One Hell of a War: General Patton's 317th Infantry Regiment in WWII


Dean Dominique - 2014
     “One Hell of a War” is a fascinating blend of first-hand accounts and the strategic decisions that led to them based on the history of the 317th Infantry Regiment from its initial activation in World War II through the end of the war. This book has all the elements everyone loved in “Band of Brothers” with the added integration of the strategic leadership decisions of Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower. Most interestingly, it contains well written and thought-provoking excerpts of the late Colonel James Hayes, who served with the regiment during its entire wartime service. The history books do not say a great deal about the 317th Infantry Regiment of the 80th Infantry Division in WWII. However, it was a regiment that accomplished rather startling results: first bridgehead across the Moselle, cleared out La Grande Couronne de Nancy, participated in the capture of Metz -- the first time in history that the fort had ever fallen to an assault, and, of course, participated in the Battle of the Bulge as one of the first regiments to arrive in the area after the German assault had broken the line. It suffered extremely severe casualties and contained some of the best men ever known. Praise for One Hell of a War... "One Hell of a War" is one of those books you simply can’t put down. It should come with a carrying handle and a sign warning "Do Not Disturb"…one of the most enjoyable WW2 books to date. -Phil Hodges for War History Online I love to read WWII history, and One Hell of a War takes the reader into the foxhole and onto the battlefield like no other book I have read … this is a must read book. -Jim Ravella, President, Folds of Honor Foundation It would be wonderful if every unit who fought during the war had a book like this portraying what was accomplished and how terrible war is for the men who actually fight it. -Gayalyn Wojtowicz, daughter of S/Sgt. Guyowen H. Howard, Sr. 317/B OUTSTANDING! “One Hell of a War” is a magnificent and masterfully told story that effortlessly weaves together the historical operations of one of Patton’s infantry regiments and first-hand accounts like no other book that I have read. A book this excellent is a rarity and should be on every professional reading list. -Colonel Frank Athanason, USA (Ret), Past National Commander of the Military Order of the Purple Heart Dean Dominique's careful research and editing of Colonel James Hayes' combat memoirs rings true in a book that is both a scholarly work and an exciting read. Trust me, when you reach the section about the fighting and cold weather during the Battle of the Bulge, you'll want to put on a coat; it's that good. -Alexander Barnes; Author of "In a Strange land; The American Occupation of Germany 1918-1923." A remarkable story about an infantry regiment during WWII that played a key role in operations in Europe. Dean does a masterful job of weaving the personal accounts into the historical context of the major operations. With so few WWII veterans left, books like these are valuable resources. -Rich Killblane, Author of "The Filthy Thirteen; From the Dustbowl to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest: The 101st Airborne’s Most Legendary Squad of Combat Paratroopers." Dean Dominique's new book, “One Hell of a War," knocks it out of the ballpark and is one of the best books I've read…You won't be able to put it down. -Andrew Z.

Take It Off: KISS Truly Unmasked


Greg Prato - 2019
    This is untrue. In fact, this period helped resuscitate KISS’s career, as they reestablished themselves in arenas, on the charts, and via MTV, and yielded some of their most popular songs – including Lick It Up, Heaven’s On Fire, Tears Are Falling, Crazy Crazy Nights, Hide Your Heart, Forever, Unholy, and more – many of which consistently found their way into the band’s set lists. While the majority of KISS books are focused on the glitz and glamour of the iconic makeup era, the non-makeup years are ripe to be explored in book form, and Take It Off does just that, zeroing in on the eleven albums KISS issued during this period – including such gold- and platinum-certified hits as Lick It Up, Animalize, Revenge, and Alive III – as well the resulting tours, videos, and other escapades.Take It Off draws on all-new interviews with KISS experts and associates, including the band’s lead guitarist throughout most of this period, Bruce Kulick, plus Crazy Nights producer Ron Nevison and video director Paul Rachman (Unholy/I Just Wanna/Domino). Among the other contributors are Charlie Benante (Anthrax), K.K. Downing (ex-Judas Priest), Derek Sherinan (ex-Dream Theater), and rock music experts Eddie Trunk, Katherine Turman, and Lonn Friend. The book also includes a foreword by Fozzy frontman Chris Jericho and an afterword by acclaimed producer Andreas Carlsson, as well as rare photographs and memorabilia from the period. With KISS currently in the midst of their last ever tour, now is the time to get Truly Unmasked.

