Fox movie made such an impression on President Reagan that he felt compelled to mention it in a speech to the Joint Session of Congress? Over the course of eight years, Mark Weinberg travelled to Camp David each weekend with Ronald and Nancy Reagan. He was one of a few select members invited into the Aspen Lodge, where the First Family screened both contemporary and classic movies on Friday and Saturday nights. They watched movies in times of triumph, such as the aftermath of Reagan’s 1984 landslide, and after moments of tragedy, such as the explosion of the Challenger and the shooting of the President and Press Secretary Jim Brady. Weinberg’s unparalleled access offers a rare glimpse of the Reagans—unscripted, relaxed, unburdened by the world, with no cameras in sight. Each chapter discusses a legendary film, what the Reagans thought of it, and provides warm anecdotes and untold stories about his family and the administration. From Reagan’s pranks on the Secret Service to his thoughts on the parallels between Hollywood and Washington, Weinberg paints a full picture of the president The New Yorker once famously dubbed “The Unknowable.” Movie Nights with the Reagans is a nostalgic journey through the 1980s and its most iconic films, seen through the eyes of one of Hollywood’s former stars: one who was simultaneously transforming the Republican Party, the American economy, and the course of the Cold War.

    The perimeter of the massive Saigon Airbase, Tan Son Nhut, was breached, and fighting raged all morning. Both gritty and intimate, From Chicago to Vietnam tells the powerful story of the ensuing epic battle, the Tet Offensive, from the perspective of one brave American soldier, Michael Duffy, whose life, like so many others, would forever be changed.Duffy's war experience begins when he exits a C-130 cargo plane onto the Tan Son Nhut tarmac--a chaotic scene of blasts, explosions, and small arms fire. Sprinting to a waiting helicopter, he is lifted up and over the city, where he gets a bird's-eye view of Saigon under attack. The helicopter lands on a road outside Bien Hoa Base Camp, and Duffy crawls in under enemy fire, tumbling into a fox-hole under cover of two GIs. Later, he meets up with his younger brother, Danny Duffy, in an ammunition convoy driving up Highway 1 to the village of Xuan Loc.After his brutal one-year tour in Vietnam, Duffy returns to Chicago, where he enjoys a Christmas dinner with his family before enrolling as a freshman at Colorado College. Like many vets, his return from the war would be met with curiosity, indifference, and, at times, scorn. This harrowing memoir was thirty years in the making.

    Bracketed by the catastrophes of the Great War and the Wall Street Crash, the 1920s was a time of fear and hedonism. The decade glittered with seduction: jazz, flappers, wild all-night parties, the birth of Hollywood, and a glamorous gangster-led crime scene forced to flourish under prohibition. It was punctuated by terrifying events—the political show trials of Sacco and Vanzetti; the huge march down Washington DC's Pennsylvania Avenue by the Ku Klux Klan—and produced a glittering array of artists, musicians and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie Smith to Charlie Chaplin.Here, Lucy Moore interweaves the most compelling stories of the people and events that characterized the decade to produce a gripping account of an often-overlooked period. In doing so, she demonstrates that the jazz age was far more than just 'between wars'; it was an epoch of passion and change—an age, she observes, that was not unlike our own. The world she evokes is one of effortless allure and terrifying drama: a world that was desperate to escape itself.

    As hostile debates raged over how to protect their new hard-won freedoms, two men formed an improbable partnership that would launch the fledgling United States: George Washington and Alexander Hamilton.Washington and Hamilton chronicles the unlikely collaboration between these two conflicting characters at the heart of our national narrative: Washington, the indispensable general devoted to classical virtues, and Hamilton, an ambitious officer and lawyer eager for fame of the noblest kind.Working together, they laid the groundwork for the institutions that govern the United States to this day and protected each other from bitter attacks from Jefferson and Madison, who considered their policies a betrayal of the republican ideals they had fought for.Yet while Washington and Hamilton's different personalities often led to fruitful collaboration, their conflicting ideals also tested the boundaries of their relationship--and threatened the future of the new republic.From the rumblings of the American Revolution through the fractious Constitutional Convention and America's turbulent first years, this captivating history reveals the stunning impact of this unlikely duo that set the United States on the path to becoming a superpower.

