From 1941 to 1944, Bignor Manor, a farmhouse in Sussex provided board and lodging for men and women of the French Resistance before they were flown by moonlight into occupied France. Barbara Bertram, whose husband was a conducting officer for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), became hostess for these daring agents and their pilots during their brief stopovers in their house. But who were these men and women that passed through the Bertram’s house? And what activities did they conduct whilst in France that meant that so many of them never returned? Edward Wake-Walker charts the experiences of numerous agents, such as Gilbert Renault, Christian Pineau and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, and the networks of operatives that they created that provided top-secret intelligence on German defences and naval bases, U-boats, as well as Hitler’s devastating new weapons, the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs. A House For Spies provides fascinating insight into the lives of SIS agents and their Lysander pilots who provided invaluable intelligence to Allied forces. This is a much-forgotten aspect of the Second World War that is only now being told by Edward Wake-Walker. “Utterly fascinating, very moving and funny. I couldn't have enjoyed it more.” — Hugh Grant “Edward Wake-Walker's meticulously researched chronicles of desperate resistance, audacity, duty, determination and daring are a valuable addition to the history of World War II” — Bel Mooney, Daily Mail “It kept me up at night as I wanted to know what happened to all the various characters [brought] so admirably back to life” — Russell England, Director of Bletchley Park: Codebreaking's Forgotten Genius and Operation Mincemeat

     As the Germans closed in on the Allies, trapping them on the beaches of Dunkirk, it seemed the entire British army would be obliterated. Such a loss would almost certainly force the British to surrender and allow a Nazi invasion of the UK. Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay planned a mass evacuation across the English Channel, but with the Germans drawing ever closer and intense air raids from the Luftwaffe, escape seemed all but impossible. But with a combination of excellent planning, luck, and an almost inconceivable bit of help from none other than Adolf Hitler himself, Operation Dynamo was underway. Over 900 boats sailed to Dunkirk - including destroyers, ferries, fishing boats and the famous “little boats of Dunkirk” – and, across nine tense days, rescued 338,226 soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk in what remains the biggest evacuation in military history. This brilliantly researched book by historian David Boyle recounts each fraught day of the famous rescue mission that Winston Churchill famously called a ‘miracle of deliverance’. Praise for David Boyle 'A wonderfully elegant and pithy reappraisal of the “miracle” that saved Britain' Saul David ‘Exhilarating’ - Daily Mail David Boyle is a British author and journalist who writes mainly about history and new ideas in economics, money, business and culture. He lives in Crystal Palace, London. His books include ‘Unheard Unseen: Warfare in the Dardanelles’, ‘Towards the Setting Sun: The Race for America’ and ‘The Age to Come’.

    He told them it was illegal to hitchhike in the area and that he would take them back to safety. He lied.Schaefer took them to a remote wooded area where he drew his gun, tied them up, gagged them and looped nooses around their necks. Schaefer received a call on his police radio and had to leave the girls but he vowed to return and finish what he

    Roosevelt and the five extraordinary men he used to pull America into World War II The period between Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the attack on Pearl Harbor was the turning point of the twentieth century. When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Americans were eager to isolate themselves from the conflict. Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to help the democracies, but he was hemmed in by congressional and public opposition and frustrated by a lack of information. How could he obtain the intelligence he required when he was trapped in Washington? Distrusting the State Department, he instead sent five men on special diplomatic missions to Europe. Their missions took them into the middle of the war and exposed them to the century’s leading figures— and Roosevelt along with them.First off the mark was Sumner Welles, a chilly patrician who traveled around Europe in the spring of 1940. In summer of that year, after the fall of France, William “Wild Bill” Donovan—war hero and future spymaster—visited an isolated UK at the president’s behest to determine whether Britain could hold out against the Nazis. Donovan’s report helped convince FDR that the country was worth backing. After he won an unprecedented third term in November 1940, FDR threw a lifeline to Britain in the form of Lend-Lease and dispatched three men to help secure it. Harry Hopkins, the frail social worker who became the whirling dervish at the center of the New Deal, was sent to explain Lend-Lease to Winston Churchill. Averell Harriman — a handsome, ambitious railroad heir—was charged with delivering the aid to London. Roosevelt even put to work his rumpled, charismatic opponent, Wendell Willkie, whose visit to London was a public relations triumph. Then, in summer 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of Russia. Hopkins returned to Britain to confer with Churchill and traveled to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. Hopkins’s mission gave Roosevelt the confidence to gamble on aiding the Soviet Union.Roosevelt’s five emissaries are unforgettable characters. Taken together, their missions plot the arc of America’s transformation from a reluctant middle power into a global leader. Drawing on vast archival research, historian Michael Fullilove has rescued these men and their missions and given them back to history. At the center of everything, of course, is FDR himself, who moved his envoys around the globe with skill and élan. Rendezvous with Destiny is narrative history at its most delightful, stirring, and important.

