But the Allies had to sink it - or risk losing the war. Shirer, famed WWII correspondent and author of 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', captures every moment of the perilous mission. However, a mixture and luck and new technology turned the tide in the Allies' favour.

    Ideal for readers of Evan Mawdsley, Max Hastings and Iain Ballantyne.On the 8th June 1940, the Nazi battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau opened their guns on the aircraft-carrier HMS Glorious.Within minutes the Glorious was taking on water and the order was given to abandon ship.Hundreds of men leapt into the icy waters of the Norwegian Sea. They hoped and prayed that nearby ships would have heard their distress signal and send help.Yet, they did not come. Men were left to tread water, hold onto small inflatables or clamber onto overcrowded lifeboats. The situation looked bleak for the few who survived the first twenty-four hours; there was nothing to eat and men resorted to drinking saltwater and their own urine to slake their thirst, but the effects of hypothermia and delirium began to take their toll.Over 1,200 men lost their lives as a result of this tragedy.Only forty men survived this ordeal, one of which was Royal Marine Ronald “Tubby” Healiss, who served as a member of a 4.7 gun crew on the Glorious. His award-winning account is a true and terrible record of suffering, which uncovers one of the greatest undocumented naval stories of the Second World War.

    He made history by making geography-- sailing through previously unknown southern seas, charting the eastern Australian coast and circumnavigating New Zealand, putting many Pacific islands on the map, and exploring both the Arctic and Antarctic. His men suffered near shipwreck, were ravaged by tropical diseases, and survived frozen oceans; his lieutenants-- including George Vancouver and William Bligh-- became celebrated captains in their own right. Exploits among native peoples combined to make Cook a celebrity and a legend.Cook is not, however, viewed by all as a heroic figure. Some Hawaiians demonize him as a syphilitic rascist who had a catastrophic effect on local health. Indigenous Australians often see him as the violent dispossessor of their lands. Nicholas Thomas explores Cook's contradictory character as never before, by reconstructing the many sides of encounters that were curious and unusual for Europeans and natives alike. The result of twenty years' research, Thomas's magnificently rich portrait overturns the familiar images of Cook and reveals the fascinating and far more ambiguous figure beneath.

    Return with Honor is O'Grady's riveting account of that time, filled with the incredible, never-before-revealed details about the tricks and strategems he used to avoid the enemy and survive.

    Constitution, the establishment of a permanent military had become the most divisive issue facing the new government. Would a standing army be the thin end of dictatorship? Would a navy protect American commerce against the Mediterranean pirates, or drain the treasury and provoke hostilities with the great powers? The foundersparticularly Jefferson, Madison, and Adamsdebated these questions fiercely and switched sides more than once. How much of a navy would suffice? Britain alone had hundreds of powerful warships.From the decision to build six heavy frigates, through the cliffhanger campaign against Tripoli, to the war that shook the world in 1812, Ian W. Toll tells this grand tale with the political insight of Founding Brothers and a narrative flair worthy of Patrick O'Brian. According to Henry Adams, the 1812 encounter between USS Constitution and HMS Guerriere "raised the United States in one half hour to the rank of a first class power in the world." 16 pages of illustrations; 8 pages of color.

    He’s done it once already.Rocky Mountains, 1823. The trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is one of the most respected men in the company, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker.But when a scouting mission puts Glass face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two men from the company are ordered to remain with him until his inevitable death. But, fearing an imminent attack, they abandon Glass, stripping him of his prized rifle and hatchet.As Glass watches the men flee, he is driven to survive by one all-consuming desire: revenge. With shocking grit and determination, he sets out on a three-thousand-mile journey across the harsh American frontier, to seek revenge on the men who betrayed him.The Revenant is a remarkable tale of obsession and the lengths that one man will go to for retribution. The novel that inspired the epic new movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy.

    Their initial optimism is short-lived, however, as the ice field slowly thickens, encasing the ship Endurance in a death-grip, crushing their craft, and marooning 28 men on a polar ice floe.In an epic struggle of man versus the elements, Shackleton leads his team on a harrowing quest for survival over some of the most unforgiving terrain in the world. Icy, tempestuous seas full of gargantuan waves, mountainous glaciers and icebergs, unending brutal cold, and ever-looming starvation are their mortal foes as Shackleton and his men struggle to stay alive.What happened to those brave men forever stands as a testament to their strength of will and the power of human endurance.This is their story, as told by the man who led them.

    She was four years old. Marina Chapman was stolen from her housing estate and then abandoned deep in the Colombian jungle. That she survived is a miracle. Two days later, half-drugged, terrified, and starving, she came upon a troop of capuchin monkeys. Acting entirely on instinct, she tried to do what they did: she ate what they ate and copied their actions, and little by little, learned to fend for herself.So begins the story of her five years among the monkeys, during which time she gradually became feral; she lost the ability to speak, lost all inhibition, lost any real sense of being human, replacing the structure of human society with the social mores of her new simian family. But society was eventually to reclaim her. At age ten she was discovered by a pair of hunters who took her to the lawless Colombian city of Cucuta where, in exchange for a parrot, they sold her to a brothel. When she learned that she was to be groomed for prostitution, she made her plans to escape. But her adventure wasn’t over yet...In the vein of "Slumdog Millionaire" and "City of God," this rousing story of a lost child who overcomes the dangers of the wild and the brutality of the streets to finally reclaim her life will astonish readers everywhere.

    Petersburg across Siberia to the coast of North America, involved over 3,000 people and cost Peter the Great over one-sixth of his empire's annual revenue. Until now recorded only in academic works, this 10-year venture, led by the legendary Danish captain Vitus Bering and including scientists, artists, mariners, soldiers, and laborers, discovered Alaska, opened the Pacific fur trade, and led to fame, shipwreck, and "one of the most tragic and ghastly trials of suffering in the annals of maritime and arctic history."

