The Christians have broken the truce and the Fifth Crusade has begun, the irate Saracens are expelling Christians and Jews from their lands, and desperate refugees are pouring into Jerusalem's port city of Acre which is expected to fall. There are coins to be earned carrying those most favoured by God to safety, meaning those with the most coins to pay for a place on one of the company's galleys. And the French governor of Acre wants to leave his young wife behind and flee with the chests of coins he collected from the city's Saracen merchants before he expelled them despite the bribes they paid him. It is a rollicking good story and a very good read.

    

     A secret cargo is headed for Japan. The Japanese High Command has entrusted it to a veteran destroyer captain - the best in the Imperial Navy - and he will stop at nothing to see that it reaches its final destination... Carrier-based dive bombers could not stop it, nor could the guerilla-commandos of the Philippine Islands. Now, the submarine Wolffish is the last ditch hope of the Allied Command. Still shaken by a recent tragedy, and desperately low on fuel, torpedoes, and morale, the war-weary submarine and her eighty-man crew must pull together to track down and destroy the cargo before it reaches Japan, and changes the course of the war...

    Born into Russian aristocracy, wealth, and security, Moura never had any reason to worry. But in the upheaval of the Bolshevik Revolution, her entire world crumbles. As her family and friends are being persecuted by Vladimir Lenin’s ruthless police, she falls into a passionate affair with British secret agent Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart. But when he’s abruptly and mysteriously deported from Russia, Moura is left alone and vulnerable.Now, she must find new paths for her survival, even if it means shedding her past and taking on new identities. Some will praise her tenderness and undying loyalty. Others will denounce her lies. But all will agree on one point: Moura embodies Life. Life at all cost.Set against the volatile landscape of 20th-century Russia, The Woman of a Thousand Names brings history to vivid life in a captivating tale about an extraordinary woman caught in the waves of change—with only her wits to save her.

    Freddie really knew how to antagonize the fans -- how to "get heat." Death threats were frequent, enraged fans stabbed him twenty-one times, and he was even doused with acid. Undeterred, Blassie just took the action up a level. He reveled in being the heel. It was commonplace to see him biting his opponents and then spitting out their blood. Blassie would routinely "file" his teeth during interviews. His matches in Los Angeles' Olympic Stadium brought him to the attention of Hollywood. Freddie's style and unpredictability made him a natural for the medium, and he became one of the biggest draws in the wrestling business. In the early '60s, he was invited to wrestle in Japan. Blassie both horrified and mesmerized sedate Japanese society. At seventeen, Freddie made his wrestling debut in a carnival. Unhappy with his choice of occupation, his family persuaded him to get a "real" job, and for a while he worked as a meatcutter. But after serving in the Navy in World War II, Freddie returned to wrestling. Here he picked up his catch phrase: "pencil neck geek." Early in his career, Blassie wrestled for Jess McMahon, and would later work for both his son, Vincent James McMahon, and his grandson, Vincent Kennedy McMahon, the current owner of World Wrestling Entertainment. ™ When his days in the ring ended, "Classy" Freddie Blassie became the manager of heels, transferring to a whole new generation of wrestlers the style, moves, and ring knowledge that had made him a legend of wrestling. Released just prior to his death, Legends of Wrestling: "Classy" Freddie Blassie contains vibrant tales of his days in wrestling with the likes of Hulk Hogan, Killer Kowalski, and the Iron Sheik. He frankly chronicles his dealings with the wrestling fraternity and the promoters, even recounting the infamous "boxer vs. wrestler" match with Muhammad Ali, who was managed by Blassie. His out-of-the-ring stories are equally compelling. Freddie details his countless sexual exploits, and his three marriages. He reflects on the cult status that he gained after his song "Pencil Neck Geek" rocketed to the top of the Dr. Demento Show play list. He recounts his touching relationship with comedian Andy Kaufman, who cast him in Breakfast with Blassie -- an underground classic in which Blassie uttered: "What the hell ever happened to the human race?" Added to this edition is an epilogue, recounting Freddie's last days and his unforgettable funeral.

    But in the aftermath, Avi is forced to flee to America. His darling wife Sara and the rest of his family soon follow – all except his brother Lieb, who stubbornly refuses to abandon his home. In ensuing years, while Avi lives the American immigrant’s dream, Lieb lives Russia’s nightmare: World War I, the Communist revolution, civil war, typhus, and famine. Still Lieb rejects Avi’s pleas to leave Russia. Then on the eve of World War II, Stalin’s pathological purges finally ensnare Lieb’s family. At last he realizes he must escape the Communist nightmare, but now all avenues are blocked, and Hitler’s armies are gathering. He turns to Avi, his brother in America, who frantically tries to rescue Lieb and his family with little more to work with than his own wit. Stretching from pre-Revolution Russia to post-Holocaust America, A Fine September Morning blends historical facts and fictional characters into a compelling epic family saga.

