By the next day, no fewer than 5500 were wounded and just under 1900 were dead—a bloodbath that the Australian War Memorial describes as ‘the worst 24 hours in Australia's entire history'.Just days later, three Australian Divisions attacked German positions at nearby Pozières, and over the next six weeks they suffered another 23,000 casualties. Of that bitter battle, the great Australian war correspondent Charles Bean would write, ‘The field of Pozières is more consecrated by Australian fighting and more hallowed by Australian blood than any field which has ever existed . . .'Yet the sad truth is that, nearly a century on from those battles, Australians know only a fraction of what occurred. This book brings the battles back to life and puts the reader in the moment, illustrating both the heroism displayed and the insanity of the British plan. With his extraordinary vigour and commitment to research, Peter FitzSimons shows why this is a story about which all Australians can be proud. And angry.

    Abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. By war's end she had lost virtually everyone she loved. Testament of Youth is both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished generation. Hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as a book that helped “both form and define the mood of its time,” it speaks to any generation that has been irrevocably changed by war.

    Although it did not single-handedly win WWI, this extremely bloody battle did mark the end of the last major German offensive of the war. Miracle at Belleau Wood is a thoroughly researched, intelligent, and insightful account of one of the U.S. Army's most intense and ferocious actions of the Great War. It is also the story of how the Marines were transformed from a motley crew of shipboard soldiers and embassy guards into, ultimately, one of the world's most elite fighting units. This brand new account of one of the most stirring battles of the Great War is an essential read for anyone with an interest in that particular theatre and the history of U.S. Marine Corps.

    Over fifty incredible years at the heart of the Age of Revolution, he fought courageously on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a soldier, statesman, idealist, philanthropist, and abolitionist. As a teenager, Lafayette ran away from France to join the American Revolution. Returning home a national hero, he helped launch the French Revolution, eventually spending five years locked in dungeon prisons. After his release, Lafayette sparred with Napoleon, joined an underground conspiracy to overthrow King Louis XVIII, and became an international symbol of liberty. Finally, as a revered elder statesman, he was instrumental in the overthrow of the Bourbon Dynasty in the Revolution of 1830. From enthusiastic youth to world-weary old age, from the pinnacle of glory to the depths of despair, Lafayette never stopped fighting for the rights of all mankind. His remarkable life is the story of where we come from, and an inspiration to defend the ideals he held dear.

    Neiberg): baseball star Babe Ruth, symphony conductor Karl Muck, and Harvard Law student Charles Whittlesey.In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as paranoia about the deadly Spanish flu spread. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German. And as the war raged on, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised as the radical lecturing workers about the injustice of a sixty-hour workweek.War Fever explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in upheaval.

    The long Chinese Civil War precipitated a long regional war between China and Japan that went global in 1941 when the Chinese found themselves fighting a civil war within a regional war within an overarching global war. The global war that consumed Western attentions resulted from Japan's peripheral strategy to cut foreign aid to China by attacking Pearl Harbor and Western interests throughout the Pacific on December 7-8, 1941. S. C. M. Paine emphasizes the fears and ambitions of Japan, China, and Russia, and the pivotal decisions that set them on a collision course in the 1920s and 1930s. The resulting wars - the Chinese Civil War (1911-1949), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945), and World War II (1939-1945) - together yielded a viscerally anti-Japanese and unified Communist China, the still-angry rising power of the early twenty-first century. While these events are history in the West, they live on in Japan and especially China.

    An honest look at how children can drive the most loving parent to periodic madness, along with practical suggestions for how to cope.--Adele Faber.

    A year earlier, this Hungarian team had won Olympic gold. A year later, they lost agonisingly in the final of a World Cup that they dominated. This is the beginning, middle and end of Hungarian football in the popular imagination.Only, how come the ideas from this team spread around the world? Why do Hungarian managers spring up in Italy, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, across Europe and the Americas, bringing their secrets with them? And what are the incredible stories they have to tell, of escaping the Nazis and the Soviet communists?How did the history of modern football come to be born in the Budapest coffeehouses of the early twentieth century?Fifteen years in the making, this new book from bestselling football historian Jonathan Wilson is the missing piece of the jigsaw; the forgotten story in football's history, lost in war, in revolution, in death and tragedy.

    The book reveals the facts about his suspended prison sentence, his dispute with the group over unpaid royalties and his retiring from the music industry, and his rumoured heroin addiction.Written with the full co-operation of Grant's family and friends to give a unique access into the most fabled and feared man in the music business.

    They fully understood that a small conflict in the Balkans – the tinderbox at the heart of the continent – could spark a European war. They well knew what their weapons could do.Yet they carried on. They accepted – and, in some cases, even seemed to relish – what they saw as an inevitable clash of arms. They planned and mapped every station on the path to oblivion. These pied pipers of the apocalypse chose war in the full knowledge that millions would follow, and die, on their orders.1914: The Year the World Ended seeks to answer the most vexing question of the 20th century: Why did European governments decide to condemn the best part of a generation of young men to the trenches and four years of slaughter, during which 8.5 million would die?

