He sheds light on Diana Ross’s relationship with Berry Gordy and her cutthroat rise to top billing in the group, as well as Florence Ballard’s corresponding decline. He also takes us inside the studio, examining how timeless classics were conceived and recorded on the Motown “assembly line,” and considers the place of Motown in an era of cultural upheaval, when not being “black enough” became a fierce denunciation within the black music industry.Deftly combining personal testimony, history, and expert analysis, Ribowsky not only tells the full, heartbreaking story of the Supremes, but shows why Gordy’s revolutionary concept of “blacks singing white” was essential to the modern evolution of music.

     This was the beginning of two years of persecution, punishment and imprisonment for Tchernavin and his family. Although a penniless scientist who was aiding the U.S.S.R. with research in fishing he was persecuted by the state because his family were Russian nobility, which to the Soviet Government meant that he was a class enemy. Tchernavin’s fascinating story takes the reader into the heart of the Soviet Union of the 1930s as it was desperately trying to industrialise, no matter what the cost was in human lives. Accused of counter-revolutionary activities and not assisting in the industrial drive that Stalin had implemented he was imprisoned in 1931 and sentenced to five years in the Gulags. Tchernavin’s account vividly depicts the persecution that he and his fellow prisoners suffered at the hands of the U.S.S.R., how many buckled under the torturous conditions, confessing to crimes they had never committed and even indicting others in the process. Along with his wife and son Tchernavin was one of the lucky ones who was able to escape across the border to Finland and later live in England. “Professor Tchernavin has an important story to tell and tells it well and convincingly.” William Henry Chamberlain, Pacific Affairs “The story reveals the life and organization of the prisons, the treatment meted out to those dealing with the Communists.” Kirkus Reviews Vladimir Tchernavin was a Russian scientist, who specialized in studying fish. He was one of the first and very few prisoners of the Gulag system to escape. His work I Speak for the Silent Prisoners of the Soviets was first published in 1934 and he died in 1949. This work was translated by Nicholas Oushakoff who had left the U.S.S.R. in the 1920s to settle in Massachusetts. He died in 1973.

    Caught there by the outbreak of the Second World War, he was unable to return to his parents for seven years. In due course, he was called to serve in an anti-aircraft battery and in the National Labour Service. Just after his eighteenth birthday, he was sent to the Russian Front with the elite Paratrooper and Tank Division, Hermann Göring. He lived through an amazing series of events, escaping death many times and was one of the few survivors of his division when the war ended. In this narrative of his early life, John Stieber describes how he went from a carefree childhood through increasing hardships, until every day of his life became a challenge for survival.

    A year later, he was unknowingly assigned to the Kamikaze Special Attack Corps—a group of airmen whose mission was to sacrifice their lives by crashing planes into enemy ships. Their callsign was "ten dead, zero alive."By picking up Memoirs of a Kamikaze, readers will experience the hardships of fighter pilot training—dipping and diving and watching as other trainees crash into nearby mountainsides. They'll witness the psychological trauma of coming to terms with death before each mission, and breathe a sigh of relief with Odachi when his last mission is cut short by Japan's eventual surrender. They'll feel the anger at a government and society that swept so much of the sacrifice under the rug in its desperation to rebuild.Odachi's innate "samurai spirit" carried him through childhood, WWII and his eventual life as a kendo instructor, police officer and detective. His attention to detail, unwavering self-discipline and impenetrably strong mind were often the difference between life and death. Odachi, who is now well into his nineties, kept his Kamikaze past a secret for most of his life. Seven decades later, he agreed to sit for nearly seventy hours of interviews with the authors of this book—who know Odachi personally. He felt it was his responsibility to finally reveal the truth about the Kamikaze pilots: that they were unsuspecting teenagers and young men asked to do the bidding of superior officers who were never held to account.This book offers a new perspective on these infamous suicide pilots. It is not a chronicle of war, nor is it a collection of research papers compiled by scholars. It is a transcript of Odachi's words.

    Holocaust biography

    One woman's shocking true story of abduction, war and survival." - Brian Whitney, author of SUBVERSIVE In the fall of 1994, 21-year-old Elena Nikitina disappeared. Drugged and kidnapped by a group of Chechen gangsters, she was driven through the night to Chechnya. Kept prisoner in a tiny room, she waited while the gang tried to ransom her back to her mother. But a few weeks after the abduction, war broke out between Russia and Chechnya. Life became very cheap, very quickly, and tiny Chechnya became an apocalyptic killing zone. All contact was cut off. There was no electricity. There was no telephone service. There could be no negotiations for Elena’s release. Elena was one lost soul, powerless, and at the mercy of hardened criminals who now fancied themselves patriotic freedom fighters. And she was their enemy – the face of the Russian invader. Through eight horrifying months of captivity, trapped in a land where countless people were dying every day, Elena fought desperately to stay alive, stay sane, and not lose the one thing that kept her going - hope. GIRL, TAKEN is her powerful memoir of that time. It is the harrowing yet stirring tale of a young woman whose courage, determination, and inner strength ultimately delivered her back to her life and her loved ones.

