Michener crafts a tale of the American men who fought the Korean War, detailing their exploits in the air as well as their lives on the ground. Young and innocent, they arrive in a place they have barely ever heard of, on a ship massive enough to carry planes and helicopters. Trained as professionals, they prepare for the rituals of war that countless men before them have endured, and face the same fears. They are American fighter pilots. Together they face an enemy they do not understand, knowing their only hope for survival is to win.  Praise for The Bridges at Toko-Ri   “A vivid and moving story, as well as an exciting one . . . The humanity of the people is deeply felt.”—Chicago Tribune   “The Banshees screaming over Korea, the perilous landings on an aircraft carrier deck ‘bouncing around like a derelict rowboat,’ a helicopter rescue from the freezing waters . . . all are stirringly rendered.”—The Denver Post   “Michener’s best . . . a story of action, ideas, and civilization’s responsibilities.”—Saturday Review

    Kathy simply wants to live life and experience a world beyond her suburban existence. So when the chance comes for her to dance with an entertainment troop in Vietnam, she slips on her boots, walks away from her convent school and heads off to war. But Kathy soon finds the reality of war is no song and dance. This go-go girl will never be the same again...

    When the Japanese invaded the island he, his family, and one hundred thousand other Dutch civilians were interned in a concentration camp and forced into hard labor for three years. After the Japanese surrendered, Mieke’s father and his family were set free in a country that plunged immediately into civil war.Across the globe in the Netherlands, police carried a crying five-year-old girl out of her home at war’s end, abandoned and ostracized as a daughter of Nazi sympathizers. This was Mieke's mother. She would be left on the street in front of her sealed home as her parents were taken away and imprisoned in the same camps where the country’s Jews had recently been held. Many years later, Mieke’s parents met, got married, and moved to California, where she and her siblings were born. While her parents lived far from the events of their past, the effects of the war would continue to be felt in their daily lives and in the lives of their children.All Ships Follow Me moves from Indonesia to the Netherlands to the United States, and spans generations as Mieke recounts her parents' lives during and after the war, and travels with them in the present day to the sites of their childhood in an attempt to understand their experiences and how it formed them. All Ships Follow Me is a deeply personal, sweeping saga of the wounds of war, and the way trauma can be passed down through generations.

    Big & sweeping, hotly recalling & recording many sensationalized episodes, often igniting all the powderkeg suspense of a thriller, this appears to be a work of popular punch & persuasion, undoubtedly destined for some best-seller notchings. Based on documents, manuscripts, private diaries, letters, hundreds of interviews in 8 countries with generals & admirals, privates & civilians, including Homilo, Nimitz & Akirn Nara, But Not in Shame has both the aura of authenticity & the sting of a not-till-now-could-it-be-told disclosure. It tackles much of the sub-rosa political intrigue & hysteria of American & British policy, the agonizing early Pacific defeats, Singapore's shocking downfall, MacArthur's escape to Australia, the unplanned, gratuitous barbarism of the average Japanese soldier towards American & Filipino prisoners on the infamous Death March, the brutal Java Sea battle, Bataan's tragic surrender & the ultimate Midway victory. It analyses Japanese tactics, our own shortsightedness, unpreparedness & confusion, along with many telling portraits of Roosevelt, Wainwright, Colin Kelly, Doolittle, Colonel Hattori, Halsey, Tom Dooley & all the other famous figures & the myths & tales that rose around them. This is hard-hitting, snappy, gripping & gritty set-the-record-straight reporting, a major addition to the coverage of the Pacific WWII campaign, one which will hardly go unnoticed.--Kirkus (edited)Part I - Timetable for ConquestPart II - The Defenses CrumblePart III - Battle for BataanPart IV - Death of Two EmpiresPart V - The Battling Bastards of BataanPart VI - From Humiliation to VictoryAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