    Kennedy. Marilyn Monroe. A page-turning reconstruction of an enchanting after-party by the New York Times bestselling author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. On the night of May 19, 1962, the marquee of the old Madison Square Garden boasted: “BEST THING TODAY…JOHN F. KENNEDY / 2ND BEST THING…MARILYN MONROE.”Few things illustrate the magnetism of the Kennedy era like Marilyn Monroe co-headlining the President’s massive birthday fundraiser, and suggestively crooning “Happy Birthday.” But only a privileged few know what happened months earlier, when the two icons spent a weekend at a private summit hosted by Bing Crosby, and later, after the New York extravaganza, at the top secret, invitation-only midnight affair at a millionaire’s Manhattan town house.For more than half a century, this exclusive, no-press-allowed after-party has been shrouded in rumor and myth. Lot 6191 in the 2010 auction of White House photographer Cecil Stoughton’s archive—“Marilyn Monroe at JFK Party”—included twenty-three prints. Their negatives, marked in Stoughton’s hand with “Sensitive material, Do not file,” were seized by the National Archives. Among the collection: the sole existing photograph of Marilyn and the president. Spellbound by the intimacy of the image and the force of public imagination, bestselling historian James Swanson masterfully reconstructs the fabled soiree, bringing alive a night that history nearly left behind.

    

    Patton At the start of the war the Nazi armed forces was one of the most feared war machines in history. It had swept away all opposition and threatened all of Europe with its dominating force. But its supremacy was not to last. In fact the gains made by Nazi Germany over the course of 1940 to 1942 were rolled back in ten short months as Patton and the Third Army roared through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria. Through the course of this offensive Patton and his men faced some of the toughest fighting of World War Two, most notably when the Germans attempted to reverse the tide in the Battle of the Bulge. Colonel Brenton G. Wallace was there to witness all of this as he served, and went on to earn five battle stars, with the Third Army through the course of its movements into Germany. His book, Patton and his Third Army is a remarkable account of this fascinating leader and his troops that changed the course of World War Two and revolutionized warfare. Wallace uncovers the actions of the Third Army from its preparations in Britain, to its first engagements with the enemy, through to the major battles around the Falaise Pocket and countering the German offensives, breaking across the Moselle into Germany until they eventually subdued the Nazi forces. This book provides fascinating insight into the strategies used by Patton to defeat the Germans. It is full of direct quotes from Patton that demonstrate his determination to win, such as: “When you have an adversary staggering and hanging on the ropes, don’t let up on him. Keep smashing, keep him off balance and on the run until you have knocked him out completely. That is the way to get this dirty business over quickly and at the smallest cost.” Patton and his Third Army is essential reading for anyone interested in the European Theater of war and finding out more about this remarkable figure who Eisenhower said was “born to be a soldier”. Brenton G. Wallace was an American army officer and architect. Through the course of the war he was awarded the Legion of Merit and Bronze Star from the United States, the Croix de Guerre with Star of Vermeil from France and also made part of the Order of the British Empire. He served under Patton as an assistance chief of staff and retired from the army as a Major General in the United States Army Reserve. His work Patton and his Third Army was first published in 1946. He passed away in 1968.

    A term given to flowers of stone fruit trees and some other plants that flower profusely in Spring. Blossoms provide pollen to bees, and initiate cross-pollination necessary for trees to reproduce by producing fruit. 2. A peak period or stage of development. Covering topics including housing, health, language and culture, Riddoch looks at the way in which Scots identify themselves and how this needs to change in order for the country to blossom u as an independent nation or a strongly devolved one. Arguing that limited access to security and wealth has left Scots feeling like outsiders in their own country, this book tackles fundamental and personal issues of identity that matter to ordinary Scots. Designed to incite discussion and debate, this book will appeal to those who believe larger issues of self esteem and power lurk beneath the complexities of the independence debate and want to delve deeperBACK COVERWhat will it take for Scotland to blossom? "Imagine Scotland as a beautifully-knitted, warmth-providing sweater caught on a snag. Its wearer tries to move forward u but cannot. A pause is needed to lift the garment clear. Scotland is thus snagged. And no amount of tugging will free it from the stubborn, progress-inhibiting three-headed hook of inequality, distant control and top-down governance." Weeding out vital components of Scottish identity from decades of political and social tangle is no mean task, but itOCOs one journalist Lesley Riddoch has undertaken. Dispensing with the tired, yo-yoing jousts over fiscal commissions, Devo Something and EU in-or-out, "Blossom" pinpoints both the buds of growth and the blight thatOCOs holding Scotland back. Drawing from its people, history, and the authorOCOs own passionate and outspoken perspective this is a plain-speaking but incisive call to restore control to local communities and let Scotland flourish.

    Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

    The act was intended as retribution for Frick's part in the massacre of workers in the Homestead strike. Captured and sentenced to serve a prison term of twenty-two years, of which he served 14, Berkman struggled to make sense of the shadowy and brutalized world of the prison—one that hardly conformed to revolutionary expectation.

    In this underground bestseller, which has come to define Spence's political philosophy, he speaks out against the destructive forces in America today-forces of government and corporate tyranny that are robbing us of our freedom-and he warns us that time is running out.In a dramatic new chapter, presented for the first time in a trade paperback edition, Spence recounts in astonishing detail the government shoot-out at Ruby Ridge and the resulting trial of separatist Randy Weaver, revealing the important lessons we must learn from this tragic case.Finally, Spence makes the eloquent case that we, as Americans, have delivered our freedoms to new masters: corporate and governmental conglomerates, our biased court system, and the censored media. From Freedom to Slavery is an urgent work that urges us to resist this tyranny, a book that must be read and discussed by all concerned citizens of our troubled land.

    All four of the girls have grown up in the United States, all four want to make it into college and succeed, but only two have immigration papers. Meanwhile, after a Mexican immigrant shoots and kills a local police officer, Colorado becomes the place where national argu- ments over immigration rage most fiercely. As the girls’ lives play out against this backdrop of intense debate over whether they have any right to live here, readers will gain remarkable insight into both the power players and the most vulnerable members of society as they grapple with understanding one of the most complicated social issues of our times.Moving, timely, and passionately told, Just Like Us is a riv- eting story about girlhood, friendship, identity, and survival.

    When the old world is unexpectedly brought down in a total war, the band seizes control of the country, and the new regime it founds as the vanguard of a new world order is ruthlessly dominated from within by the former seminarian until he stands as the absolute ruler of a vast and terrible state apparatus, with dominion over Eurasia. But the largest country in the world is also a poor and backward one, far behind the great capitalist countries in industrial and military power, encircled on all sides. Shortly after seizing total power, Stalin conceives of the largest program of social reengineering ever attempted: the root-and-branch uprooting and collectivization of agriculture and industry across the entire Soviet Union. To stand up to the capitalists he will force into being an industrialized, militarized, collectivized great power is an act of will. Millions will die, and many more will suffer, but Stalin will push through to the end against all resistance and doubts. Where did such power come from? We think we know the story well. Remarkably, Stephen Kotkin’s epic new biography shows us how much we still have to learn. The product of a decade of scrupulous and intrepid research, Stalin contains a host of astonishing revelations. Kotkin gives an intimate first-ever view of the Bolshevik regime’s inner geography, bringing to the fore materials from Soviet military intelligence and the secret police. He details Stalin’s invention of a fabricated trial and mass executions as early as 1918, the technique he would later impose across the whole country. The book places Stalin’s momentous decision for collectivization more deeply than ever in the tragic history of imperial Russia. Above all, Kotkin offers a convincing portrait and explanation of Stalin’s monstrous power and of Russian power in the world. Stalin restores a sense of surprise to the way we think about the former Soviet Union, revolution, dictatorship, the twentieth century, and indeed the art of history itself.

    Navy is a specialist in the field of communications intelligence. Little did Tony know that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would have such a direct impact on his career and life. He is urgently ordered from his comfortable duty in Washington, DC to an assignment at Bletchley Park, the British communications intelligence center. This fast-paced, riveting story thrusts Tony into personal, technical and diplomatic situations that test his skills and ingenuity. His love life intermingles with his involvement in a high-level world of intelligence, spies and intrigue. Tony loves every minute of it. Published author, Peter J. Azzole, is a retired U.S. Navy officer with a career in communications intelligence. He crafts this story from history and professional experience.