    How did that day you've forgotten look? What did it feel like? Were you lonely? Did you have the sense you were progressing anywhere? Probably not. Yet string a few thousand of them together and that's a life. --From Boy WondersCathal Kelly grew up in the seventies and eighties, decades when dressing like Michael Jackson seemed like a good idea and The Beachcombers--an adventure show about logging--seemed to make sense. But apart from fashion missteps and baffling TV plotlines, Kelly's youth was a time of wonder, obsession and discovery. Navigating an often fraught fam­ily life, Kelly sought refuge in books, music, movies, games and at least one backyard hole. However, looking back he sees that his passion for George Orwell, Star Wars or The Smiths was never just about the book, movie or band. Rather, it was about the promise each new experience offered him in making sense of the world, and how he might find a home within it.By turns funny, elegiac and insightful, Boy Wonders is an unvarnished celebration of grow­ing up and stumbling toward identity. It's about the good and the bad of those brief years when we find purpose without end, obsession with­out limit and joy in the strangest of places.

    Every day Karl Niemann commutes to work, a business manager in charge of various factories. In the evenings he returns home to life as a normal family man.For many years this was all Derek Niemann had known about his grandfather – until he made the chilling discovery that Karl had actually been an officer in the SS; and that his “business” used thousands of slave labourers in concentration camps. Suddenly, a lifetime of unsettling hints and clues fell into place.With the help of surviving relatives and hundreds of previously unknown photographs, Derek reconstructs the lives of his German forebears and uncovers the true story of what Karl did. A Nazi in the Family is an illuminating portrayal of how ordinary people can fall into the service of a monstrous regime."All families have secrets, but few are as shocking as Derek Niemann's." Culture Trip"Extraordinary." Glasgow Evening Times"Vividly captures the complex life of an ordinary man." Andrew Bomford, BBC Radio 4

    It wasn't a cry, or even a sob. It came from deep in my soul... It was the sound of a mother helpless to save her child from danger. I asked the same unanswered questions over and again. Where was he? Where was my Damien?On 2 November 1996, sixteen-year-old Damien Nettles went out for the evening in his home town of Cowes on the Isle of Wight. CCTV recorded him in a chip shop at 23:40 and on the High Street just after midnight. He has never been seen since.His mother, Valerie, has spent over two decades desperately trying to find out what happened to her son. Arrests have been made, and suspects released without charge. Despite years of research by journalists and a private investigator, Damien's vanishing remains a mystery.In this hugely moving and compelling account, Valerie Nettles tells the full, perplexing story of her son's disappearance. Someone must know what happened to Damien. Will the truth ever emerge from the shadows?

    Clay Bonnyman Evans has honored that lineage with this masterful melding of military history and personal quest.”—Ron Powers, co-author of New York Times #1 bestseller Flags of Our FathersIn November 1943, Marine 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr. was mortally wounded while leading a successful assault on a critical Japanese fortification on the Pacific atoll of Tarawa, and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military honor. The brutal, bloody 76-hour battle would ultimately claim the lives of more than 1,100 Marines and 5,000 Japanese forces. But Bonnyman's remains, along with those of hundreds of other Marines, were hastily buried and lost to history following the battle, and it would take an extraordinary effort by a determined group of dedicated civilians to find him.In 2010, having become disillusioned with the U.S. government's half-hearted efforts to recover the "lost Marines of Tarawa," Bonnyman's grandson, Clay Bonnyman Evans, was privileged to join the efforts of History Flight, Inc., a non-governmental organization dedicated to finding and repatriating the remains of lost U.S. service personnel.In Bones of My Grandfather, Evans tells the remarkable story of History Flight's mission to recover hundreds of Marines long lost to history in the sands of Tarawa. Even as the organization begins to unearth the physical past on a remote Pacific island, Evans begins his own quest to unearth and reclaim the true history of his grandfather, a charismatic, complicated hero whose life had been whitewashed, sanitized, and diminished over the decades.On May 29, 2015, Evans knelt beside a History Flight archaeologist as she uncovered the long-lost, well-preserved remains of his grandfather. And more than seventy years after giving his life for his country, a World War II hero finally came home.

