It helped in the American conquest of California, the launch of the Republican Party, and the ignition of the western Indian wars. And along the way, Lake Tahoe even found the time to invent the ski industry, spark the sexual revolution, and win countless Academy Awards. Tahoe beneath the Surface brings this hidden history of America s largest mountain lake to life through the stories of its most celebrated residents and visitors over the last ten thousand years. It mixes local Washoe Indian legends with tales of murderous Mafia dons, and Rat Pack tunes with Steinbeck novels. It establishes Tahoe as one of America s literary hot spots by tracing the steps of more than a dozen authors including Bertrand Russell, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Michael Ondaatje. Tahoe beneath the Surface reveals how the lake transformed the lives of conservationists like John Muir, humorists like Mark Twain, and Hollywood icons like Frank Sinatra. It even touches upon some of the darker aspects of American history, including anti-Chinese racism and the Kennedy assassination. Despite the impact Lake Tahoe has had on America, environmental threats loom large, and Tahoe Blue a term that Lankford uses to encompass the whole range of life, beauty, and meaning the lake represents grows increasingly vulnerable. In Tahoe beneath the Surface, human history and natural history combine in a most engaging way, one that will both inform and inspire all who would keep Tahoe blue.

    Quickly falling in love with the rush of being a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne, he believed his service would honorably help the South Vietnamese protect their country from the ruthless communist North and their Southern allies. But once in the volatile jungles of Vietnam, the merciless hunting and killing of the enemy, constant threat of landmines and booby traps, ambushes that could easily backfire, and deaths of his comrades made Stillman question how any man—if he survived—could ever return to his life as he’d known it. Written with John’s daughter, Lori Stillman, Jumping from Helicopters is a vivid and moving memoir that unearths fifty years of repressed memories with stunning accuracy and raw details. Interwoven with the author’s own journal entries and including thirty-five photographs, it is a story that will open your eyes to what these brave young men witnessed and endured, and why they returned facing a lifetime of often unspoken unrest, persistent nightmares, and forced normalcy, haunting even the strongest of soldiers.

    In this collection of more than 200 letters, they share their first impressions of the rigors of life in the bush, their longing for home and family, their emotions over the conduct of the war, and their ache at the loss of a friend in battle. Poignant in their rare honesty, the letters from Vietnam are "riveting,... extraordinary by [their] very ordinariness... for the most part, neither deep nor philosophical, only very, very human" (Los Angeles Times). Revealing the complex emotions and daily realities of fighting in the war, these close accounts offer a powerful, uniquely personal portrait of the many faces of Vietnam's veterans.

    Written by Tom Jackman, the local investigative journalist who covered the story, and Troy Cole, the chief investigating officer, "Rites Of Burial" tells the gruesome true story of Robert Berdella, a serial killer whose inhuman crimes of murder and dismemberment might have served to inspire Jeffrey Dahmer's Milwaukee slaughter.

    A grenade fell through the gunner’s hatch and exploded, shattering Kapacziewski’s right leg below the knee, damaging his right hip, and severing a nerve and artery in his right arm.He endured more than forty surgeries, but his right leg still wasn’t healing as he had hoped, so in March 2007, Kapacziewski chose to have it amputated with one goal in mind: to return to the line and serve alongside his fellow Rangers. One year after his surgery, Kapacziewski accomplished his goal: he was put back on the line, as a squad leader of his Army Ranger Regiment.On April 19, 2010, during his ninth combat deployment (and fifth after losing his leg), Kapacziewski’s patrol ran into an ambush outside a village in eastern Afghanistan. After a fellow Ranger fell to withering enemy fire, shot through the belly, Sergeant Kap and another soldier dragged him seventy-five yards to safety and administered first aid that saved his life while heavy machineguns tried to kill them. His actions earned him an Army Commendation Medal with “V” for Valor. He had previously been awarded a Bronze Star for Valor—and a total of three Purple Hearts for combat wounds.

    America's top military leaders are scrutinized as Puryear ponders what prepared our generals for the terrible responsibilities they bore during World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and on to today.

    From the moment the author, then a young woman from Harvard, 1st encountered President Johnson at a White House dance in the spring of 67, she became fascinated by the man: his character, his enormous energy & drive, & his manner of wielding these gifts in an endless pursuit of power. As a member of his White House staff, she soon became his personal confidante. In the years before his death he revealed himself to her as to no other. Widely praised & enormously popular, Lyndon Johnson & the American Dream is a biography like few others. With insight & a richly engrossing style, the author renders LBJ in all his vibrant, conflicted humanity.PrefacePrologueGrowing up Education & the dream of success The making of a politician Rise to power in the senateThe senate leader The vice-presidencyThe transition yearThe great society Vietnam Things go wrongUnder siege in the White House The withdrawalEpilogueAcknowledgmentsAuthor's PostscriptNotesIndex

    As he and his platoon leader flew over the A Shau Valley, a Chinook helicopter engulfed in flames suddenly came into view. Hartley noticed tiny black smoking objects exiting the tail ramp of the aircraft. Seconds later, he realized those objects were men escaping the flames and plunging to their deaths. It was in that moment that he silently wondered, How the hell did I get here? Mr. Hartley was still wet behind the ears when he was tossed into the cauldron of Americas most unpopular war as an attack helicopter gunship pilot. As he shares a gripping, birds-eye view of battles that took him from the Demilitarized Zone in the north to the Mekong Delta in the south, Mr. Hartley compellingly details how he learned to rely on his superior training and equipment to follow through with his mission to kill the enemy and save the lives of his fellow soldiers below. Gunship Pilot provides an unforgettable glimpse into two combat tours of duty in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot soaring high above rice paddies and jungles attempts to fulfill his duty of protecting Americas warriors on the ground.

