hitler's camps and dispels the idea that such a tragedy could only happen to people "over there - not here." His American citizenship was his and his family's tool to survival. His family never went into hiding, and Barry was able to keep his mother and father out of the camps for several years because of his American citizenship. His American citizenship was also the key which finally opened the doors to freedom in a prisoner exchange. Spanjaard recounts his meeting and the befriending of Anne Frank, his job as a personal messenger boy to Camp Commandant Josef Kramer and the destruction of his fellow Jews, with a cynical humor, without taking away from the seriousness of the situation. It reveals a youngster suddenly propelled to adult responsibilities, who nevertheless remains a teenager finding friends and life's remaining joys wherever he can."It is a book that young adults should read and then pass on to their parents."

    Unconventional in many ways, disregardful of parade ground discipline, unorthodox in their dress, yet a force so tightly knit in the face of danger that those who knew anything about them could only marvel.

    The new monster in the IRA's armoury must be destroyed at birth. A top-secret, top-priority order goes out to 22 Special Air Service Regiment:SEEK AND DESTROY - NO MATTER WHERE.For the four-men Sabre team of the legendary SAS this will be their toughest mission... probing the inner sanctum of the IRA's terror machine, fighting in the bloody carnage and chaos of Ulster - never before has so much been at stake. They encounter both triumph and disaster - and the cruellest twist of fate.

    He detailed his work in the student movement creating a network of the people and later described what he went through to train and become a guerilla fighter.

    

    With dramatic, driving power, John Keegan describes the massed armies—American, Canadian, English, French, German, and Polish—at successive stages of the invasion. As he details the strategies of the military engagements, Keegan brilliantly shows how each of the armies reflected its own nation's values and traditions. In a new introduction written especially to commemorate the 50th anniversary of D-Day, he contemplates the ways the events at the battle of Normandy still reverberate today.“The best military historian of our generation.” –Tom Clancy “John Keegan writes about war better than almost anyone in our century.” –The Washington Post Book World “Very dramatic… Very well done… a book which conjures romance from some very hard fighting.” –A. J. P. Taylor, The New York Review of Books “The story of this vast, complex, and risky amphibious assault, and the campaign which followed, has been told many times, but never better than by John Keegan.” –The Wall Street Journal

    The invasion of Occupied Europe. This army, mainly Americans, British and Canadians, most of whom had no experience of battle, was to be transported across the English Channel. No one knew how. This is the story of the American "occupation" of a wide district of South Devon to permit realistic war games. Its characters range from the Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery to the village simpleton. The Magic Army is an impressively moving, often very funny novel, which recreates the astonishing operation which preceded the Allied landing in France.

    battleship California depicts the devastation at Pearl Harbor from the hazardous vantage point of the open birdbath atop the mainmast.

    Six miles above the city of Hiroshima, bomb day doors snapped open to release "Little Boy", a code-name for the world's first atomic bomb. In an instant thousands of lives were destroyed, while the city's buildings, books and paintings caught fire and burned. The survivors discovered later that the bomb had permanently tainted them with its invisible contamination. Keiji Nakazawa was six years old when he experienced this holocaust. He survived to write and draw this story.

    McNeill explores a whole millennium of human upheaval and traces the path by which we have arrived at the frightening dilemmas that now confront us. McNeill moves with equal mastery from the crossbow—banned by the Church in 1139 as too lethal for Christians to use against one another—to the nuclear missile, from the sociological consequences of drill in the seventeenth century to the emergence of the military-industrial complex in the twentieth. His central argument is that a commercial transformation of world society in the eleventh century caused military activity to respond increasingly to market forces as well as to the commands of rulers. Only in our own time, suggests McNeill, are command economies replacing the market control of large-scale human effort. The Pursuit of Power does not solve the problems of the present, but its discoveries, hypotheses, and sheer breadth of learning do offer a perspective on our current fears and, as McNeill hopes, "a ground for wiser action." "No summary can do justice to McNeill's intricate, encyclopedic treatment. . . . McNeill's erudition is stunning, as he moves easily from European to Chinese and Islamic cultures and from military and technological to socio-economic and political developments. The result is a grand synthesis of sweeping proportions and interdisciplinary character that tells us almost as much about the history of butter as the history of guns. . . . McNeill's larger accomplishment is to remind us that all humankind has a shared past and, particularly with regard to its choice of weapons and warfare, a shared stake in the future."—Stuart Rochester, Washington Post Book World "Mr. McNeill's comprehensiveness and sensitivity do for the reader what Henry James said that Turgenev's conversation did for him: they suggest 'all sorts of valuable things.' This narrative of rationality applied to irrational purposes and of ingenuity cannibalizing itself is a work of clarity, which delineates mysteries. The greatest of them, to my mind, is why human beings have never learned to cherish their own species."—Naomi Bliven, The New Yorker

    It takes us inside the armed struggle to throw off British rule and create a united Ireland in the early part of this century.

    by Lawrence Wilson

    Lamia and her family are caught up in the fighting, with tragic consequences. Lamia struggles with the hatred that threatens to destroy her, until she grasps that forgiveness and love are the most important things. Nothing else matters.

    A vivid, emotional account of the war.

    

    But not every woman who suffers physical or mental abuse is simply a victim. In the authors' long work experience, there are countless women - and men - who are actually "prone to violence". These are the unfortunate victims of their own deep-seated addiction to violence. They learn to use violence as a strategy for survival from the early moments of their abused childhoods. The ability to find pleasure in pain is all part of their tragic inheritance.This book discusses the grim addiction behind all other addictions, and draws on ten years of fieldwork among people who carry with them from birth the seeds of their own destruction.The case histories are taken from all walks of life - while gross physical abuse occurs more often in working-class families, the sophisticated mental violence of the middle classes can be far more damaging and long-lasting. This book is for anyone who wants to explore this critical area of human relationships. Hopefully it does not merely expose the roots of a problem, but also attempts to find some solutions.