    Born in 1905 to a wealthy family in the oil-boom city of Baku, at the edge of the czarist empire, Lev escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan. He found refuge in Germany, where, writing under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, his remarkable books about Islam, desert adventures, and global revolution, became celebrated across fascist Europe. His enduring masterpiece, Ali and Nino–a story of love across ethnic and religious boundaries, published on the eve of the Holocaust–is still in print today.But Lev's life grew wilder than his wildest stories. He married an international heiress who had no idea of his true identity–until she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. His closest friend in New York, George Sylvester Viereck–also a friend of both Freud's and Einstein's–was arrested as the leading Nazi agent in the United States. Lev was invited to be Mussolini's official biographer–until the Fascists discovered his "true" identity. Under house arrest in the Amalfi cliff town of Positano, Lev wrote his last book–discovered in a half a dozen notebooks never before read by anyone–helped by a mysterious half-German salon hostess, an Algerian weapons-smuggler, and the poet Ezra Pound. Tom Reiss spent five years tracking down secret police records, love letters, diaries, and the deathbed notebooks. Beginning with a yearlong investigation for The New Yorker, he pursued Lev's story across ten countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic and surreal, and sometimes as heartbreaking, as his subject's life. Reiss's quest for the truth buffets him from one weird character to the next: from the last heir of the Ottoman throne to a rock opera-composing baroness in an Austrian castle, to an aging starlet in a Hollywood bungalow full of cats and turtles.As he tracks down the pieces of Lev Nussimbaum's deliberately obscured life, Reiss discovers a series of shadowy worlds–of European pan-Islamists, nihilist assassins, anti-Nazi book smugglers, Baku oil barons, Jewish Orientalists–that have also been forgotten. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth century–of the origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism and terrorism. Written with grace and infused with wonder, The Orientalist is an astonishing book.

     It begins somewhere in Russia in the mid-19th century, and takes the reader into the events during the two world wars, and their ways of existence during the holocaust. The simple and touching stories are presented from the perspective of a sensitive young boy, fascinated by his surroundings. In a moment of anxiety and fear, the boy is torn from his family, and the journey of his life begins. The story describes four generations that represent the history of Eastern European Jews. The author creates a unique attraction between the book and the reader, by her fluent and vivid language. Historical truths are intertwined with fascinating stories about the power of a violin, and the miracles that occurred during the attempt to survive under impossible conditions in a period where sanity was lost. “People will forget what I said, people will forget what I did, people will never forget what I made them feel.”

    One of the more impressive books based on the horrors of WW2. I AM JUDEN is an extraordinary reading experience... Stephen Uzzell has woven facts with the skill of a documentarian and enhanced those facts with the burnish of a thriller. Highly recommended." The San Francisco Review of BooksInspired by the life of forgotten hero Haim Michael Klar, I Am Juden is the triumphant, epic tale of one man's incredible courage and resistance during the twentieth century's darkest days.Jozef Siegler leads a perilous double life as an SS officer in Krakow and ultimately Auschwitz. His life is a tightrope walk through the Holocaust unlike any other. Nazi by day and resistance agent by night, any false move would result in certain death and exposure of the Jewish underground.Kiel, Germany, 1938. Jozef Siegler has been a pacifist since his father died fighting in the anti-Jewish pogroms of the Russian Empire. Jozef now leads a quiet life as a university professor, but his days of innocence are numbered. With the final tightening of the Nuremberg Race Laws, he loses his job and flees Germany with his younger sister Shoshana. Aided by their Aryan looks and gift for languages, they are recruited into the Jewish resistance to transport orphans across the border into neutral Lithuania. But war soon envelops the continent. Brother and sister become separated. Jozef's quest to find Shoshana begins. Constantly on the move, never certain who to trust, it is his inventive ingenuity, the kindness of strangers, and the most hair-raising strokes of luck that ensure his survival. When Jozef stumbles upon the dead body of SS Oberfuhrer Harry Mohnke, he faces the biggest decision of his life. If he can bring himself to wear the hated uniform and impersonate a Nazi, how many lives could he save ?Fans of Schindler's List, All The Light We Cannot See and The Tattooist of Auschwitz are gripped by this riveting saga of history, suspense and heroism.

    Katya Ivanova is a young pilot in a far-flung military academy in the Ural Mountains. From childhood, she’s dreamed of taking to the skies to escape her bleak mountain life. With the Nazis on the march across Europe, she is called on to use her wings to serve her country in its darkest hour. Not even the entreaties of her new husband—a sensitive artist who fears for her safety—can dissuade her from doing her part as a proud daughter of Russia.After years of arduous training, Katya is assigned to the 588th Night Bomber Regiment—one of the only Soviet air units composed entirely of women. The Germans quickly learn to fear nocturnal raids by the daring fliers they call “Night Witches.” But the brutal campaign will exact a bitter toll on Katya and her sisters-in-arms. When the smoke of war clears, nothing will ever be the same—and one of Russia’s most decorated military heroines will face the most agonizing choice of all.