    

    The consequences of the popular rebellion and Russian President Putin’s attempt to strangle it remain uncertain. In this book, Andrew Wilson combines a spellbinding, on-the-scene account of the Kiev Uprising with a deeply informed analysis of what precipitated the events, what has developed in subsequent months, and why the story is far from over.   Wilson situates Ukraine’s February insurgence within Russia’s expansionist ambitions throughout the previous decade. He reveals how President Putin’s extravagant spending to develop soft power in all parts of Europe was aided by wishful thinking in the EU and American diplomatic inattention, and how Putin’s agenda continues to be widely misunderstood in the West. The author then examines events in the wake of the Uprising—the military coup in Crimea, the election of President Petro Poroshenko, the Malaysia Airlines tragedy, rising tensions among all of Russia's neighbors, both friend and foe, and more. Ukraine Crisis provides an important, accurate record of events that unfolded in Ukraine in 2014. It also rings a clear warning that the unresolved problems of the region have implications well beyond Ukrainian borders.

    When Hitler declared his intention to obliterate the key city of Leningrad on 22 September 1941, he could not have foreseen the grim determination of its citizens. Over the course of 900 days, the city resisted the Germans pounding at its gates. Its survival contributed to the defeat of Nazism. But the price was heavy – over 1 million died in Leningrad from German bombs and artillery, or from disease, the cold or starvation.In its suffering Leningrad became a source of symbolic national pride, of good conquering evil. The story of the siege is one of heroic resistance and stoical survival but it also one of unimaginable suffering and extreme deprivation. THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD: HISTORY IN AN HOUR is essential reading for all history lovers.Know your stuff: read about the Siege of Leningrad in just one hour.

    But it is Stella’s voice, the amazing way that she tells her story, that makes this Holocaust story so unique, powerful and endearing. The reader listens to Stella’s stunning simplicity of expression, her use of Polish and Yiddish phrases, her humor, her all-so-frequent grammatical errors – and is charmed. It is a story that only Stella Yollin can tell, and it can only be told in Stella’s sweet and incomparable way.

     Hours after the fateful attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army invades Luzon. The allies retreat to the Bataan Peninsula and the ensuing bloody battle sets the tone for the entirety of the war in the Pacific. Far from home and abandoned, the brave GIs and Filipinos fight the Japanese to a standstill. Long months of bloody fighting take their toll on both sides, however, the Japanese have reserves, the allies don’t. Sergeant Tarkington and the soldiers of the 1st platoon are put to the ultimate test. With dwindling supplies and constant harassment from the battle-hardened Japanese, the GIs must adapt and become a cohesive fighting unit if they hope to survive. Tark’s Ticks is the first book in a gritty WWII series. Pick up your copy today.

    During his journey he learns through example and suffering that in indigenous peoples of all cultures there is dignity that must be recognized and built upon as a foundation for Christian conversion. Includes appendix, 7 line drawings.

    With its lively style and psychological insight, this memoir about Sergei Esenin has abiding value for scholar and general reader alike.

    Yet behind this triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost love, exile—and above all the miracle of survival.Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive “potato-colored” tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Léger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where “one either died or came out famous.” But turmoil lay ahead—war and revolution; a period as an improbable artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; a difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, and eventually the United States. Throughout, as Jackie Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography, he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories. His subject, more often than not, was the shtetl life of his childhood, the wooden huts and synagogues, the goatherds, rabbis, and violinists—the whole lost world of Eastern European Jewry. Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who peopled it: Chagall’s passionate, energetic mother, Feiga-Ita; his eccentric fellow painter and teacher Bakst; his clever, intense first wife, Bella; their glamorous daughter, Ida; his tough-minded final companion and wife, Vava; and the colorful, tragic array of artist, actor, and writer friends who perished under the Stalinist regime.Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall’s complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as André Breton put it, “under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,” and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall’s work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life—ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth.Drawing upon hitherto unseen archival material, including numerous letters from the family collection in Paris, and illustrated with nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and photographs, Chagall is a landmark biography to rank with Hilary Spurling’s Matisse and John Richardson’s Picasso.

    Events unfolding in this city affected the fortunes of all the 'families', & shaped the entire underworld. In this book, Frank Hayde ties in every major name in organised crime as well as the corrupt Kansas City police force.