He was born to race —some of the fastest cars ever to tear up a speedway.  Carroll Shelby wasn’t born to run. He was born to race—some of the fastest cars ever to tear up a speedway. The exciting new feature film Ford v Ferrari--starring Matt Damon as Shelby and Christian Bale as fellow racer Ken Miles--immortalizes the small-town Texas boy who won the notorious Le Mans 24-hour endurance challenge, and changed the face of auto racing with the legendary Shelby Cobra. But there’s much more to his high-velocity, history-making story.A wizard behind the wheel, he was also a visionary designer of speed machines that ruled the racetrack and the road. While his GT40s racked up victories in the world’s most prestigious professional racing showdowns, his masterpiece, the Ford Cobra, gave Europe’s formidable Ferrari an American--style run for its money. If you’ve got a need for speed, strap in next to the man who put his foot down on the pedal, kept his eyes on the prize, and never looked back.

    These are the true-life diary entries of a prison officer, working in one of the country’s worst correctional facility. The daily stabbings, rapes and murders are just the beginning of a nightmare ride into the darkness of life behind bars. It’s a raw and ruthless look behind the walls in all its brutal honesty. This is maximum-security.

    At ten kilometres in length, the Mazeno is the longest route to the summit of an 8,000-metre peak. Ten expeditions had tried and failed to climb this enormous ridge. Eleven days later two of the team, Sandy Allan and Rick Allen, both in their late fifties, reached the summit. They had run out of food and water and began hallucinating wildly from the effects of altitude and exhaustion. Heavy snow conditions meant they would need another three days to descend the far side of the ‘killer mountain’. ‘I began to wonder whether what we were doing was humanly possible. We had climbed the Mazeno and reached the summit, but we both knew we had wasted too much energy. In among the conflicting emotions, the exhaustion and the elation, we knew our bodies could not sustain this amount of time at altitude indefinitely, especially now we had no water. The slow trickle of attrition had turned into a flood; it was simply a matter of time before our bodies stopped functioning. Which one of us would succumb first?’ In Some Lost Place is Sandy Allan’s epic account of an incredible feat of endurance and commitment at the very limits of survival – and the first ascent of one of the last challenges in the Himalaya.

    He called it Ravensbrück, and during the years that followed thousands of people died there after enduring brutal forms of torture. All were women. There are a handful of studies and memoirs that reference Ravensbrück, but until now no one has written a full account of this atrocity, perhaps due to the mostly masculine narrative of war, or perhaps because it lacks the Jewish context of most mainstream Holocaust history. Ninety percent of Ravensbrück's prisoners were not Jewish. Rather, they were political prisoners, Resistance fighters, lesbians, prostitutes, even the sister of New York's Mayor LaGuardia. In a perverse twist, most of the guards were women themselves. Sarah Helm's groundbreaking work sheds much-needed light on an aspect of World War II that has remained in the shadows for decades. Using research into German and newly opened Russian archives, as well as interviews with survivors, Helm has produced a landmark achievement that weaves together various accounts, allowing us to follow characters on both sides of the prisoner/guard divide. Chilling, compelling, and deeply unsettling, Ravensbrück is essential reading for anyone concerned with Nazi history.

    They Call It Pacific is an insightful account of events leading up to the war and beyond from an authority on Japanese-American affairs at the time. It is also a thrilling journal detailing Lee’s unbelievable real-time escape from the Philippine Islands with the help of the Filipino resistance. The book contains extensive accounts of the battle for the Philippines on Bataan and Corregidor, interviews with soldiers including General Douglas MacArthur, talks with Japanese prisoners, and descriptions of combat as the author accompanied Navy pilots such as Swede Larson on flights over Guadalcanal. This new edition of They Call It Pacific has been updated with footnotes and images from the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. *Includes original footnotes. *Includes photographs from World War 2.

    Chris Spealler is 5’5" and 140 pounds. Such daunting facts would make most declare defeat before trying. Chris didn’t buy the odds, though. Instead, he forged his own modern-day David-and-Goliath story. Speal is Chris’s account of struggle and perseverance, despite being "too small." What others did with ease, he seemed to do with sheer grit and will. And his actions put him among CrossFit’s elite. His is not a story of a gifted athlete whose natural talent granted him acclaim, but rather of one man who refused to back down and inspired an entire community in the process.