    They were to lead the assault on Omaha Beach and break out inland. Simultaneously, other Ranger units would scale the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc to destroy the ostensibly huge gun battery there and thus protect the invasion fleet from being targeted. But was the Pointe du Hoc mission actually necessary? Why did the Allies plan and execute an attack on a gun battery that they knew in advance contained no field guns? And more importantly, why did they ignore the position at Maisy that did? Using personal interviews with the surviving Rangers who fought on the beach and at Pointe du Hoc, The Cover-Up at Omaha Beach presents exceptionally detailed new research that takes the reader into the middle of the action with the Rangers.Gary Sterne has made a painstaking study of what the Allies actually knew in advance of D-Day, including what was known about Maisy Battery. Maps, orders, and assault plans have been found in US, UK, and German archives, many of which have only been recently released after having been classified for more than sixty years. Radio communications of the Rangers as they advanced inland have been found, and Royal Air Force intelligence evaluations of bombing missions directed at the site have now been released. All these combine to make The Cover-Up at Omaha Beach one of the most up-to-date references on the subject.

    An Italian prisoner of war in equatorial East Africa recounts his escape from a British POW camp so that he might climb the 17,000-foot peak of Mount Kenya.

    The U.S. Navy SEALs have long been considered among the finest, most courageous and professional soldiers in American military history– an elite fighting force trained as parachutists, frogmen, demolition experts and guerrilla warriors, and ready for combat on the Sea, Air and Land. Born out of a proud naval tradition dating back to World War II, the first SEAL teams were commissioned in the early 1960s. Vietnam was their proving ground.In this remarkable volume, fifteen former SEALs share their vivid, first–person remembrances of action in Vietnam– brutal, honest and thrilling stories of covert missions and ferocious firefights, of red–hot chopper insertions and extractions, revealing astonishing truths that will only add strength to the SEAL legend.

    Week after week, Mauldin defied army censors, German artillery, and Patton’s pledge to “throw his ass in jail” to deliver his wildly popular cartoon, “Up Front,” to the pages of Stars and Stripes. “Up Front” featured the wise-cracking Willie and Joe, whose stooped shoulders, mud-soaked uniforms, and pidgin of army slang and slum dialect bore eloquent witness to the world of combat and the men who lived—and died—in it. This taut, lushly illustrated biography—the first of two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Bill Mauldin—is illustrated with more than ninety classic Mauldin cartoons and rare photographs. It traces the improbable career and tumultuous private life of a charismatic genius who rose to fame on his motto: “If it’s big, hit it.”

    Badly wounded, he found refuge in a ruined monastery and in the arms of Sofia Bartoli. But the love that kindled between them was shaken by an irreversible betrayal.Nearly thirty years later, Hugo’s estranged daughter, Joanna, has returned home to the English countryside to arrange her father’s funeral. Among his personal effects is an unopened letter addressed to Sofia. In it is a startling revelation.Still dealing with the emotional wounds of her own personal trauma, Joanna embarks on a healing journey to Tuscany to understand her father’s history—and maybe come to understand herself as well. Joanna soon discovers that some would prefer the past be left undisturbed, but she has come too far to let go of her father’s secrets now…

    As Stefano, an Italian POW, heads toward home across war-ravaged Germany, he encounters a young child beside his dead mother. Unable to leave him to an unknown fate, Stefano takes the boy with him, finding refuge in a seemingly abandoned house in a secluded woodland.But the house is far from vacant. Stefano wakes at the arrival of its owner, Erich, a former German soldier, who invites the travelers to stay until they can find safe passage home. Stefano cautiously agrees, intrigued by the disarming German, his reclusive neighbor Rosalind, and her traumatized husband, Georg. Stefano is also drawn to Monique, the girl in a photograph on Rosalind’s wall, who went missing during the war.But when he discovers letters written by Monique, a darker truth emerges. This place of refuge could be one of reckoning, and the secrets of the past might prevent the travelers from ever getting home.

    . .  If you are interested in joining the Peace Corps, you probably have questions that run the gamut from "What is the application process like?" to "Is the Peace Corps effective as a development agency?" In this updated second edition, former Peace Corps volunteer Dillon Banerjee shares candid facts and insights about the experience in a practical question-and-answer format. With input from recently returned volunteers who served across the globe, this thorough guide presents valuable information including: •   What Peace Corps recruiters look for in your application•   Items you should--and shouldn't---pack for your two-year trip•   Useful gadgets and technology that help volunteers stay connected from far away•   Real answers to personal questions about culture shock, safety, dating, homesickness, and more Whether you're thinking of joining or have already been accepted and are preparing to leave, The Insider's Guide to the Peace Corps will help equip you for the unique challenges and rewards of the volunteer experience, regardless of your program area or country assignment. It's essential reading for anyone interested in "the toughest job you'll ever love."