    H.H. Holmes" contains three fully illustrated, unabridged primary source books, plus Holmes' published confession as originally documented shortly before his execution. For the first time in over a century, these materials are again available - and all in one book. HOLMES' OWN STORY by Herman W. Mudgett - 1895 In this autobiography, Holmes recounts his childhood years, and life's trials and tribulations. THE HOLMES-PITEZEL CASE by Detective Frank Geyer - 1896 Included are rare court transcripts, expert witness testimony, and in-depth criminal and legal detection methods utilized in the trial against Holmes. THE HOLMES CASTLE by Robert Corbitt - 1895 Robert Corbitt entered the Holmes "castle" when the investigation into the horrors first began. Learn what made Corbitt believe that Holmes was innocent. THE CONFESSION OF H.H. HOLMES - 1896 Holmes gives the media what they want...a confession. UNABRIDGED - ILLUSTRATED

    It makes visceral the fear, the filth, and the cold that were his constant companions. Kafak is a reluctant hero who intentionally pisses off the brass to avoid promotion because he has seen too many of his commanding officers get blown to pieces and he doesn’t want to be next. He fights from the beaches of Anzio in Italy and battles up through the South of France toward Germany, facing one terrible heart-pounding encounter after another. Seen through Kafak’s thick-lensed army-issued glasses, the wider implications of the war remain blurry while he focuses on the simple, urgent needs of survival: keep your head down, keep your feet dry, gain the next six feet of ground, and concentrate on what tomorrow will bring.

    Only after they arrived at their destinations did some of them realize how much they missed female companionship..One way for men living on the frontier to meet women was through subscriptions to heart-and-hand clubs. The men received newspapers with information, and sometimes photographs, about women, with whom they corresponded. Eventually, a man might convince a woman to join him in the West, and in matrimony. Social status, political connections, money, companionship, or security were often considered more than love in these arrangements. Complete with historic photographs and actual advertisements from both women seeking husbands and males seeking brides, Object Matrimony includes stories of courageous mail order brides and their exploits as well as stories of the marriage brokers, mercenary matchmakers looking to profit as merchants did off of the miners and settlers. Some of these stories end happily ever after; others reveal desperate situations that robbed the brides of their youth and sometimes their lives.

    However, few can match Hans Sturm in his astonishing rise from a mere private in an infantry regiment, thrown into the bloody maelstrom of the Eastern Front, to a highly decorated war hero. A young man who had displayed fearless heroism in combat, earning him some of Germany's highest military awards, Sturm hated bullies and injustice, and reacted in his normal pugnacious and outspoken manner when confronted with wrongdoing. From striking a member of the feared Sicherheitsdienst for his treatment of a Jewish woman, to refusing to wear a decoration he felt was tainted because of the treatment of enemy partisans, Sturm repeatedly stuck to his moral values no matter what the risk. Even with the war finally over, Sturm's travails would not end for another eight years as he languished in a number of Soviet labour camps until he was finally released in 1953. ** This electronic edition includes 60 black-and-white photographs **