     Sixty-thousand marines had landed on the barren, volcanic island that was five miles long and two and half miles wide. For five weeks these men would become involved in some of the bloodiest and fiercest fighting of the Second World War. One third of them would end the battle either dead or wounded. The U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima written by five official marine combat writers, who personally saw action on the island, provides vivid insight into the battle that was described as “a nightmare in hell.” Henri and his fellow correspondents provide a step-by-step chronological overview of the battle as it was fought. They begin with an outline of the months of preparation that were undertaken before the first gun was fired before providing details on how the generals and admirals put their plans into action. Every aspect of the conflict is covered by the authors who interviewed many of the frontline troops to gain a sense of what the battle was like witnessed from the marines on the ground. “Among the Americans who served on Iwo, uncommon valor was a common virtue” — Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief, U. S. Pacific Fleet. “The Japanese, despite heavy losses, offered maximum resistance, but the Marines were established on high ground and the conquest of Iwo Jima was assured.” — Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King. This book is essential reading for all who wish to understand what the U.S. Marines went through in their famous capture of Iwo Jima. The authors of this book are three Marine Corps combat correspondents and two Marine Public Relations Officers who were at Iwo Jima. Combat correspondents are trained like other Marines. They live and fight with the outfits to which they are attached and write articles for newspapers and magazines about the men in their units. In battle they can see only what happens in their own units’ limited sectors. In compiling this book, therefore, they drew upon their own experiences on Iwo plus stories written by other combat correspondents and Public Relations Officers who were there. The authors were Captain Raymond Henri, Public Relations Officer, 3d Marine Division, who passed away in 2015, First Lieutenant Jim G. Lucas, Assistant Public Relations Officer, 4th Marine Division, who passed away in 1971, Technical Sergeant W. Keyes Beech, Combat Correspondent, 5th Marine Division, who passed away in 1990, Technical Sergeant David K. Dempsey, Combat Correspondent, 4th Marine Division who passed away in 1999, and Technical Sergeant Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Combat Correspondent, 3d Marine Division, who passed away in 2005. Their book was first published in 1945.

    It was the only infantry division in the armies of the British Empire that accompanied Monty from during Alamein to BerlinAfter the 1940 disaster at St Vale'ry when many were killed or captured, the re-formed 51st were a superlative division, brilliantly inspired and led. The 'Highway Decorators' (after their famous HD cypher) fought with consummate success through North Africa and Tunisia and from Normandy into the heart of Germany. Blooded at Alamein - where they suffered over 2000 casualties - they pursued the Afrika Korps via Tripoli and Tunis fighting fierce battles along the way. They lost 1,500 men helping to liberate Sicily. Back to the UK for the second front, the Highlanders battled their way through Normandy bocage, the break-out to the Seine, triumphal re-occupation of St Vale'ry, and were the first troops to cross the Rhine, fighting on to Bremen and Bremerhaven. In the eleven months fighting in NW Europe in 1944 and 1945 the Highlanders suffered more than 9000 casualties.

    In fact, the mysteries surrounding her fate often overshadows her accomplishments as a pilot and author. Who was this high-flying woman who lived as if she were invincible but understood she was anything but? Here, from historian Nancy Nahra, is her inspiring story.

    Approved by both the Anne Frank House Foundation in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, run by the Frank family, this work of literary criticism unravels the complex, fascinating story of the diary and effectively makes the case for it being a work of art from a precociously gifted writer.

    . . Emmy® award–winning journalist, TV host, and New York Times bestselling author Rita Cosby has always asked the tough questions in her interviews with the world’s top newsmakers. Now, in a compelling and powerful memoir, she reveals how she uncovered an amazing personal story of heroism and courage, the untold secrets of a man she has known all her life: her father. Years after her mother’s tragic death, Rita finally nerved herself to sort through her mother’s stored belongings, never dreaming what a dramatic story was waiting for her. Opening a battered tan suitcase, she discovered it belonged to her father—the enigmatic man who had divorced her mother and left when Rita was still a teenager. Rita knew little of her father’s past: just that he had left Poland after World War II, and that his many scars, visible and not, bore mute witness to some past tragedy. He had always refused to answer questions. Now, however, she held in her hand stark mementos from the youth of the man she knew only as Richard Cosby, proud American: a worn Polish Resistance armband; rusted tags bearing a prisoner number and the words Stalag IVB; and an identity card for an ex-POW bearing the name Ryszard Kossobudzki. Gazing at these profoundly telling relics, the well-known journalist realized that her father’s story was one she could not allow him to keep secret any longer. When she finally did persuade him to break his silence, she heard of a harrowing past that filled her with immense pride . . . and chilled her to the bone. At the age of thirteen, barely even adolescent, her father had seen his hometown decimated by bombs. By the time he was fifteen, he was covertly distributing anti-Nazi propaganda a few blocks from the Warsaw Ghetto. Before the Warsaw Uprising, he lied about his age to join the Resistance and actively fight the enemy to the last bullet. After being nearly fatally wounded, he was taken into captivity and sent to a German POW camp near Dresden, finally escaping in a daring plan and ultimately rescued by American forces. All this before he had left his teens. This is Richard Cosby’s story, but it is also Rita’s. It is the story of a daughter coming to understand a father whose past was too painful to share with those he loved the most, too terrible to share with a child . . . but one that he eventually revealed to the journalist. In turn, Rita convinced her father to join her in a dramatic return to his battered homeland for the first time in sixty-five years. As Rita drew these stories from her father and uncovered secrets and emotions long kept hidden, father and daughter forged a new and precious bond, deeper than either could have ever imagined.