    Indianapolis and her crew. Just 4 days after this flagship of the massive Pacific Fifth Fleet had delivered the components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to the island of Tinian, she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sank within 15 minutes. Why the Navy failed to rescue these brave sailors and why they began a massive coverup that lasted for over 30 years is the subject of this book, based upon previously unavailable files that reveal this startling conspiracy to conceal the massive blunders that were made.

    This updated edition of Gaddis' classic carries the history of containment through the end of the Cold War.Beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt's postwar plans, Gaddis provides a thorough critical analysis of George F. Kennan's original strategy of containment, NSC-68, The Eisenhower-Dulles New Look, the Kennedy-Johnson flexible response strategy, the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of detente, and now acomprehensive assessment of how Reagan - and Gorbechev - completed the process of containment, thereby bringing the Cold War to an end.He concludes, provocatively, that Reagan more effectively than any other Cold War president drew upon the strengths of both approaches while avoiding their weaknesses. A must-read for anyone interested in Cold War history, grand strategy, and the origins of the post-Cold War world.

    A collection of essays by Paul Fussell.

    An in-depth reference provides elaborate descriptions of 113 major British aircrafts, and includes more than two hundred color drawings, 126 photographs, and eighty-six diagrams.

    Analyses the performance of two key parties engaged in fighting during World War II.

    

    

    

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    He seeks to overthrow the old order and become a truly absolute—yet benevolent—dictator. His rival, the humble Yang Wen-li of the Free Planets Alliance, wishes to preserve democracy even if he must sacrifice his political ideals to defeat the Empire. Their political and military battles play out over a galactic chessboard in an epic saga fifteen centuries in the making!

    

    Presents more than 600 photos of Mauser 98s, Selbstladegewehr 41s and 43s, optical sights by Goerz, Zeiss, etc., plus German snipers in action. An exceptional hardcover collector's edition for serious military historians everywhere.

    written and edited by: Paul Eddy and Magnus Linklater with Peter Gillman ; the Insight Team: John Ball, Michael Bilton, Robin Morgan ; with the British task force: John Shirley ; In Argentina: Isabel Hilton ; Defence Correspondent: Jon Connell ; contributors: Ian Jack, Simon Winchester ; Additional reporting: Will Ellsworth Jones [and others] ; researchers: Lee Chester and Therese Stanton ; graphics: Gordon Beckett [and others] ; picture design, David Gibbons.

    Describes the author's experiences as an Army flight instructor, the tension of flying dangerous missions against the Germans, and the difficult period of adjustment after the war, Describes the author's experiences as an Army flight instructor, the tension of flying dangerous missions against the Germans, and the difficult period of adjustment after the war.

    Army study of the effect of Communist indoctrination on those held prisoners of war in Korea. Includes reports on the collaboration of prisoners with the enemy.

    

    In his discussion of the literature of the war he turns his attention to a wide variety of literary texts: novels, plays, poems, memoirs, oral histories, and works of documentary and reportage.Beidler begins with an analysis of the peculiar difficulties involved in writing about an experience like Vietnam. He moves from the early attempts to deal with the experience (including Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? and Arthur Kopit’s Indians) to more recent works as diverse as Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato, Phillip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, the plays of David Rabe, the poems of John Balaban and Bruce Weigl, and recently published experiments in oral history such as Al Santoli’s Everything We Had and Mark Baker’s Nam.

    Hitler's forces are driving across the steppes, smashing all resistance aside. But the advance is suddenly halted by thousands of enemy tanks arriving via a massive railhead. Sergeant Rolf Kessler's section is ordered to destroy it. Under the command of the ruthless Captain Weiss they set off. But their objective is 150 miles inside the seething hell of the Pripet marshes, an almost primeval expanse of endless swamp.And Kessler has other problems. His men are being murdered one by one. With Russians all round and a killer in their midst, survival seems impossible. Kessler must discover the killer in time or the section known as Sledgehammer will be annihilated by one of its own number.

    After World War II, nuclear developers used information-management techniques, including official secrecy and public relations, to promote what one called the “sunny side of the atom”—energy “too cheap to meter” that would supposedly power a new Golden Age. Such euphoric visions set the stage for one of the most extraordinary public-relations efforts in history: the selling of nuclear technology to the American public.The original edition of Nukespeak, published by Sierra Club Books in 1982, was conceived in the wake of the first great nuclear plant accident at Three Mile Island. Breaking through the linguistic filter of the nuclear mindset, it carefully documented how nuclear developers confused their hopes with reality, covered up damaging information, harassed and dismissed scientists who disagreed with official policy, and generated false or misleading statistics to bolster their assertions.Sadly, these developers also failed to learn from their mistakes—as this updated 30th anniversary edition of the book makes abundantly clear. Examining the critical events of the last three decades—including Chernobyl; nuclear proliferation thanks to the fiction of “Atoms for Peace”; the campaign to re-brand nuclear power as a clean, green solution to global warming; and the still-unfolding disaster at Japan’s Fukushima power plant—the new edition argues persuasively that “nukespeak” and the nuclear mindset continue to dominate public debate about nuclear weapons and nuclear power in a continuing attempt to seduce us into accepting the unthinkable.

    Both combat and non-combat aircraft are covered by text detailing each type's origin, history, and variants, followed by a full technical specification.