This is the riveting true account of death, danger, and discovery on the high seas in the dramatic search for America's greatest lost treasure, the S.S. Central America.

    In late January 1998, after a miserable stretch of fishing that hadn't paid for even their groceries, the five-man crew of a seventy-nine-year-old Alaska schooner called the La Conte risked one last run to the Fairweather Grounds, despite the approach of bad weather. The young skipper, a father-to-be, was convinced fish could be found on the shoals, and his instincts were right: they hit the mother lode. For eighteen hours their lines had a fish on every hook: yellow eye, lingcod, calico, halibut, even the occasional sand shark; it was an incredible haul, one that would bring huge profits -- and respect -- back in port.But they stayed out too long, and a hurricane-force Arctic storm caught them. Though in need of repair herself, the La Conte had weathered bad seas before -- and might have again. But in the cruelest of ironies, the additional burden of its magnificent catch sank the ship, and set the five men -- Bob Doyle, Mike DeCapua, Gig Mork, David Hanlon, and Mark Morley -- afloat in frigid seventy-foot seas. Their radio beacon was sending distress signals to the Coast Guard, but the chances of rescue under such conditions seemed remote.Eight months later, on a deserted island nearly 800 miles away, two boys found a mutilated corpse that had washed ashore and been mauled by brown bears. A forensics investigator, haunted by the thought that this man's family might never know what had become of him, and with only a single partial fingerprint and scraps of a survival suit for clues, set out to identify the body.Author Todd Lewan's painstaking investigation into these events began here, too, with the discovery that the man found dead on Shuyak Island had been one of the fishermen aboard the La Conte. Lewan became obsessed with learning what had become of the other crewmen; with understanding how five "end of the roaders" from different parts of the United States had come together in Alaska to fish one of the world's most treacherous patches of ocean in the dead of winter; and with conveying the way in which that "dream catch" represented an opportunity for each of the men to significantly alter his life. In the process he learned of the truly heroic efforts undertaken by no fewer than three different teams of Coast Guard helicopter rescue units to save these desperate men.Lewan's re-creation of the events themselves -- the discovery of a lost fisherman's remains; the bonding of troubled men on the high seas; the horrifying hours spent fighting to keep from freezing to death in thirty-eight-degree water; the impossibly courageous efforts of the helicopter rescue crews; and the moving account of how one of the survivors, in particular, found during this tempest an unexpected inner strength that allowed him to turn his life around -- makes for an unforgettable tale, a page-turning narrative drama of the first order. It also provides a timeless, affecting portrait of hard-living seekers drawn to Alaska: of adventurers in search of roots, home, and the chance to remake themselves in the spirit of America's last frontier.

    The relentless and unstoppable German advances that had seen the panzers sweep hundreds of miles into Russia was finally brought to a halt. The elite German 6th Army was first fought to a standstill, then surrounded and forced to surrender.Over 1.5 million people lost their lives during the six months of fighting, many of them civilians caught up in the campaign. For the first time in the war, the German army had been defeated on the field of battle. Before Stalingrad the Russians never won; after Stalingrad they could not lose.This book looks at the titanic struggle that ended in the total destruction of the second city of the Soviet Union, the greatest battle the world has ever seen.

