Thus, Pacepa and Rychlak also document how the U.S. "mainstream media's" enduring sympathy for all things liberal-left has made it vulnerable to--indeed, the prime carrier of--civilization-transforming campaigns of lying, defamation and historical revisionism that turn reality on its head.

    Whether discussing the recent U.S. military escalation in Colombia, the bipartisan rollback of Social Security, the rise of for-profit HMOs, or growing inequality worldwide, Chomsky shows how ordinary citizens, if they work together, have the power to make meaningful change.Renowned interviewer David Barsamian showcases his unique access to Chomsky's thinking on a number of topics of contemporary and historical import. In an interview conducted after the important November 1999 "Battle in Seattle", Chomsky discusses prospects for building a movement to challenge corporate domination of the media, the environment, and even our private lives. Chomsky also engages in a discussion of his ideas on language and mind, making his important linguistic insights accessible to the lay reader.

    His comrades claim that he saved 100. President Harry S. Truman presented him with the Congressional Medal of Honor upon his return to the United States, for his heroics on Okinawa, and the citation credits him with saving 75 lives, splitting the difference. "From a human standpoint, I shouldn't be here to tell the story," said Doss in an interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "No telling how many times the Lord has spared my life." During World War II, 16,112,556 American soldiers served their country and the cause of the Allies, and only 43 received the Medal of Honor. Doss, who held a powerful allegiance to Christ, and was a devoted member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, became the first conscientious objector to receive the U.S. military's highest honor. Today, he is one of two conscientious objectors to have received it.

     For the next four years they would become instrumental in the secret war against Germany, developing a wide array of armaments to give Britain the upper hand against the might of the Axis forces. Under the guidance of Charles Goodeve, a remarkable Canadian with a flair for picking out which invention could tip the war in the Allies’ favor, these scientists and inventors worked tirelessly, and even put their lives on the line, in the quest to give Churchill’s military the knockout weapon. As Nevil Shute, who was an engineer with the Wheezers and Dodgers stated, “If any one quality was a common requirement for the officers in this unusual department I would say it was imagination — the imagination to look forward and to visualize what might happen.” Not all of their inventions were successful, indeed Sir Charles Madden, who served as staff officer to the Director of the Department stated that during his time there he dealt with “a medley of suggestions ranging from the impractical to the lunatic.” Yet, despite some mishaps, the Wheezers and Dodgers were instrumental in aiding the Allies to victory, with their degaussing method of protecting ships from mines to their Hedgehog weapon that destroyed over forty-five enemy submarines. Secret Weapons of World War II records all of the Department’s developments through the course of the conflict, both successful and not, and is written with humor and insight. “Their story has the fascination of the unexpected, in a British well-played spirit.” Kirkus Reviews Gerald Pawle worked with the Wheezers and Dodgers through the course of World War Two. This work was first published under the title The Secret War: 1939-1945 in 1957. Pawle passed away in 1991.

    Starting with the leak to the press of Roosevelt's famous Rainbow Plan, then spiraling back to FDR's inept prewar diplomacy with Japan, and his various attempts to lure Japan into an attack on the U.S. Fleet in the Pacific, Fleming takes the reader inside the incredibly fractious struggles and debates that went on in Washington, the nation, and the world as the New Dealers, led by FDR, strove to impose their will on the conduct of the War. Unlike the familiar yet idealized FDR of Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time, the reader encounters a Roosevelt in remorseless decline, battered by ideological forces and primitive hatreds which he could not handle-and frequently failed to understand-some of them leading to unimaginable catastrophe. Among FDR's most dismaying policies, Fleming argues, were an insistence on "unconditional surrender" for Germany (a policy that perhaps prolonged the war by as many as two years, leaving millions more dead) and his often uncritical embrace of and acquiescence to Stalin and the Soviets as an ally. For many Americans, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a beloved, heroic, almost mythic figure, if not for the "big government" that was spawned under his New Deal, then certainly for his leadership through the War. The New Dealers' War paints a very different portrait of this leadership. It is sure to spark debate.

    Bartov focuses on the barbaric struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union--where the vast majority of German troops fought--to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army into Hitler's image.

    update

    "Bold and unhesitating".--Times Literary Supplement (London). 16 pages of photos.

    Eisenhower that focus on his military career or the time of his presidency, none clearly explores the important role faith played both in his personal life and in his public policy. This despite the fact that he is the only US president to be baptized as a Christian while in office.Alan Sears and Craig Osten invite you on a journey that is unique in American history and is essential to understanding one of the most consequential, admired, and complex Americans of the 20th Century. The story begins in abject poverty in rural Texas, then travels through Kansas, West Point, two World Wars, and down Pennsylvania Avenue. This is the untold story of a man whose growing faith sustained him through the loss of a young son, marital difficulties, depression, career disappointments, and being witness to some of the worst atrocities humankind has devised. A man whose faith was based in his own sincere personal conviction, not out of a sense of political expediency or social obligation.You've met Dwight Eisenhower the soldier and Dwight Eisenhower the president. Now meet Dwight Eisenhower the man of faith.

    Mistakes might be made along the way, perhaps even tragic errors of judgement such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But the prevailing view is that the West is essentially a force for good in the wider world. Why Are We The Good Guys? is a provocative challenge of this false ideology. David Cromwell digs beneath standard accounts of crucial issues such as foreign policy, climate change and the constant struggle between state-corporate power and genuine democracy. The powerful evidence-based analysis of current affairs is leavened by some of the formative experiences that led the author to question the basic myth of Western benevolence: from schoolroom experiments in democracy, exposure to radical ideas at home, and a mercy mission while at sea; to an unexpected encounter with former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, the struggles to publish hard-hitting journalism, and the founding of Media Lens in 2001.