    Lawrence, “a sideshow of a sideshow.”  Amidst the slaughter in European trenches, the Western combatants paid scant attention to the Middle Eastern theater.  As a result, the conflict was shaped to a remarkable degree by a small handful of adventurers and low-level officers far removed from the corridors of power.   Curt Prüfer was an effete academic attached to the German embassy in Cairo, whose clandestine role was to foment Islamic jihad against British rule.  Aaron Aaronsohn was a renowned agronomist and committed Zionist who gained the trust of the Ottoman governor of Syria. William Yale was the fallen scion of the American aristocracy, who traveled the Ottoman Empire on behalf of Standard Oil, dissembling to the Turks in order gain valuable oil concessions.  At the center of it all was Lawrence.  In early 1914 he was an archaeologist excavating ruins in the sands of Syria; by 1917 he was the most romantic figure of World War One, battling both the enemy and his own government to bring about the vision he had for the Arab people. The intertwined paths of these four men – the schemes they put in place, the battles they fought, the betrayals they endured and committed – mirror the grandeur, intrigue and tragedy of the war in the desert.  Prüfer became Germany’s grand spymaster in the Middle East.  Aaronsohn constructed an elaborate Jewish spy-ring in Palestine, only to have the anti-Semitic and bureaucratically-inept British first ignore and then misuse his organization, at tragic personal cost.  Yale would become the only American intelligence agent in the entire Middle East – while still secretly on the payroll of Standard Oil.  And the enigmatic Lawrence rode into legend at the head of an Arab army, even as he waged secret war against his own nation’s imperial ambitions. Based on years of intensive primary document research, LAWRENCE IN ARABIA definitively overturns received wisdom on how the modern Middle East was formed.  Sweeping in its action, keen in its portraiture, acid in its condemnation of the destruction wrought by European colonial plots, this is a book that brilliantly captures the way in which the folly of the past creates the anguish of the present.

     Additionally, as a lady-in-waiting, Countess Buxhoeveden attended on the Empress for much of the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, only leaving her side when the Imperial Family was removed to Tobolsk after the Tsar’s abdication in 1917. Thereafter, she followed the Empress to Tobolsk, and then to Ekaterinburg, where the entire Imperial Family, some of the Court suite and some of their servants met their deaths on July 17, 1918. The portrait the Countess paints of the Empress is of a warm, shy, kind and generous woman, devoted to Russia, her husband and her children, deeply charitable in word and deed, and a committed friend and mistress, but ill-starred, physically sick, maligned, misunderstood and much plotted against. The character descriptions in this book also include those for Tsar Nicholas, each of the children – OTMA and the Tsarevitch – Grand Duchess Ella (the Empress’ sister), Ania Vyrubova (the Empress’ most intimate friend), Rasputin and Kerensky (the Head of the Provisional Government that took power after the abdication of the Tsar and before the ascendancy of the Bolsheviks). The narrative also describes in detail the daily domestic life of the Imperial Family, and each of their trips to other parts of Russia and abroad in peace and war. It is rare for the author of any authorized biography to know her subject so familiarly and for so long, and to have been a first-hand witness to almost everything that happened for much of her life, and it is this that makes ‘The Tragic Empress’ such an intriguing and compelling book.

    On August 7, 1914, Britain fired its first shots of World War I not in Europe but in the German colony of Togo. The campaign to eliminate the threat at sea posed by German naval bases in Africa would soon be won, but in the land war, especially in East Africa, British troops would meet far fiercer resistance from German colonial forces that had fully mastered the tactics of bush warfare. It was expected to be a small war, over by Christmas, yet it would continue bloodily for more than four years, even beyond the signing of the Armistice in Europe. Its costs were immense, its butchery staggering (in excess of100,000 British troops and 45,000 native recruits dead). Utmost among the tragic consequences, though, was the waste laid to the land and its indigenous peoples in what one official historian described as a war of extermination and attrition without parallel in modern times. Imperialism had gone calamitously amok. This eye-opening account of the Great War in East Africa does not flinch at the daily horrors of an ill-fated campaign--not just the combat but also a hostile climate, disease, the terrible loneliness--nor does it fail to recount tales of extraordinary courage and the kind of adventure that inspired fiction like C. S. Forester's The African Queen, William Boyd's An Ice-Cream War, and Wilbur Smith's Shout at the Devil, In all, it demonstrates dramatically why even the most hardened of Great War soldiers preferred the trenches of France to the trauma of East Africa.

    After the last shot was fired and the troops marched home, approximately three million soldiers remained unaccounted for. An unassuming English chaplain first proposed a symbolic burial in memory of all the missing dead; subsequently the idea was picked up by almost every combatant country. Acclaimed author Neil Hanson focuses on the lives of three soldiers — an Englishman, a German, and an American — using their diaries and letters to offer an unflinching yet compassionate account of the front lines. He describes how each man endured nearly unbearable conditions, skillfully showing how the Western world arrived at the now time-honored way of mourning and paying tribute to all those who die in war.

    It is a journey into a past vividly brought to life and bursting with ideas, that pits one century against another in his quest to measure which century saw the greatest change.We journey from a time when there was a fair chance of your village being burned to the ground by invaders — and dried human dung was a recommended cure for cancer — to a world in which explorers sailed into the unknown and civilizations came into conflict with each other on an epic scale. Here is a story of godly scientists, fearless adventurers, cold-hearted entrepreneurs, and strong-minded women — a story of discovery, invention, revolution, and cataclysmic shifts in perspective.Millennium is a journey into the past like no other. Our understanding of human development will never be the same again, and the lessons we learn along the way are profound ones for us all.