Book picks similar to
Vietnam: A View from the Front Lines (General Military) by Andrew Wiest
history
non-fiction
vietnam-war
vietnam
The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922
Edmond Taylor - 1962
A Time to Stand: The Epic of the Alamo
Walter Lord - 1961
Through the years the garrison’s heroic stand has become so clothed in folklore and romance that the truth has nearly been lost. In A Time to Stand Walter Lord rediscovers and recreates the whole fascinating story. From contemporary documents, diaries, and letters, he has mined a wealth of fresh information that throws intriguing sidelights on the epic of the Alamo. What were the defenders like? Why did they take their stand? Did any escape? Did Davy Crockett surrender?The cast of characters includes not only famous figures like Jim Bowie but unknown, unsung men: John Purdy Reynolds, the wandering Pennsylvania surgeon; George Kimball, the industrious New York hatter, Micajah Autry of Tennessee, who was a far better poet than a businessman. And then there are the Mexicans: the fabulous Santa Anna; the smooth Colonel Almonte; the forlorn private Juan Basquez, who only wanted to stay home and make shoes.
Woman's Own
Robyn Carr - 1990
At its center is young Lilly Armstrong, a beauty on the brink of womanhood, too brave and too fearless to settle for the status quo. In a booming city animated by inventors, builders and artists, and now excited for the great Centennial Exhibition, Lilly aspires to carve out a life of independent freedom for herself and her women kin – lives not dependent on men.But of course there is a man – a man who admires Lilly, who thinks like she does and who would move heaven and earth to help Lilly realize her dreams.With the guidance of her quietly resilient mother and the unexpected aid of her estranged and powerful grandmother – and despite the foolish meddling of her shallow and ambitious sister – Lilly is determined to lead her family of women into the challenge of the next century on her own terms, forging an empire that will survive for generations.Lilly intends for her family to have it all, not the least of which is enduring love.Fans of VIRGIN RIVER will enjoy this timeless novel of new beginnings, untamable passion and all-redeeming love.Praise for Robyn Carr's historicals:"A remarkable storyteller...the plot moves swiftly and cleverly. A well-told tale." -Library Journal"This is no routine romance...Carr presents a personal, inside view of life...in historically accurate detail. A reader's delight." -Bestsellers"Thanks to sophisticated character development and elegantly simple prose, Carr deftly handles the themes of betrayal, envy, greed and the psychological patterns that recur over generations." -Publishers Weekly
The Lost Kings: Lancaster, York Tudor
Amy Licence - 2017
Life could be nasty, brutish, and short. Some met their end in battle, others were dragged to the block, losing everything for daring to aspire to the throne. Some were lost in mysterious circumstances, like Edward V, the elder of the Princes in the Tower. But the majority of these young men died in their teens, on the brink of manhood. They represent the lost paths of history, the fascinating "what-ifs" of the houses of York and Tudor. They also diverted the route of dynastic inheritance, with all the complicated implications that brings, passing power into unlikely hands. This book examines 10 such figures, using their lives to build a narrative of this savage century.
American Heritage History of World War II
Stephen E. Ambrose - 1997
At the time, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.L. Sulzberger received widespread praise for his authoritative account of the six-year war that involved more than fifty-six nations, resulted in the death of some 22 million people, and shaped the course of history. His work became a standard reference on the war. Stephen E. Ambrose, one of the most highly regarded historians of our time, oversaw a major revision of this classic work. Seamlessly incorporating new material and insights, Ambrose produced a comprehensive and riveting account of the war’s key characters and events. In planes and foxholes, in deserts and jungles, on ships and beaches, Ambrose shines a light on the people involved - the leaders, the fighters, the victims. He also added new chapters on the atrocities of the Holocaust and revelations about the secret war of espionage. Ambrose’s analysis also offers insight into the events that precipitated the Cold War. This book captures the courage, commitment, military genius, and horror of the war that gave birth to a new era in world politics. For students, history buffs, and fascinated readers, The American Heritage History of World War II is the definitive single-volume work on the subject and will endure as a major narrative of world history.
Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Biography
Noel B. Gerson - 1976
Noel Gerson explores the life of this fascinating woman who literally changed the course of American history with her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe reveals a towering literary figure who was also a remarkable woman, a crusading feminist, and a woman who led a life more dramatic than anything she wrote. In an age when women were usually confined to the kitchen, the bedroom, and the parlour, Harriet Beecher Stowe argued emancipation with President Lincoln, had an extraordinary woman-to-woman relationship with Queen Victoria, and was regarded by Emile Zola as a comrade-in-arms in their separate crusades for a better world. Her super-abundant energy and refreshing humour enabled her to combine the duties of a devoted wife and mother of five with a renowned literary career and to become in the process one of the greatest celebrities of the nineteenth century. ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe’ is an impressive biography of a literary giant who changed the course of history forever. Noel Bertram Gerson (1913-1988) was a prolific American author, who wrote 325 books under his own name and under several pseudonyms. He channeled his own wartime experience in military intelligence into many of his novels, as well as writing widely about American history. His titles include ‘Liner’, ‘Daughter of Earth and Water: A Biography of Mary Shelley’, ‘The Conqueror’s Wife’ and ‘I’ll Storm Hell: A Novel of Mad Anthony Wayne’. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.
A Short History of World War I
James L. Stokesbury - 1981
Casualty lists reached unimagined proportions as the same ground -- places like Ypres and the Somme -- was fought over again and again. Other major bloody battles remain vivid in memory to this day: Gallipoli and the Battle of Jutland are but two examples. Europe was at war with itself, and the effect on Western civilization was profound, its repercussions felt even today.World War I saw the introduction of modern technology into the military arena: The tank, airplane, machine gun, submarine, and -- most lethal of all -- poison gas, all received their first widespread use. Professor Stokesbury analyzes these technological innovations and the war's complex military campaigns in lucid detail. At the same time he discusses the great political events that unfolded during the war, such as the Russian Revolution and the end of the Hapsburg dynasty, putting the social and political side of the war into the context of modern European history.A Short History of World War I is the first history of this war to be written in twenty years. It incorporates recent research and current thinking about the war in a highly readable and lively style.
Chasing Heisenberg: The Race for the Atom Bomb (Kindle Single)
Michael Joseloff - 2018
But far from the battlefields, Allied scientists are struggling.Intelligence reports put them a distant second behind the Germans in a competition that could determine the outcome of the war: the race to build the world's first nuclear weapon.For the Allies' top scientists, the race is deeply personal. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Samuel Goudsmit have known Hitler's chief atomic scientist, Werner Heisenberg, for years. A brilliant, world-renowned physicist and once a good friend, he's anti-Nazi but also a loyal German.Fear that he's put country first and is building a bomb haunts Oppenheimer and Fermi all through their months and years developing the Allied bomb. That same anxiety drives Goudsmit, now a top Allied intelligence officer, to risk his life as he attempts to track down Heisenberg and the site of Hitler's suspected atom bomb program.
Waterloo: June 18, 1815: The Battle For Modern Europe
Andrew Roberts - 2005
On the bloody battlefield of Waterloo, the Emperor Napoleon and his hastily formed legions clashed with the Anglo-Allied armies led by the Duke of Wellington -- the only time the two greatest military strategists of their age faced each other in combat.With precision and elegance, Andrew Roberts sets the political, strategic, and historical scene, providing a breathtaking account of each successive stage of the battle while also examining new evidence that reveals exactly how Napoleon was defeated. Illuminating, authoritative, and engrossing, Waterloo is a masterful work of history.
Case White: The Invasion of Poland 1939
Robert Forczyk - 2019
The campaign has widely been described as a textbook example of Blitzkrieg, but it was actually a fairly conventional campaign as the Wehrmacht was still learning how to use its new Panzers and dive-bombers.The Polish military is often misrepresented as hopelessly obsolete and outclassed by the Wehrmacht, yet in fact it was well-equipped with modern weapons and armor. Indeed, the Polish possessed more tanks than the British and had cracked the German Enigma machine cipher. Though the combined assault from Germany and the Soviet Union defeated Poland, it could not crush the Polish fighting spirit and thousands of soldiers and airmen escaped to fight on other fronts. The result of Case White was a brutal occupation, as Polish Slavs found themselves marginalized and later eliminated, paving the way for Hitler's vision of Lebensraum (living space) and his later betrayal and invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.Using a wide array of sources, Robert Forczyk challenges the myths of Case White to tell the full story of the invasion that sparked history's greatest conflict.