    Flying Enterprise steamed westward from Europe toward America. A few days into the voyage, she hit the eye of a ferocious storm. Force 12 winds tossed men about like playthings and turned drops of freezing Atlantic foam into icy missiles. When, in the space of twenty-eight hours, the ship was slammed by two rogue waves–solid walls of water more than sixty feet high–the impacts cracked the decks and hull almost down to the waterline, threw the vessel over on her side, and thrust all on board into terror.Flying Enterprise’s captain, Kurt Carlsen, a seaman of rare ability and valor, mustered all hands to patch the cracks and then try to right the ship. When these efforts came to naught, he helped transfer, across waves forty feet high, the passengers and the entire crew to lifeboats sent from nearby ships. Then, for reasons both professional and intensely personal, and to the amazement of the world, Carlsen defied all requests and entreaties to abandon ship. Instead, for the next two weeks, he fought to bring Flying Enterprise and her cargo to port. His heroic endeavor became the world’s biggest news.In a narrative as dramatic as the ocean’s fury, acclaimed bestselling author Frank Delaney tells, for the first time, the full story of this unmatched bravery and endurance at sea. We meet the devoted family whose well-being and safety impelled Carlsen to stay with his ship. And we read of Flying Enterprise’s buccaneering owner, the fearless and unorthodox Hans Isbrandtsen, who played a crucial role in Kurt Carlsen’s fate.Drawing on historical documents and contemporary accounts and on exclusive interviews with Carlsen’s family, Delaney opens a window into the world of the merchant marine. With deep affection–and respect–for the weather and all that goes with it, he places us in the heart of the storm, a “biblical tempest” of unimaginable power. He illuminates the bravery and ingenuity of Carlsen and the extraordinary courage that the thirty-seven-year-old captain inspired in his stalwart crew. This is a gripping, absorbing narrative that highlights one man’s outstanding fortitude and heroic sense of duty. “One of the great sea stories of the twentieth century… [a] surefire nautical crowd-pleaser.”--Booklist é (starred review)“Frank Delaney has written a completely absorbing, thrilling and inspirational account of a disaster at sea that occasioned heroism of the first order. In the hands of a gifted storyteller, the ‘simple courage’ of the ship’s captain and the young radio man who risked their lives to bring a mortally wounded ship to port reveals the essence and power of all true courage–a stubborn devotion to the things we love.”–Senator John McCain

    Historian Grace Cole steps back and reviews the long history of barbarian invaders who pushed into Europe from the steppes of Asia, beginning 3,000 years ago with the nomadic Scythians, and then traces the tribes from Scandinavia, who migrated south to plague the empire until it finally crumbled. She examines the successes and failures of the principal barbarian tribes over the six centuries of their dominance and explores the surprising role of the Church as the era progressed. She covers the rise of France and the Holy Roman Empire and shows how the last great wave of barbarians - the Vikings -colonized a new world in Greenland and North America. Finally, she explains feudalism, the strange structure that held society together into the early Renaissance, outlining how it foreshadowed and laid the foundations for the civilization that became Europe. This rich heritage - the flowering of learning, the bold exploration and colonization of the globe, new political and economic structures, the idea of personal freedom - all were, in large part, the fruit of barbarism. And finally, the belief that barbarians and medieval Europe belonged to a dark age is conclusively put to rest.

    'Diver' is an honest, moving and sometimes hilarious account of a hair-raisingly exciting career, both in the Royal Navy and in commercial deep-sea diving-training.

    This classic insider's account has been updated and supplemented with rare photographs from the LRDG collection in the Imperial War Museum.

    Chronicling the crucial role of imperial Japan’s island stronghold during WWII, Fortress Rabaul is the renowned second installment of Bruce Gamble’s award-winning military nonfiction trilogy from Zenith Press.

    Bruning, a renegade American pilot fights against all odds to rescue his family -- imprisoned by the Japanese--and revolutionizes modern warfare along the way. From the knife fights and smuggling runs of his youth to his fiery days as a pioneering naval aviator, Paul Irving "Pappy" Gunn played by his own set of rules and always survived on his wits and fists. But when he fell for a conservative Southern belle, her love transformed him from a wild and reckless airman to a cunning entrepreneur whose homespun engineering brilliance helped launch one of the first airlines in Asia. Pappy was drafted into MacArthur's air force when war came to the Philippines; and while he carried out a top-secret mission to Australia, the Japanese seized his family. Separated from his beloved wife, Polly, and their four children, Pappy reverted to his lawless ways. He carried out rescue missions with an almost suicidal desperation. Even after he was shot down twice and forced to withdraw to Australia, he waged a one-man war against his many enemies -- including the American high command and the Japanese--and fought to return to the Philippines to find his family. Without adequate planes, supplies, or tactics, the U.S. Army Air Force suffered crushing defeats by the Japanese in the Pacific. Over the course of his three-year quest to find his family, Pappy became the renegade who changed all that. With a brace of pistols and small band of loyal fol,lowers, he robbed supply dumps, stole aircraft, invented new weapons, and modified bombers to hit harder, fly farther, and deliver more destruction than anything yet seen in the air. When Pappy's modified planes were finally unleashed during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, the United States scored one of the most decisive victories of World War II. Taking readers from the blistering skies of the Pacific to the jungles of New Guinea and the Philippines to one of the the war's most notorious prison camps, Indestructible traces one man's bare-knuckle journey to free the people he loved and the aerial revolution he sparked that continues to resonate across America's modern battlefields.

