Dr. Winter looks anew at the culture of commemoration and the ways in which communities endeavored to find collective solace after 1918. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is a profound and moving book of great importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century.

    She began her nursing career as a tuberculosis nurse in Baltimore and then served as an army nurse in Europe during World War I. After that she traveled to Asia where she saw the effects of opium addiction. The Backwash of War (1934) was based on her diaries kept during her time at the front. La Motte speaks of her time in an army hospital in France as periods of boredom interspersed with moments of fright. The Backwash of War is an excellent memoir of war from the viewpoint of a woman army nurse.

    Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expedtions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly died of disease at the Front, one was hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: "The price of life is death." Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but "a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day." As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much of it that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive.For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

     When the marines -- or "jarheads," as they call themselves -- were sent in 1990 to Saudi Arabia to fight the Iraqis, Swofford was there, with a hundred-pound pack on his shoulders and a sniper's rifle in his hands. It was one misery upon another. He lived in sand for six months, his girlfriend back home betrayed him for a scrawny hotel clerk, he was punished by boredom and fear, he considered suicide, he pulled a gun on one of his fellow marines, and he was shot at by both Iraqis and Americans. At the end of the war, Swofford hiked for miles through a landscape of incinerated Iraqi soldiers and later was nearly killed in a booby-trapped Iraqi bunker. Swofford weaves this experience of war with vivid accounts of boot camp (which included physical abuse by his drill instructor), reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family. As engagement with the Iraqis draws closer, he is forced to consider what it is to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man. Unlike the real-time print and television coverage of the Gulf War, which was highly scripted by the Pentagon, Swofford's account subverts the conventional wisdom that U.S. military interventions are now merely surgical insertions of superior forces that result in few American casualties. Jarhead insists we remember the Americans who are in fact wounded or killed, the fields of smoking enemy corpses left behind, and the continuing difficulty that American soldiers have reentering civilian life. A harrowing yet inspiring portrait of a tormented consciousness struggling for inner peace, Jarhead will elbow for room on that short shelf of American war classics that includes Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and be admired not only for the raw beauty of its prose but also for the depth of its pained heart.

    Yet the novel is much more. Written in sparse prose that is shockingly clear—the descriptions of electronic treatments are particularly harrowing—it combines real-life characters and events with fictional ones in a work that examines the insanity of war like no other. Barker also weaves in issues of class and politics in this compactly powerful book. Other books in the series include The Eye in the Door and the Booker Award winner The Ghost Road.

    In this epic history, Dan Jones vividly resurrects this fierce and seductive royal dynasty and its mythic world. We meet the captivating Eleanor of Aquitaine, twice queen and the most famous woman in Christendom; her son, Richard the Lionheart, who fought Saladin in the Third Crusade; and King John, a tyrant who was forced to sign Magna Carta, which formed the basis of our own Bill of Rights. This is the era of chivalry, of Robin Hood and the Knights Templar, the Black Death, the founding of Parliament, the Black Prince, and the Hundred Year’s War. It will appeal as much to readers of Tudor history as to fans of 'Game of Thrones.

    But behind all of this an intellectual war was also being fought between engineers, chemists, code-breakers, physicists, doctors, mathematicians, and intelligence gatherers. This hidden war was to make a positive and lasting contribution to how war was conducted on land, at sea, and in the air, and most importantly, life at home. Secret Warriors provides an invaluable and fresh history of the World War I, profiling a number of the key incidents and figures which lead to great leaps forward for the twentieth century. Told in a lively and colorful narrative style, Secret Warriors reveals the unknown side of this tragic conflict.