    Army enlisted man, was captured at Bataan. For nearly three and a half years, until he was liberated by the Russians in Manchuria, he remained a prisoner of war. Here is his account of this long and terrifying captivity. "It is one of the most harrowing and debilitating chronicles that I have read. . . . He describes the ordeal brilliantly; he harbors no resentments apparently, and he has emerged from an inferno of bestiality with utter serenity." — Maxwell Geismar, Saturday Review "An impressive and moving book." — David Dempsey, New York Times "His is no ordinary prisoner-of-war story; better written than most, it contains no tales of swashbuckling defiance. . . . The force of this book is its testimony to the indomitable strength of the human spirit." — Manchester Guardian "The plain narrative of this story would by itself have been fascinating, but this book is far more than a story, it is a work of art." — André Siegfried, Academie Francaise "Sidney Stewart's composed narrative is one of the most noble documents ever penned by a prisoner of war. The companions he writes about remained men to the end, until at last only one man remained; he survived to write this unforgettable, this magnificent story." — George Slocombe, New York Herald Tribune [Paris]

    Two white house maids, a remarkable mother and her daughter, reveal what it was really like upstairs, downstairs at the white house.

    In 1997 it had been running for 50 years, with less than one hundred people successfully completing it – only four of which had been non-Japanese. In the same year Scott Langley was at the top of his game, a third degree black belt, captain of the British JKS National Team and JKS European and World Champion. He moved to Japan with a secret plan – to be the fifth foreigner to complete the course. This is the true story of Scott’s Journey, spanning five years, chronicling the highs and lows of facing karate’s toughest challenge and how he learnt to survive and never give in.In Autumn 2013 Scott sent this book to his Sensei in Japan for their approval. They responded immediately declaring the book to be full of lies and misrepresentations of Japan and forbade him to publish it. He was suspended for a month and then affectively expelled in January 2014. Suddenly, his 30 year relationship with Japanese karate had abruptly come to an end. This had been major a part of his entire karate life and he had dedicated himself to its values and rules, running a karate organization in Ireland for over ten years. He never wanted to jeopardize his position or damage the reputation of the group. However, unfortunately, the sacrifices he made during this true story are nothing compared to the sacrifices he has had to make to publish it. About the Author Scott Langley began karate in 1985. Showing a rare combination of aptitude, dedication and love of the art, Scott rose through the grades at a steady rate. In 1991 he gained his black belt. However, this was just the beginning. He quickly began winning national competitions and in 1993 was selected for the Japan Karate Shotorenmei national team. While at university he trained daily at his university club and under the guidance of Sadashige Kato 8th Dan. By the time Scott graduated, he was a 3rd Dan and had become one of the youngest people to win the JKS World Championships. But this was just the foundation of what lay ahead. In 1997 Scott moved to Japan to train full time at the World Headquarters. In 2000 he was invited to enter the elusive instructors’ course and after two years of intensive training, graduated, becoming only the fifth westerner to complete the challenge. He moved to Ireland with a mandate to promote the JKS within the British Isles. Within a decade Scott’s group had become the biggest single style association in the UK and Ireland and was as big at the JKS in Japan. He now teaches fulltime at www.hombudojokarate.com

    Gen. McClellan: “What troops are those fighting in the Pike?” Maj. Gen. Hooker: “General Gibbon’s brigade of Western men.” Maj. Gen. McClellan: “They must be made of iron.” And so, during the Battle of South Mountain, a prelude to the Battle of Antietam, this brigade earned its famous title as the “Iron Brigade”. Once McClellan had heard of their actions during the Second Battle of Bull Run, where they were facing off against a superior force under Stonewall Jackson, he is said to have stated that they were the “best troops in the world.” Rufus R. Dawes was a captain with the 6th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, that along with 2nd and 7th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiments, the 19th Indiana, Battery B of the 4th U.S. Light Artillery, and later in the war the 24th Michigan, formed the Iron Brigade. Although only in his early twenties at the beginning of the war he rapidly became an important leader in the famous brigade and by the end of the war was brevetted as a brigadier general for meritorious service. One of his most famous actions was on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg when he led a counterattack on the confederate forces under Brigadier General Joseph R. Davis and forced the surrender of more than two hundred enemy soldiers. Service With the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers records in brilliant detail all of the actions that he and his regiment were involved in, including Second Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor and Petersburg. Yet this book is not simply an account of the military activities that took place as he also recorded his feelings and moods, and included details about daily camp life and individual soldiers. Rufus Dawes derived all of the books material from his diaries and letters. He realized the value of a statement made at the moment as to his experiences, and he appreciated fully the treacherous nature of memory. He believed contemporaneous expression in letters and diaries provided material of historical value. He had the material and the ability to write a superb history of the grueling service of this famous regiment, but he felt that the story of his personal experiences and impressions written at the time would be of greater value, and so this book is not only account of the regiment, it is also a very personal account of one man’s view of the Civil War. This book deserves to be read and enjoyed by all who wish to hear more about this brutal but fascinating conflict and to get to the heart of what the soldiers saw and thought. Rufus R. Dawes was a military officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War. After the war he became a businessman, Congressman and author. His book Service With the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers was first published in 1890. He passed away in 1899.