    A true wartime drama based on the experience of Dorothy Joy Kinney Chambers M.D. and her family. This sweeping biographical novel brings to life the dramatic experience of a valiant woman who, armed only with the white coat of her profession, found the courage to live her life on the razor’s edge and survived it. It’s a captivating story of service and sacrifice, of love and the searing emotions that gripped this missionary doctor throughout her imperiled course.“A lovely story of an extraordinary woman! The use of contemporary sources adds authenticity to an ordeal that could be overwhelming in its grimness were it not described so vividly and poetically.” —Dorey Schmidt, Ph.D.Dorothy Kinney had found herself in remote India in 1928, a medical missionary charged with building up a hospital for the women and children of Assam. The fledgling doctor began her practice in Gauhati, where her surgeries were performed by the light of a kerosene lamp in an open-air clinic with no electricity, no running water, and no sewer system. She left it ten years later a fully functioning modern hospital, with running water, electricity, and the complete devotion of the people of Assam. It was there she fell in love. Pregnant with their second child, Dorothy, her missionary husband Fred Chambers, and their daughter Carol Joy, set out on a voyage that would take them to their new missionary post in Iloilo, on the Philippine island of Panay. One day later War was declared in Europe. She could not know that by the time her unborn baby turned eighteen months old her little family would be swept into a Japanese internment camp. With four thousand other prisoners of war she struggled to feed her little family in the prison at Santo Tomas, a place where hundreds died and most starved. Had General MacArthur’s bold rescue not liberated them, the entire camp would have been lost. Many remember Dorothy Chambers in her white coat of courage, doctoring the children of the camp, never knowing that her little family would come within just twenty-four hours of execution. This is her story.

    He’s the only artist ever to win Grammy Awards for music, lyrics, and orchestration, and his chart-topping career has, so far, lasted fifty years, most recently with a Kanye West rap hit and a new classical nocturne. Now, in his first memoir, Webb delivers a snapshot of his life from 1955 to 1970, from simple and sere Oklahoma to fast and fantastical Los Angeles, from the crucible of his family to the top of his longed-for profession. Webb was a preacher’s son whose father climbed off a tractor to receive his epiphany, and Jimmy, barely out of his teen age years, sank down into the driver’s seat of a Cobra to speed to Las Vegas to meet with Elvis. Classics such as “Up, Up and Away”, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, “Wichita Lineman”, “Galveston”, “The Worst that Could Happen”, “All I Know”, and “MacArthur Park” were all recorded by some of the most important voices in pop before Webb’s twenty-fifth birthday: he thought it was easy. The sixties were a supernova, and Webb was at their center, whipsawed from the proverbial humble beginnings into a moneyed and manic international world of beautiful women, drugs, cars and planes. That stew almost took him down—but Webb survived, his passion for music and work among his lifelines. The Cake and The Rain is a surprising and unusual book: Webb’s talent as a writer and storyteller is here on every page. His book is rich with a sense of time and place, and with the voices of characters, vanished and living, famous and not, but all intimately involved with him in his youth, when life seemed nothing more than a party and Webb the eternal guest of honor.

    She was an ordinary German schoolgirl from an average family thrust into the extraordinary circumstances of war. Her memoir vividly describes the price she, her family, and all the German people paid for Hitler's ambition. Relived through her memories, it is truly a story of childhood innocence lost, but also of survival through grit and courage. She endured air raids, bomb shelters, military training, capture, imprisonment, rape and harrowing escape. The author has created a razor-sharp, clear-eyed and tense narrative about her life during this frightening time, as well as the story of her early struggles as a German war bride settling into a new life in America. This is Dorchen, and she is a remarkable woman.

    A surprising number go on to kill a second or even third wife or girlfriend, often in exactly the same way. In more than fifty chilling case studies, Marilee Strong examines the strange and complex psychology that drives these killers—from the murder a century ago that inspired the novel An American Tragedy to Scott Peterson, Mark Hacking, Jeffrey MacDonald, Ira Einhorn, Charles Stuart, Robert Durst, Michael White, Barton Corbin, and many others. Erased also looks at how these men manipulate the legal system and exploit loopholes in missing persons procedures and death investigation, exposing how easy it can be to get away with murder.

    The book chronicles Virski's experiences as a soldier in the Ukraine and Central Asia, describing the hardships, his comrades-in-arms, the food, clothing, and interactions with officers and the NKVD (secret police). When war with Germany breaks-out, Virski witnesses scenes of brutality and is caught in fierce fighting, where he is wounded and hospitalized. Following his recovery, he eventually makes his way back to his native Poland. My Life in the Red Army is impressive for its straightforward style yet tinged with a sense of humor towards his situation.