Surviving the Fatherland
Annette Oppenlander - 2017
SURVIVING THE FATHERLAND tells the true and heart-wrenching stories of Lilly and Günter struggling with the terror-filled reality of life in the Third Reich, each embarking on their own dangerous path toward survival, freedom, and ultimately each other. Based on the author’s own family and anchored in historical facts, this story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the strength of war children.
The Never List
F.E. Greene - 2015
When Tori discovers it's not a ghost but a journalist from 1854, she accidentally strands him in 2014. Intrigued by the dapper and crusading Charles Stratford, Tori offers to help him locate a pendant that will reopen the door to his century. Even when their treasure hunt across London turns dangerous, Tori finds herself wishing that Charles could stay. But after losing her family a decade before, can she risk loving someone again, especially a man from 1854?Lured into the future by a mysterious pendant, Charles Stratford must track down its counterpart to unlock the door between Londons. When the winsome Victoria Smith volunteers to join his search, Charles becomes smitten with the intrepid bookseller. He also uncovers an ancient struggle between two underground societies and becomes entangled in their secret intrigues. If Charles fails to return both pendants to 1854, he places his own London at risk. But how can he succeed when it means saying farewell to Victoria in 2014?From modern-day Soho to nineteenth-century Mayfair, The Never List takes readers on a whirlwind tour of Londons new and old as its time-crossed heroes search for a way to love each other within two centuries. It is the first book in the Love Across Londons series which should be read in order.Book One: The Never ListBook Two: The Best-Left QuestionsBook Three: The Next ForeverRomance Heat Scale: Mild/PG. No detailed sex scenes, profanity, or graphic violence.Praise for The Never List - SEMI-FINALIST in the 2017 Kindle Book Awards:
Stephen Morris
Nevil Shute - 1961
Not discovered until after his death, the reflect strongly personal elements of the thrilling and eloquent style of writing that has made him one of the world's best-loved story-tellers.
Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair
Michael R. Beschloss - 1986
On May Day 1960, Soviet forces downed a CIA spy plane flown deep into Soviet territory by Francis Gary Powers two weeks before a crucial summit. This forced President Dwight Eisenhower to decide whether, in an effort to save the meeting, to admit to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev—and the world—that he had secretly ordered Powers’s flight, or to claim that the CIA could take such a significant step without his approval. In rich and fascinating detail, Mayday explores the years of U-2 flights, which Eisenhower deemed “an act of war,” the US government’s misconceived attempt to cover up the true purpose of the flight, Khrushchev’s dramatic revelation that Powers was alive and in Soviet custody, and the show trial that sentenced the pilot to prison and hard labor. From a U-2’s cramped cockpit to tense meetings in the Oval Office, the Kremlin, Camp David, CIA headquarters, the Élysée Palace, and Number Ten Downing Street, historian Michael Beschloss draws on previously unavailable CIA documents, diaries, and letters, as well as the recollections of Eisenhower’s aides, to reveal the full high-stakes drama and bring to life its key figures, which also include Richard Nixon, Allen Dulles, and Charles de Gaulle. An impressive work of scholarship with the dramatic pacing a spy thriller, Mayday “may be one of the best stories yet written about just how those grand men of diplomacy and intrigue conducted our business” (Time).
Battle for Leyte Gulf
C. Vann Woodward - 1947
Vann Woodward recreates the gripping account of the battle for Leyte Gulf—the greatest naval battle of World War II and the largest engagement ever fought on the high seas. For the Japanese, it represented their supreme effort; they committed to action virtually every operational fighting ship on the lists of the Imperial Navy, including two powerful new battleships of the Yamato class. It also ended in their greatest defeat—and a tremendous victory for the United States Navy. Features a new introduction by Evan Thomas, author of Sea of Thunder.