    There, they would quietly forge a series of agreements that divided up Asia. At the time, Roosevelt was bully-confident about America's future on the continent. But these secret pacts lit the fuse that would--decades later--result in a number of devastating wars: WWII, the Korean War, the communist revolution in China. One hundred years later, James Bradley retraces that epic voyage and discovers the remarkable truth about America's vast imperial past--and its world-shaking consequences. Full of fascinating characters and brilliantly told, The Imperial Cruise will forever reshape the way we understand U.S. history.Contents:History repeating --Civilization follows the Sun --Benevolent intentions --Pacific Negroes --Haoles --Honorary Aryans --Playing Roosevelt's game --The Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia --The imperial cruise --Roosevelt's open and closed doors --Incognito in Japan --Sellout in Seoul --Following the Sun --

    The talk around the family Seder table is of new babies and budding romance, not of the increasing hardships threatening Jews in their hometown of Radom, Poland. But soon the horrors overtaking Europe will become inescapable and the Kurcs will be flung to the far corners of the world, each desperately trying to navigate his or her own path to safety. As one sibling is forced into exile, another attempts to flee the continent, while others struggle to escape certain death, either by working grueling hours on empty stomachs in the factories of the ghetto or by hiding as gentiles in plain sight. Driven by an unwavering will to survive and by the fear that they may never see one another again, the Kurcs must rely on hope, ingenuity, and inner strength to persevere. An extraordinary, propulsive novel, We Were the Lucky Ones demonstrates how in the face of the twentieth century’s darkest moment, the human spirit can endure and even thrive.

    It ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history. The defeat, though, was only the beginning, as Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman make dramatically clear in this powerfully original book. From then until the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the prisoners of war suffered an ordeal of unparalleled cruelty and savagery: forty-one months of captivity, starvation rations, dehydration, hard labor, deadly disease, and torture--far from the machinations of General Douglas MacArthur. The Normans bring to the story remarkable feats of reportage and literary empathy. Their protagonist, Ben Steele, is a figure out of Hemingway: a young cowboy turned sketch artist from Montana who joined the army to see the world. Juxtaposed against Steele's story and the sobering tale of the Death March and its aftermath is the story of a number of Japanese soldiers. The result is an altogether new and original World War II book: it exposes the myths of military heroism as shallow and inadequate; it makes clear, with great literary and human power, that war causes suffering for people on all sides.

    atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ensuing death and destruction that led to the end of World War II. The events that culminated in the fall of Japan - which forever changed the course of diplomacy, geopolitics, and warfare in the twentieth century - are vividly recreated through dramatic first-hand accounts of the major participants on both sides of the Pacific. They include: Harry Truman, the inexperienced American president who made the decision that would lead to unprecedented death and destruction; the war-mongering, but mysterious, Japanese Emperor Hirohito, who ultimately presided over his country's surrender; General Leslie Groves, the no-nonsense director of the Manhattan Project; and Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane, the Enola Gay, which dropped the very first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945.

    Winner of the 1990 Christopher Award. 11 halftones; 2 line drawings.

    A convoy of thirty-seven merchant ships is ploughing through icy, submarine-infested North Atlantic seas during the most critical days of World War II, when the German submarines had the upper hand and Allied shipping was suffering heavy losses. In charge is Commander George Krause, an untested veteran of the U.S. Navy. Hounded by a wolf pack of German U-boats, he faces 48 hours of desperate peril trapped on the bridge of the ship. Exhausted beyond measure, he must make countless and terrible decisions as he leads his small fighting force against the relentless U-boats.