    They distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, printed subversive newspapers, hid resisters, secreted Jews to safety, transported weapons, and conveyed clandestine messages. The youngest was a schoolgirl of fifteen who scrawled "V" for victory on the walls of her lycée; the eldest, a farmer's wife in her sixties who harbored escaped Allied airmen. Strangers to each other, hailing from villages and cities from across France, these brave women were united in hatred and defiance of their Nazi occupiers.Eventually, the Gestapo hunted down 230 of these women and imprisoned them in a fort outside Paris. Separated from home and loved ones, these disparate individuals turned to one another, their common experience conquering divisions of age, education, profession, and class, as they found solace and strength in their deep affection and camaraderie.In January 1943, they were sent to their final destination: Auschwitz. Only forty-nine would return to France.A Train in Winter draws on interviews with these women and their families; German, French, and Polish archives; and documents held by World War II resistance organizations to uncover a dark chapter of history that offers an inspiring portrait of ordinary people, of bravery and survival—and of the remarkable, enduring power of female friendship.

    What makes Bill Clinton tick?William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States is undoubtedly the greatest American enigma of our age -- a dark horse that captured the White House, fell from grace and was resurrected as an elder statesman whose popularity rises and falls based on the day’s sound bytes.  John Gartner's In Search of Bill Clinton unravels the mystery at the heart of Clinton’s complex nature and why so many people fall under his spell.  He tells the story we all thought we knew, from the fresh viewpoint of a psychologist, as he questions the well-crafted Clinton life story.  Gartner, a therapist with an expertise in treating individuals with hypomanic temperaments, saw in Clinton the energy, creativity and charisma that leads a hypomanic individual to success as well as the problems with impulse control and judgment, which frequently result in disastrous decision-making.  He knew, though, that if he wanted to find the real Bill Clinton he couldn’t rely on armchair psychology to provide the answer.  He knew he had to travel to Arkansas and around the world to talk with those who knew Clinton and his family intimately. With his boots on the ground, Gartner uncovers long-held secrets about Clinton's mother, the ambitious and seductive Virginia Kelley, her wild life in Hot Springs and the ghostly specter of his biological father, Bill Blythe, to uncover the truth surrounding Clinton’s rumor-filled birth.  He considers the abusive influence of Clinton's alcoholic stepfather, Roger Clinton, to understand the repeated public abuse he invited both by challenging a hostile Republican Congress and engaging in the clandestine affair with Monica Lewinsky that led to his downfall.  Of course, there is no marriage more dissected than that of the Clintons, both in the White House and on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign trail.  Instead of going down familiar paths, Gartner looks at that relationship with a new focus and clearly sees, in Hillary’s molding of Clinton into a more disciplined politician, the figure of Bill Clinton’s stern grandmother, Edith Cassidy, the woman who set limits on him at an early age.   Gartner brings Clinton’s story up to date as he travels to Ireland, the scene of one of Clinton’s greatest diplomatic triumphs, and to Africa, where his work with AIDS victims is unmatched, to understand Clinton’s current humanitarian persona and to find out why he is beloved in so much of the world while still scorned by many at home.   John Gartner’s exhaustive trip around the globe provides the richest portrait of Clinton yet, a man who is one of our national obsessions.  In Search of Bill Clinton is a surprising and compelling book about a man we all thought we knew.

    In Becoming Evil, social psychologist James Waller uncovers the internal and external factors that can lead ordinary people to commit extraordinary acts of evil. Waller debunks the common explanations for genocide- group think, psychopathology, unique cultures- and offers a more sophisticated and comprehensive psychological view of how anyone can potentially participate in heinous crimes against humanity. He outlines the evolutionary forces that shape human nature, the individual dispositions that are more likely to engage in acts of evil, and the context of cruelty in which these extraordinary acts can emerge. Illustrative eyewitness accounts are presented at the end of each chapter. An important new look at how evil develops, Becoming Evil will help us understand such tragedies as the Holocaust and recent terrorist events. Waller argues that by becoming more aware of the things that lead to extraordinary evil, we will be less likely to be surprised by it and less likely to be unwitting accomplices through our passivity.

    Four were condemned to death; two were executed. This engrossing book reveals the extraordinary methods adopted by MI5 to uncover British traitors and their German spymasters, as well as two serious wartime plots by well-connected British fascists to mount a coup d’etat which would replace the government with an authoritarian pro-Nazi regime. The book also shows how archaic attitudes to social status and gender in Whitehall and the courts ensured that justice was neither fair nor equitable. Aristocratic British pro-Nazi sympathizers and collaborators were frequently protected while the less-privileged foot soldiers of the Fifth Column were interned, jailed or even executed for identical crimes.

    His Labour government introduced sweeping new legislation that unchained the country from its old conservative bonds, established the world's first nuclear free state and let loose a free market economic agenda that radically transformed the country. It was a rapid climb to the very top for the overweight doctor's son from working class South Auckland. As leader during the final years of the Cold War he confronted the agendas of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and lived through the political upheavals of the fall of the Soviet Union, post-apartheid South Africa and Rajiv Ghandi's India. Along the way he memorably defeated the Reverend Jerry Falwell in a famous Oxford Union debate about the morality and sanity of the nuclear arms race, and negotiated the aftermath of the tragic bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French agents in Auckland harbour.