    Later, this Bermondsey boy would become known as Tommy Steele . In this engaging memoir Tommy recalls his childhood years growing up in Bermondsey. He relives with great fondness Saturdays as a young boy, spent gazing at the colourful posters for the Palladium and days spent wandering up Tower Bridge Road to Joyce's Pie Shop for pie and mash. But he also brings to life with extraordinary vividness what it was like to live through the devastation of the Blitz. Yet it was once he joined the merchant navy and began singing and performing for his fellow seamen that his natural ability as an entertainer marked him out as a favourite. And it was while ashore in America that he became hooked on rock'n'roll and a legend was born . From Tommy's humble beginning to life at sea and finally as a performer, Bermondsey Boy is a colourful, charming and deeply engaging memoir from a much-loved entertainer.

    This is a coming-of-age memoir of a prep school boy who enlists in the Marine Corps, gets caught in a horrific three-day assault during some of the heaviest fighting of the Vietnam War, then returns to attend Harvard University amidst a heavy anti-war sentiment.

    He started the Give Kids the World foundation andDignity U Wear charity.

    We were halfway in when the Japanese machine guns got their range. Bullets slapped the water and whined as they ricocheted off the barge. Some of us ducked; some of us fell to the floor; and all of us prayed.” Here, in heart-stopping human detail, are twenty-one personal accounts told by the men themselves. They are the stories of men who lived in hell and lived to tell of it. There is the story of Sgt. Albert Schmid who was awarded the Navy Cross for his single-handed destruction of a flanking attack while on Guadalcanal. The account of Private Nicolli who was literally blown into the air like a matchstick and then, with a piece of shrapnel in his chest, managed to help a wounded comrade to the rear. “The luckiest man in the Solomons,” Sgt. Koziar, tells of how he had his tonsils removed with the assistance of a Japanese sniper’s bullet. These are just three of the twenty-one fascinating stories that were told to Gerold Frank and James Horan just months after these marines had returned from active duty to recover from the conflict in the Pacific. The valor of these marines is astounding, as twenty-one-year-old Corporal Conroy states in the book, “I don’t suppose I shall ever be able to sum up all the bravery, the guts, the genuine, honest courage displayed by the boys out in Guadalcanal. They were afraid, and yet they took it. They had what it takes . . .” The battles of Gavutu-Tanambogo, Tulagi, Tenaru, Matanikau and Guadalcanal are all covered through these accounts which take the reader right to the epicenter of the Pacific conflict. “telling of living conditions on the beaches and in the jungles where they fought, offering an insider’s view of foxholes, food, snipers, mosquitos, boondocks, shrapnel, their injuries, and their pain.” Great Stories of World War II Gerold Frank and James Horan were professional authors who wrote down the stories of these marines shortly after they had returned from active duty. The War in the South Pacific was first published in 1943 as Out in the Boondocks. Frank went on to become a prominent ghostwriter and passed away in 1998. Horan, author of more than forty books, died in 1981.

    Then they met the German Panther, with a gun so murderous it could shoot through one Sherman and into the next. Soon a pattern emerged: The lead tank always gets hit.After Clarence sees his friends cut down breaching the West Wall and holding the line in the Battle of the Bulge, he and his crew are given a weapon with the power to avenge their fallen brothers: the Pershing, a state-of-the-art “super tank,” one of twenty in the European theater.But with it comes a harrowing new responsibility: Now they will spearhead every attack. That’s how Clarence, the corporal from coal country, finds himself leading the U.S. Army into its largest urban battle of the European war, the fight for Cologne, the “Fortress City” of Germany.Battling through the ruins, Clarence will engage the fearsome Panther in a duel immortalized by an army cameraman. And he will square off with Gustav Schaefer, a teenager behind the trigger in a Panzer IV tank, whose crew has been sent on a suicide mission to stop the Americans.As Clarence and Gustav trade fire down a long boulevard, they are taken by surprise by a tragic mistake of war. What happens next will haunt Clarence to the modern day, drawing him back to Cologne to do the unthinkable: to face his enemy, one last time.

    An oral history unlike any other, BLOODS features twenty black men who tell the story of how members of their race were sent off in disproportionate numbers and the special test of patriotism they faced. Told in voices no reader will soon forget, BLOODS is a must-read for anyone who wants to put the Vietnam experience in historical, cultural, and political perspective.Cited by THE NEW YORK TIMES as One of the Notable Books of the Year"Superb."TIME

    It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America’s giant military bureaucracy, steered by elitist generals and blueblood diplomats who favored troop build-ups and napalm bombs over winning the trust of the people. Through dozens of interviews and access to neverbefore-seen documents―including long-hidden love letters―Boot recasts this cautionary American story, tracing the bold rise and the crashing fall of the roguish “T. E. Lawrence of Asia” from the battle of Dien Bien Phu to the humiliating American evacuation in 1975. Bringing a tragic complexity to this so-called “ugly American,” this “engrossing biography” (Karl Marlantes) rescues Lansdale from historical ignominy and suggests that Vietnam could have been different had we only listened. With reverberations that continue to play out in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Road Not Taken is a biography of profound historical consequence.