    He was intended for the law, but abandoned his studies at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1899 to serve as a trooper in the South African War. Carton de Wiart's extraordinary military career embraced service with the Somaliland Camel Corps (1914-15), liaison officer with Polish forces (1939), membership of the British Military Mission to Yugoslavia (1941), a period as a prisoner of war (1941-43), and three years as Churchill's representative to Chiang Kai-shek (1943-46). (Churchill was a great admirer.) During the Great War, besides commanding the 8th Glosters, Carton de Wiart was GOC 12 Brigade (1917) and GOC 105 Brigade (April 1918). Both these commands were terminated by wounds. He was wounded eight times during the war (including the loss of an eye and a hand), won the VC during the Battle of the Somme, was mentioned in dispatches six times, and was the model for Brigadier Ben Ritchie Hook in the Sword of Honour trilogy of Evelyn Waugh.

    As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of cold war confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering & achievement against fantastic odds. Here are up-close portraits of the maverick band of scientists & engineers who made the Skunk Works so renowned. Filled with telling personal anecdotes & high adventure, with narratives from the CIA & from Air Force pilots who flew the many classified, risky missions, this book is a portrait of the most spectacular aviation triumphs of the 20th century.

    Originally published in 1930, the landmark novel was one of the first to shatter the world’s illusion that war is a glorious endeavour. Instead, this chilling first-hand account brought readers face to face with the brutal, ugly realities of life in the trenches. Often compared to All Quiet on the Western Front and A Farewell to Arms, Generals Die in Bed was described by the New York Times as “a burning, breathing, historic document.” With veterans of WWI no longer here to tell their tales, this book stands as a lasting monument to the horror of war.

    Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives, at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains, he finds a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled, and only a single, mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains.But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal, makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever.From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front; from hardscrabble operating rooms to battlefields thundering with Cossack cavalry, The Winter Soldier is the story of war and medicine, of family, of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and finally, of the mistakes we make, and the precious opportunities to atone.

    . . Shot through with fresh insights . . . No previous biography has attempted anything so comprehensive.' ObserverNelson is a thrilling new appraisal of Horatio Nelson, the greatest practitioner of naval command the world has ever seen. It explores the professional, personal, intellectual and practical origins of one man's genius, to understand how the greatest warrior that Britain has ever produced transformed the art of conflict, and enabled his country to survive the challenge of total war and international isolation. In Nelson, Andrew Lambert - described by David Cannadine as 'the outstanding British naval historian of his generation' - is able to offer new insights into the individual quality which led Byron rightly to celebrate Nelson's genius as 'Britannia's God of War'. He demonstrates how Admiral Nelson elevated the business of naval warfare to the level of the sublime. Nelson's unique gift was to take that which other commanders found complex, and reduce it to simplicity. Where his predecessors and opponents saw a particular battle as an end in itself, Nelson was always a step ahead - even in the midst of terrifying, close-quarters action, with officers and men struck down all around him. 'Excellent . . . Worthy of the stirring events [it celebrates].' Independent

    In analyzing the causes of World War I without concern for the question of guilt, the author places emphasis on two central facts: first, that when statesmen and peoples took actions they knew might lead to war, they were not envisaging the catastrophe that the war became but rather a quick and limited war; and, second, that among the many conflicts that might have led to war, the one that did was the threat to the integrity of Austria-Hungary posed by Serbia and Serb nationalism.

    He served with the Legion in Cambodia and Bosnia, then returned to civilian life, but military habits would not allow him to settle.His need for intense excitement and extreme danger drove him back to the lifestyle he knew and loved, and using his Legion training, he became a ?hidden soldierOCO by opting for security missions in Iraq and Haiti.In Iraq he was the sole survivor of an ambush in no manOCOs land between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, the most dangerous place on earth.An intense, exciting and vivid account of extraordinary and sometimes horrific events, "Hidden Soldier" lifts the veil on the dark and shadowy world of security contractors and what the situation is really like in Iraq as well as other trouble spots.This bestseller also includes photographs taken by Padraig OOCOKeeffe while he was a Legionnaire and when he was in Iraq."

    This classic reprint of Corporal Alvin York's journal reveals him as a humble Christian who risked his life in the First World War and was later awarded the congessional Medal of Honor for his brav