    But where Hollywood’s depiction fades to black, another incredible story begins . . .Not long after the escape, fifty of the recaptured airmen were taken to desolate killing fields throughout Germany and shot on the direct orders of Hitler. When the nature of these killings came to light, Churchill’s government swore to pursue justice at any cost. A revolving team of military police, led by squadron leader Francis P. McKenna, was dispatched to Germany seventeen months after the killings to pick up a trail long gone cold.Amid the chaos of postwar Germany, divided between American, British, French, and Russian occupiers, McKenna and his men brought twenty-one Gestapo killers to justice in a hunt that spanned three years and took them into the darkest realms of Nazi fanaticism.In Human Game, Simon Read tells this harrowing story as never before. Beginning inside Stalag Luft III and the Nazi High Command, through the grueling three-year manhunt, and into the final close of the case more than two decades later, Read delivers a clear-eyed and meticulously researched account of this often-overlooked saga of hard-won justice.

    Deaf to her pleas of innocence, the Thai courts sentence Goosen to death. On appeal, her sentence is commuted to life, to be served in Bangkok's notorious Lard Yao prison. Pregnant, terrified and desperately alone, Goosen begins a harrowing 16-year journey behind bars...

    By the time she was twelve, the war had begun. Abandoned by her father when he realized the price of being associated with a Jewish wife and family, Anita and her mother were ultimately left to fend for themselves. Anita's teenage years are spent desperately fighting for survival yet learning to trust in the One she discovered would not leave her ...

    Early in 1944, German commander Field Marshal Erwin Rommel took one look at the gentle, sloping sands and announced "They will come here!” He was referring to "Omaha Beach”—the prime American D-Day landing site. The beach was subsequently transformed into three miles of lethal, bunker-protected arcs of fire, with seaside chalets converted into concrete strongpoints, fringed by layers of barbed wire and mines. The Germans called it “the Devil's Garden."When Company A of the US 116th Regiment landed on Omaha Beach in D-Day’s first wave on 6th June 1944, it lost 96% of its effective strength. Sixteen teams of US engineers arriving in the second wave were unable to blow the beach obstacles, as first wave survivors were still sheltering behind them. This was the beginning of the historic day that Landing on the Edge of Eternity narrates hour by hour—rom midnight to midnight—tracking German and American soldiers fighting across the beachhead. Mustered on their troop transport decks at 2am, the American infantry departed in landing craft at 5am. Skimming across high waves, deafened by immense broadsides from supporting battleships and weak from seasickness, they caught sight of land at 6.15. Eleven minutes later, the assault was floundering under intense German fire. Two and a half hours in, General Bradley, commanding the landings aboard USS Augusta, had to decide if to proceed or evacuate. On June 6th there were well over 2,400 casualties on Omaha Beach – easily D-Day’s highest death toll.The Wehrmacht thought they had bludgeoned the Americans into bloody submission, yet by mid-afternoon, the American troops were ashore. Why were the casualties so grim, and how could the Germans have failed? Juxtaposing the American experience—pinned down, swamped by a rising tide, facing young Wehrmacht soldiers fighting desperately for their lives, Kershaw draws on eyewitness accounts, memories, letters, and post-combat reports to expose the true horrors of Omaha Beach.These are stories of humanity, resilience, and dark humor; of comradeship and a gritty patriotism holding beleaguered men together. Landing on the Edge of Eternity is a dramatic historical ride through an amphibious landing that looked as though it might never succeed.

     The victories won by British arms in the years which followed that great deliverance have made men forget those soldiers – the first of the many – upon whom it fell to withstand the shock of Hitler’s great attack. It is now fitting that these men and their Commander-in-Chief, Lord Gort, should be worthily remembered, and their story fully told, from those first landings in France, in the autumn of 1939, until the climax of Dunkirk. The authors, both professional writers, themselves served as officers with the B.E.F., and have recaptured the gallantry and comradeship of that little force. The result is a moving story of courage and devotion in the face of odds which no other British Force has ever been called upon to face. It is chivalrous to admire a gallant enemy, and of that chivalry we have lately seen much. Justice demands that the courage and devotion of our own fighting men be no less clearly recognised. There were no medals for the B.E.F., hardly even today the laurels of memory. They were soldiers, doing a soldier’s job against odds which no British Force had ever been called upon to face, and which, it is to be hoped, no British Force will ever face again. What were they then, the men of that small Expeditionary Force, a mere army in one of the groups of French armies? How did they spend the months of what has been called the “twilight war”, and how, when the shock of battle came at last, did they withstand the blow? Dunkirk tells the true story of those brave men who fought to save the lives of so many. With the 2017 movie release of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk now is the time to remember the real history of the battle in the words of those who experienced it. Lt. Colonel Ewan Butler and Major J. Selby Bradford M.B.E., M.C. served in France as young officers during the last months of 1939 and the first five of 1940 with that small British Expeditionary force commanded by Lord Gort, which first faced the full might of Nazi Germany. Dunkirk was first published in 1950 under the title Keep The Memory Green. It was used as inspiration for the 1958 film, Dunkirk, starring Richard Attenborough.