    They were not -- as we have all come to believe--two halves of the same apple. Each had a distinctive role in creating the first "flying machine."How could two misanthropic brothers who never left home, were high-school dropouts, and made a living as bicycle mechanics have figured out the secret of manned flight? This new history of the Wright Brothers' monumental accomplishment focuses on their early years of trial and error at Kitty Hawk (1900-1903) and Orville Wright's epic fight with the Smithsonian Institute and Glenn Curtis. William Hazelgrove makes a convincing case that it was Wilbur Wright who designed the first successful airplane, not Orville. He shows that, while Orville's role was important, he generally followed his brother's lead and assisted with the mechanical details to make Wilbur's vision a reality. Combing through original archives and family letters, Hazelgrove reveals the differences in the brothers' personalities and abilities. He examines how the Wright Brothers' myth was born when Wilbur Wright died early and left his brother to write their history with personal friend John Kelly. The author notes the peculiar inwardness of their family life, business and family problems, bouts of depression, serious illnesses, and yet, rising above it all, was Wilbur's obsessive zeal to test out his flying ideas. When he found Kitty Hawk, this desolate location on North Carolina's Outer Banks became his laboratory. By carefully studying bird flight and the Rubik's Cube of control, Wilbur cracked the secret of aerodynamics and achieved liftoff on December 17, 1903. Hazelgrove's richly researched and well-told tale of the Wright Brothers' landmark achievement captures the excitement of the times at the start of the "American century."

    Her loved ones were cruelly forced from her arms in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland and perished in Treblinka Death Camp. This is a true story of Holocaust survival. In ww2 books, it is a searing story of human rights abuses and genocide.The story of Nazi Germany and the Jews is a story of anti-Semitism, Nazi concentration camps, gas chambers and World War 11 (wwii). The Warsaw ghetto where the Nazis had imprisoned the Jews was being emptied as Hitler’s Final Solution to murder all of European Jewry was put into action. Lena kept thinking, “It’s my turn next.” As some Jews escaped Treblinka and exposed it as being a death camp not a labour camp, young men and women in the ghetto decided to make a stand.Lena helped in the resistance which became the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by gathering light bulbs from empty houses which could be used for Molotov cocktails. By a miracle, she escaped the ghetto before it became an inferno. But where could she hide? When it was over and she could walk free, the tears she had held back flooded out because she was all alone and there was no one to care that she had survived and no one to go to.Author Barbara Miller adds to Holocaust history and ww2 German history by skilfully weaving her research with Lena’s diary and interviews to bring her ww2 biography to life. Lena helped her companions in hiding to survive with her humour and compassion. She turned 100 in January 2019 and her miraculous story of survival against the odds will inspire you to not give up no matter how dark the time or difficult the situation or cruel the people around you. Download or order now! What are others saying about this remarkable book? This is a compelling, indeed exemplary work, that merges the history of the Holocaust with the live story of one survivor: Lena Goldstein, aged 100, one of the last living witnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust. Konrad Kwiet, Emeritus Professor and Resident Historian Sydney Jewish Museum This is a truly beautiful collaboration between the author and her subject, who have together produced an invaluable documentation of a unique, moving, life story set against the backdrop of one of the darkest moments in human history.  To read "If I Survive" is to meet a remarkable person and to be touched by her intense humanity in an inhuman world. Jeremy Jones AM, former President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and Director, Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council In this book Barbara Miller tells a powerful, must read story of survival - the story of Lena Goldstein, an elegant, articulate centenarian, a victim of one of the most horrific periods in human history, the Holocaust. Josie Lacey OAM, Author of An Inevitable Path, A Memoir, Life Member Executive Council of Australian Jewry, WIZO, and ECC Barbara Miller has given Lena Goldstein’s personal Holocaust journey the validation it so richly deserves; an eye witness account of a truly inspiring and heroic survivor. Viv Parry, Chairperson, Child Survivors of the Holocaust, Melbourne Another important book from the celebrated writer Barbara Miller. Expertly researched and skillfully written. Irene Shaland, author of The Dao of Being Jewish and Other Stories: Seeking Jewish narrative all over the World.” It is not often that you commence a book and feel compelled to continue reading until it is finished.