Hidden Warbirds: The Epic Stories of Finding, Recovering, and Rebuilding WWII's Lost Aircraft


Nicholas A. Veronico - 2013
    His website, wreckchasing.com, is the go-to source for enthusiasts who want to know more about how to locate vintage airplane wrecks and then tell their stories.In this engaging new book, Veronico explores the romantic era of World War II Warbirds and the stories of some of its most famous wrecks, including the Dotty Mae (a P-47 submerged for over 60 years in the Traunsee in Austria, excavated and recovered with great care), the Swamp Ghost (a B-17E which crashed in New Guinea in the latter days of World War II and which was only recently discovered), and Glacier Girl (a P-38, part of "The Lost Squadron," which crashed in a large ice sheet in Greenland in 1942). Throughout, Veronico provides a history of the aircraft, as well as the unique story behind each discovery and recovery with ample illustrations. Hidden Warbirds is aviation history at its best.

Papyrus


John Oehler - 2013
    An accidental tea spill damages the royal papyrus she has been struggling to interpret, the papyrus purported to be Queen Tiye’s last message to her son, Tutankhamun. But the spill also exposes hidden writing below the surface hieroglyphs. Horrified at the damage but aching to read the entire secret text, Rika agrees to let visiting remote-sensing expert David Chamberlain smuggle the priceless document out of the museum and scan it with instruments on his aircraft. The results are stunning. They show Tiye, previously a footnote in history, to have been the power behind the thrones of her husband and sons, as well as the architect of a monotheistic religion unique in ancient Egypt. Riveted by these revelations, Rika and David devise a covert plan to locate Tiye’s tomb. But Major Hassam of the Egyptian Secret Police misreads their activities as a plot to overthrow the government and vows to stop them at all costs. Reared in revolution, Rika feels a spiritual bond with Tiye, an African commoner who revolutionized Egyptian society by introducing a religion that freed Egypt from the tyranny of the Amun priests. Rika’s quest to find Tiye’s tomb parallels the queen’s last journey up the Nile, three thousand years before, to be buried alive in a tomb like no other. In a league with Michael Crichton, Dan Brown, and Wilbur Smith, John Oehler has created a cinematic page-turner of explosive yet poetic brilliance. And readers who liked Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, will love Rika. Papyrus was a semi-finalist in the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition (top 1% of 10,000 entries) and garnered more than a hundred 5-star reviews.

Tiny Blunders/Big Disasters: Thirty-Nine Tiny Mistakes That Changed the World Forever (Revised Edition)


Jared Knott - 2020
    World History

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson | Chapter Compilation


Ethan Thomas - 2016
     The ship was called “magnificent”, consuming as much as one hundred forty tons of coal every day even if it just stands still on the dock, and standing seven stories tall from dock to bridge. She was considered by engineers and shipbuilders as one of the finest examples of man’s ingenuity and creativity. In addition, out of all the ships that were converted for use in the war, the Lusitania was the only one that was exempted and continued on as a cruise ship. However, its job of carrying passengers across the Atlantic Ocean was not the thing that made her famous today. Read more.... Download your copy today! for a limited time discount of only $2.99! Available on PC, Mac, smart phone, tablet or Kindle device. © 2015 All Rights Reserved by Unlimited Press Works, LLC

The Atomic City Girls


Janet Beard - 2018
    Oak Ridge, Tennessee has sprung up in a matter of months—a town of trailers and segregated houses, 24-hour cafeterias, and constant security checks. There, June joins hundreds of other young girls operating massive machines whose purpose is never explained. They know they are helping to win the war, but must ask no questions and reveal nothing to outsiders.The girls spend their evenings socializing and flirting with soldiers, scientists, and workmen at dances and movies, bowling alleys and canteens. June longs to know more about their top-secret assignment and begins an affair with Sam Cantor, the young Jewish physicist from New York who oversees the lab where she works and understands the end goal only too well, while her beautiful roommate Cici is on her own mission: to find a wealthy husband and escape her sharecropper roots. Across town, African-American construction worker Joe Brewer knows nothing of the government’s plans, only that his new job pays enough to make it worth leaving his family behind, at least for now. But a breach in security will intertwine his fate with June’s search for answers.When the bombing of Hiroshima brings the truth about Oak Ridge into devastating focus, June must confront her ideals about loyalty, patriotism, and war itself.

Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health


Jeanne E. Abrams - 2013
    Concerns over health affected the founding fathers and their families as it did slaves, merchants, immigrants, and everyone else in North America. As both victims of illness and national leaders, the Founders occupied a unique position regarding the development of public health in America. Revolutionary Medicine refocuses the study of the lives of George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and James and Dolley Madison away from the usual lens of politics to the unique perspective of sickness, health, and medicine in their era. For the founders, republican ideals fostered a reciprocal connection between individual health and the "health" of the nation. Studying the encounters of these American founders with illness and disease, as well as their viewpoints about good health, not only provides us with a richer and more nuanced insight into their lives, but also opens a window into the practice of medicine in the eighteenth century, which is at once intimate, personal, and first hand. Perhaps most importantly, today's American public health initiatives have their roots in the work of America's founders, for they recognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some new responsibilities with respect to ensuring the health and well-being of its citizenry. The state of medicine and public healthcare today is still a work in progress, but these founders played a significant role in beginning the conversation that shaped the contours of its development. Jeanne E. Abrams is Professor at Penrose Library and the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver. She is the author of Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail: A History in the American West (NYU Press 2006) and Dr. Charles David Spivak: A Jewish Immigrant and the American Tuberculosis Movement, as well as numerous articles in the fields of American, Jewish and medical history which have appeared in scholarly journals and popular magazines."Revolutionary Medicine is a 'must-read' for anyone interested in the birth of America. Upon closing Jeanne E. Abrams's wonderful book about the illnesses and health experiences of the nation's founders, you will never be able to look at Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and their peers the same way again."—Howard Markel, author of An Anatomy of an Addiction"We know their vaunted place in history: Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, and statesman, scientist, and pamphleteer Benjamin Franklin. But it’s their work in public health—and their personal battles with illness—that makes this blend of political and medical history so engaging...Abrams’s meticulous medical portrait of colonial times—and its most powerful leaders—will be fascinating reading for students of both history and medicine."—Publishers Weekly

The Icepick Surgeon


Sam Kean - 2021
    But sometimes, when obsession gets the better of scientists, they twist a noble pursuit into something sinister. Under this spell, knowledge isn’t everything, it’s the only thing—no matter the cost. Bestselling author Sam Kean tells the true story of what happens when unfettered ambition pushes otherwise rational men and women to cross the line in the name of science, trampling ethical boundaries and often committing crimes in the process.The Icepick Surgeon masterfully guides the reader across two thousand years of history, beginning with Cleopatra’s dark deeds in ancient Egypt. The book reveals the origins of much of modern science in the transatlantic slave trade of the 1700s, as well as Thomas Edison’s mercenary support of the electric chair and the warped logic of the spies who infiltrated the Manhattan Project. But the sins of science aren’t all safely buried in the past. Many of them, Kean reminds us, still affect us today. We can draw direct lines from the medical abuses of Tuskegee and Nazi Germany to current vaccine hesitancy, and connect icepick lobotomies from the 1950s to the contemporary failings of mental-health care. Kean even takes us into the future, when advanced computers and genetic engineering could unleash whole new ways to do one another wrong.Unflinching, and exhilarating to the last page, The Icepick Surgeon fuses the drama of scientific discovery with the illicit thrill of a true-crime tale. With his trademark wit and precision, Kean shows that, while science has done more good than harm in the world, rogue scientists do exist, and when we sacrifice morals for progress, we often end up with neither.

Jesse Ventura's Marijuana Manifesto: How Lies, Corruption, and Propaganda Kept Cannabis Illegal


Jesse Ventura - 2016
    Now, more than ever before, our country needs to see full legalization of medical/recreational marijuana and hemp. Any way you look at it, for whoever is using it, marijuana is a medicinal plant, in abundant supply. Every month and every year that goes by, we find out more positive things about it. Medicinal marijuana has been demonized through the years but obviously this plant has a great deal of positive attributes, and it’s also a renewable resource. Being a cash crop, marijuana is bad for the pharmaceutical industry. Is Big Pharma pressuring the government to continue to deny sick people access? If so, that’s truly a crime against American citizens. And as Ventura writes: “Our government won’t do the right thing and legalize marijuana unless we the people demand it, because there are so many people within our government on the payroll, all thanks to the War on Drugs." Jesse Ventura’s Marijuana Manifesto calls for an end to the War on Drugs. Just because something is illegal, that doesn’t mean it goes away, it just means that criminals run it. Legalizing marijuana and marijuana dispensaries will serve to rejuvenate our pathetic economy, and just might make people a little happier. Ventura’s book will show us all how we can take our country back.

Atlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic


Joe Jackson - 2012
    Although it was one of the most coveted prizes in the world, it sat unclaimed (not without efforts) for eight long years, until the spring of 1927. It was then, during five incredibly tense weeks, that one of those magical windows in history opened, when there occurred a nexus of technology, innovation, character, and spirit that led so many contenders (from different parts of the world) to all suddenly be on the cusp of the exact same achievement at the exact same time. Atlantic Fever is about the race; it is a milestone in American history whose story has never been fully told. Richard Byrd, Noel Davis, Stanton Wooster, Clarence Chamberlin, Charles Levine, René Fonck, Charles Nungesser, and François Coli—all had equal weight in the race with Charles Lindbergh. Although the story starts in September 1926 with the crash of the first competitor, or even further back with the 1919 establishment of the prize, its heart is found in a short period, those five weeks from April 14 to May 21, 1927, when the world held its breath and the aviators met their separate fates in the air.

The Gamblers: John Aspinall, James Goldsmith and the Murder of Lord Lucan


John George Pearson - 2005
    In the tradition of “true crime” books, The Gamblers follows the fortunes of five men at the center of the ultra-fashionable Clermont Set including the infamous Lord Lucan who disappeared following the murder of his children’s nanny.

Pandemic 1918: The Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History


Catharine Arnold - 2018
    In three successive waves, from 1918 to 1919, influenza killed more than 50 million people. German soldiers termed it Blitzkatarrh, British soldiers referred to it as Flanders Grippe, but world-wide, the pandemic gained the notorious title of “Spanish Flu." Nowhere on earth escaped: the United States recorded 550,000 deaths (five times its total military fatalities in the war), while European deaths totaled more than two million.Amid the war, some governments suppressed news of the outbreak. Even as entire battalions were decimated, with both the Allies and the Germans suffering massive casualties, the details of many servicemen’s deaths were hidden to protect public morale. Meanwhile, civilian families were being struck down in their homes. Philadelphia ran out of gravediggers and coffins, and mass burial trenches had to be excavated with steam shovels. Spanish flu conjured up the specter of the Black Death of 1348 and the great plague of 1665, while the medical profession, shattered after five terrible years of conflict, lacked the resources to contain and defeat this new enemy. Through primary and archival sources, historian Catharine Arnold gives readers the first truly global account of this terrible epidemic.

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital


Sheri Fink - 2013
    Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in America for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better. A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis.

The Jamestown Experiment: The Remarkable Story of the Enterprising Colony and the Unexpected Results That Shaped America


Tony Williams - 2011
    The American dream was built along the banks of the James River in Virginia.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South


Radley Balko - 2018
    Together they spent a combined thirty years in prison before finally being exonerated in 2008. Meanwhile, the real killer remained free.The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist chronicles how the courts and Mississippi's death investigation system--a relic of the Jim Crow era--failed to deliver justice for its citizens and recounts the horrifying story of the two men who built successful careers on the back of this system. For nearly two decades, medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne performed the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies, while his friend Dr. Michael West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades. Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. But then some of those convictions began to fall apart. Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington argue that bad forensics, structural racism, and institutional failures are at fault, and raise sobering questions about our criminal justice system's ability to address them.

The B-58 Blunder: How the U.S. Abandoned its Best Strategic Bomber


George Holt Jr. - 2015
    This work is a case study on how the B-58 supersonic bomber came to a premature death in the U.S. military, largely because of infighting among military and civilian leaders, who failed to understand the value of this fantastic airplane. It was a technological marvel for its time and the very best pilots and navigators were chosen to fly this unique aircraft. At its maximum speed of 2.2 Mach (1,452 mph) it was 2½ times faster than the muzzle velocity of a .45 caliber bullet. It could fly faster and out turn must fighters of its day and was also capable of flying close to tree top level just below the speed of sound. It was nearly undetectable by enemy radars due to its speed and low radar cross section and was better at flying through heavy turbulence due to its solid delta wing design. It had a highly accurate navigation and bombing system. It had a capsule ejection system for the safety of the aircrew and was capable of getting airborne in only half the time required by other bombers. Told for the first time, this is the inside story that dispels the unproven myths surrounding the demise of the B-58 and why this magnificent airplane should have been saved. Its loss from the nuclear armory was a severe blow to our “Cold War” deterrence strength. The B-58 was a bomber that set the standard for fear in the heart of an enemy. Its loss was a strategic mistake. The author provides lessons learned and recommendations for military and civilian leaders, going forward, to hopefully prevent future blunders—like what happened to the B-58.