My Boys and Girls Are in There: The 1937 New London School Explosion


Ron Rozelle - 2012
    The resulting explosion leveled the four-year-old structure and resulted in a death toll of more than three hundred—most of them children. To this day, it is the worst school disaster in the history of the United States. The tragedy and its aftermath were the first big stories covered by Walter Cronkite, then a young wire service reporter stationed in Dallas. He would later say that no war story he ever covered—during World War II or Vietnam—was as heart-wrenching.In the weeks following the tragedy, a fact-finding committee sought to determine who was to blame. It soon became apparent that the New London school district had, along with almost all local businesses and residents, tapped into pipelines carrying unrefined gas from the plentiful oil fields of the area. It was technically illegal, but natural gas was in abundance in the “Oil Patch.” The jerry-rigged conduits leaked the odorless “green” gas that would destroy the school.A long-term effect of the disaster was the shared guilt experienced—for the rest of their lives—by most of the survivors. There is, perhaps, no better example than Bill Thompson, who was in his fifth grade English class and “in the mood to flirt” with Billie Sue Hall, who was sitting two seats away. Thompson asked another girl to trade seats with him. She agreed—and was killed in the explosion, while Thompson and Hall both survived and lived long lives, never quite coming to terms with their good fortune.My Boys and Girls Are in There: The 1937 New London School Explosion is a meticulous, candid account by veteran educator and experienced author Ron Rozelle. Unfolding with the narrative pace of a novel, the story woven by Rozelle—beginning with the title—combines the anguished words of eyewitnesses with telling details from the historical and legal record. Released to coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New London School disaster, My Boys and Girls Are in There paints an intensely human portrait of this horrific event.

Pioneer Days in the Southwest from 1850 to 1879: Thrilling Descriptions of Buffalo Hunting, Indian Fighting and Massacres, Cowboy Life and Home Building


Charles Goodnight - 1909
     Pioneer Days is written by the rank and file who were the true heroes and heroines, who suffered and gave their lives and the lives of those near and dear to them, in order to lay the foundation for future happy homes, peace and prosperity. The writers of this book were the small remnant yet left who were the actual participators in these early struggles, and they give their experiences, unadorned, without any claim to literary merit; for the writers were by then old. When you read their simple statements of facts of Indian conflicts, of terrible suffering and privations, so unassumingly told by them, it is only fitting that those who have had the advantage of schools and Christianity, and refinement, of which they were almost entirely deprived, to cover their rough and often ungrammatical sentences with the cloak of Christian charity, and interline them with garlands of flowers and chivalry which truly belongs to them. With contributions from Charles Goodnight (1836-1929), Emanuel Dubbs (1843–1932), and John A. Hart (1790–1840), the 1909 book "Pioneer Days in the Southwest" gives unadorned truths and conditions that fortunately have passed out forever. A great portion is devoted to the life of Charles Goodnight the first pioneer of the Texas Panhandle. No history of pioneer days would be complete without the name of Charles Goodnight. While Mr. Goodnight has a state and national reputation, the people of the Panhandle of Texas feel that they are especially honored in owning him as a citizen, and he and his estimable wife had, and now hold a place in the hearts of old timers as well as later settlers, that would cause the people to condemn any writer who failed to give to them that mete of praise which they so richly deserve, and place their name at the head of the highly honored galaxy of heroes who contended with and finally overcame every obstacle and danger of a country entirely given over to lawlessness at the time of their advent. These histories generally took place in the present-day states of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico.

Fifty Years on the Trail:: A True Story of Western Life


John Young Nelson - 2014
    Born in Virginia in 1826, Nelson ran away from home as a young teenager to escape a domineering father and to seek adventure in the west. He took odd jobs along with way working on farms, serving as a cabin boy on a Mississippi steamer, and becoming an apprentice with a group of traders traveling west from Missouri. After meeting a band of Sioux, he decided that the nomadic life of an Indian was the adventure he was looking for and got himself adopted into the tribe. Here he learned how to live off the land and acquired the skills of a Sioux warrior. His adopted father was the Chief Spotted Tail and his brother-in-law was Red Cloud—Chief of the Sioux Nation. As a young Sioux brave, Nelson participated in Indian raids and skirmishes. Later, he guided Brigham Young and the first group of Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, worked as a military scout with William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill), fought in the Indian Wars, and served as a lawman in North Dakota. In his many escapades he often narrowly escaped death from bullets, arrows, and knives. Nelson’s story is a fascinating view of the early American west in all its glory. This pre-1923 publication has been converted from its original format for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the conversion.

If The Devil Had A Wife


Rebecca Nugent - 2010
    Happily ever after. Such are the classic promises of fairy tales. Yet in Texas we find a twist to the familiar storyline. In If the Devil Had a Wife, there is still the battle of Good vs. Evil, a beautiful maiden, a wealthy suitor, a kingdom of riches and the wicked witch, but any similarity with Cinderella and Snow White ends there. With the help of her life partner and an attorney (always necessary in these modern times), Nelda Stark executes a devious plan that elevates fraud and theft to a new high. A massive coverup reaches into the Texas Attorney General's Office, stealing from not only the Stark family, but the federal and state governments.

Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life


Robert M. Utley - 1989
    Utley does what countless books, movies, television shows, musical compositions, and paintings have failed to do: he successfully strips off the veneer of legendry to expose the reality of Billy the Kid. Using previously untapped sources, he presents an engrossing story—the most complete and accurate ever—of a youthful hoodlum and sometime killer who found his calling in New Mexico’s bloody power struggle known as the Lincoln County War. In unmasking the legend Utley also tells us much about our heritage of frontier vigilantism and violence.