     The movie Dunkirk premiered in 2017, decades after the event that turned certain defeat into a military miracle that inspired the people of Great Britain. The epic saga of the ordinary British civilians who sailed across the English Channel to rescue their trapped soldiers while the German military launched its might to prevent the evacuation is a stirring tale. The British government hoped that perhaps the mini-armada would be able to rescue 50,000 troops. But the 861 vessels who responded to their country’s plea brought more than 300,000 soldiers safely home. The film has garnered awards and earned the impressive rank of the highest-grossing World War II film of all time. But even more stirring than cinema is the true story of the events that unfolded in the embattled port of Dunkirk, where, against all odds, the British Army was rescued from Hitler’s forces by a fleet of “Little Ships” determined to bring their boys home. Inside you will read about... ✓ Britannia Rules the Waves ✓ The Phoney War ✓ Defending the Perimeter ✓ The Little Ships ✓ The Dunkirk Spirit And much more!

    Classified for over half a century for political reasons, this is the full account of Operation Halyard, a story of loyalty, self-sacrifice, and bravery.

    Gales of November - like the one that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald in the 1970s - are a fact of life for Great Lakes mariners, but this one was anything but ordinary. Meteorologists now believe that a blast of cold polar air met a warm, moist air mass entrained in a low-pressure cell moving up from the Gulf of Mexico through the U.S. heartland, and the result was a violent weather bomb and the worst recorded storm in Great Lakes history. The storm lasted four days, with sustained winds as high as 75 miles per hour, freezing temperatures, white-out blizzard conditions, and mountainous seas. Though the U.S. Department of Agriculture's weather bureau (forerunner of the U.S. Weather Bureau) issued storm warnings on Friday morning, November 7, the warnings contained no hint of anything more than 50-mile-per-hour winds for Friday and Saturday. Most ships were making their final trips of the season; their captains knew that as autumn turned to winter the weather would only get worse, and then the lakes would freeze. Across the Great Lakes, hundreds of sh

    The magnificent ship is already boiling over with a mutinous plot that is just about to break into the open when, just off the coast of Western Australia, it strikes an unseen reef in the middle of the night. While Commandeur Francisco Pelsaert decides to take the long-boat across 2000 miles of open sea for help, his second-in-command Jeronimus Cornelisz takes over, quickly deciding that 250 people on a small island is unwieldy for the small number of supplies they have. Quietly, he puts forward a plan to 40 odd mutineers how they could save themselves, kill most of the rest and spare only a half-dozen or so women, including his personal fancy, Lucretia Jansz - one of the noted beauties of Holland - to service their sexual needs. A reign of terror begins, countered only by a previously anonymous soldier Wiebbe Hayes, who begins to gather to him those are prepared to do what it takes to survive . . . hoping against hope that the Commandeur will soon be coming back to them with the rescue yacht.It all happened, long ago, and it is for a very good reason that Peter FitzSimons has long maintained that this is "far and away the greatest story in Australia's history, if not the world's." FitzSimons unique writing style has made him the country's best-selling non-fiction writer over the last ten years, and he is perfect man to make this bloody, chilling, stunning tale come alive.

    "I am a woman. I am a fisherman. . . I am not a fisherwoman, fisherlady, or fishergirl. If anything else, I am a thirty-seven-year-old tomboy. It's a word I have never outgrown." Greenlaw also happens to be one of the most successful fishermen in the Grand Banks commercial fleet, though until the publication of Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, "nobody cared." Greenlaw's boat, the Hannah Boden, was the sister ship to the doomed Andrea Gail, which disappeared in the mother of all storms in 1991 and became the focus of Junger's book.The Hungry Ocean, Greenlaw's account of a monthlong swordfishing trip over 1,000 nautical miles out to sea, tells the story of what happens when things go right -- proving, in the process, that every successful voyage is a study in narrowly averted disaster. There is the weather, the constant danger of mechanical failure, the perils of controlling five sleep-, women-, and booze-deprived young fishermen in close quarters, not to mention the threat of a bad fishing run: "If we don't catch fish, we don't get paid, period. In short, there is no labor union." Greenlaw's straightforward, uncluttered prose underscores the qualities that make her a good captain, regardless of gender: fairness, physical and mental endurance, obsessive attention to detail. But, ultimately, Greenlaw proves that the love of fishing -- in all of its grueling, isolating, suspenseful glory -- is a matter of the heart and blood, not the mind. "I knew that the ocean had stories to tell me, all I needed to do was listen." -- Svenja Soldovieri

    Bradley on Lake Michigan, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the wreck.At approximately 5:30 P.M. on November 18, 1958, the Carl D. Bradley, a 623-foot limestone carrier caught in one of the most violent storms in Lake Michigan history, snapped in two and sank within minutes. Four of the thirty-five man crew escaped to a small raft, where they hung on in total darkness, braving massive waves and frigid temperatures. As the storm raged on, a search-and-rescue mission hunted for survivors, while the frantic citizens of nearby Rogers City, the tiny Michigan hometown to twenty-six members of the Bradley crew, anxiously awaited word of their loved ones' fates.In Wreck of the Carl D., Michael Schumacher reconstructs, in dramatic detail, the tragic accident, the perilous search-and-rescue mission, and the chilling aftermath for the small town so intimately affected by the tragedy. A fitting tribute to a powerful ship, the men who died aboard it, and the town that still mourns its loss, Schumacher's compelling follow up to Mighty Fitz is a wonderful addition to the literature of the Great Lakes and maritime history.