The Boy Captives: (Clinton And Jeff Smith)


Clinton L. Smith - 1977
    

Rebecca's Hope


Kimberly Grist - 2018
     As an adult, she is armed with skills that most would covet, yet she lives in a boarding house, works as a waitress and struggles financially. Most single women in the area didn’t stay single long. Most, but not her. The one man she had said yes to was dragging his feet. The townspeople all agree she is in need of a husband. Even the young girls in her Sunday School Class have taken action and writing an ad for the paper. Wanted: Husband for Rebecca Mueller. **Must be handsome, nice, like children, and live within walking distance of Carrie Town School. Will her circumstances change and allow her to hold out for true love?

The Great Clippers


Jane D. Lyon - 2016
    These wealthy men had founded the first banks in the United States and built its first railroads, factories, and steamships. Now, they were to cap their achievements by making their young country equally superior in size, and in the process, producing the greatest, swiftest, and most beautiful craft the world had ever seen - the clipper ship. This book not only traces the origins and achievements of the clipper but enlivens the dry bones of historic fact with the flesh and blood of clipper captains and crews. A great era comes to life with their courageous, tenacious stories.

An Indian Winter or With the Indians in the Rockies


James Willard Schultz - 1913
    W. Schultz (1859–1947) was an author, explorer, and historian known for his historical writings of the Blackfoot Indians in the late 1800s, when he lived among them as a fur trader. In 1907, Schultz published My Life as an Indian, the first of many future writings about the Blackfeet that he would produce over the next thirty years. Schultz lived in Browning, Montana. "With the Indians in the Rockies" is by a Rocky Mountain veteran, J. W. Shultz, and is “real stuff,” vivid and exciting, with the value that comes from firsthand knowledge. It is the story of Thomas Fox, a trapper, whose life was spent among the Indians——friendly and hostile,—in the pursuit of his calling, and who told the story to Mr. Schultz around the camp-fire. Buffalo-hunting, rowing up the Missouri, fights with Indians, the discovery that his Uncle Wesley was married to a squaw, to whom he became very much attached, exploring the Rocky Mountains, adventures in the snow, bear hunting and the like make up the story.It is a story of out-door adventure, Indians, wild animals, and the perils of a mountain winter that has seldom been equalled in absorbing vividness and power. Mr. Schultz's work bids fair to become a classic for old and young alike. Few men are now left who can write with such knowledge and charm about the scenes and people of the old buffalo days. Every boy, as well as every man and woman who retains an interest in the realities of life in the open, will read the book with delight.Schultz writes:"WHEN in the eighteen seventies I turned my back on civilization and joined the trappers and traders of the Northwest, Thomas Fox became my friend. We were together in the Indian camps and trading posts often for months at a time ; he loved to recount his adventures in still earlier days, and thus it was that I learned the facts of his life. The stories that he told by the evening camp-fire and before the comfortable fireplaces of our various posts, on long winter days, were impressed upon my memory, but to make sure of them I frequently took notes of the more important points. "As time passed, I realized more and more how unusual and interesting his adventures were, and I urged him to write an account of them. He began with enthusiasm, but soon tired of the unaccustomed work. Later, however, after the buffalo had been exterminated and we were settled on a cattle-ranch, where the life was of a deadly monotony compared with that which we had led, I induced him to take up the narrative once more."

The Raven's Bride: A Novel of Eliza Allen and Sam Houston


Elizabeth Crook - 1991
    The ensuing scandal caused Houston to resign his office in disgrace, leave Tennessee to live with the Cherokees in Arkansas, and eventually to go to Texas and mold its history.

Zoe and Verse


Jade Jones - 2018
    On the contrary, she's the total opposite. Zoe’s life has been an uphill battle for as long as she can remember. Raised by crack addict parents, life has already dealt her a bad hand and she has to do everything she can to survive – even if some of the tricks up her sleeve can land her in hot water. But twenty years old and headstrong as ever, Zoe is hell-bent on following her boyfriend Sensei – a jack boy who landed himself behind bars after being caught with stolen work - through fire and brimstone. When it comes to Sensei, Zoe is just a naïve young girl in love and she swears to hold him down. But when her boyfriend’s irresistible older brother Verse enters the scene, she is helpless against his charms and falls for him hard and fast, the other brother soon forgotten. At 38, Verse is everything Sensei wishes he was - including the boss of H-town. Although he idolizes his brother, will things change now that Verse has stolen his girl? Will Sensei still aspire to follow in Verse’s footsteps when he gets out of prison to find that Zoe’s keeping time with him? And can Zoe finally get herself together and change for the better? Find out in “Zoe and Verse”, the first volume of this epic and unforgettable Houston-based story of love, passion, betrayal, and reckoning! THIS IS A COMPLETED SERIES.

Jack Slater: Orphan Train to Cattle Baron


Johnny Gunn - 2017
    He was saved by the Children’s Aid Society that placed orphaned children with families on the frontier. These families welcomed the children and most found loving homes. Some grew up to become industrial, political, or community leaders. Slater did not find a loving home. Instead, he found himself at Pete Jablonski’s farm in Fargo, Dakota Territory where abuse was a daily dose of reality. When outlaws rob a local mine payroll and kill four men in the process, Slater makes a mortal enemy of the Elko County Sheriff that takes Slater's life is an unexpected direction.