Their experiences encompass the span of the Cold War, from voyages in WW2-era submarines under Arctic ice to nuclear-powered espionage missions in Soviet-dominated seas. There are dangerous encounters with Russian spy ships in UK waters and, finally as the communist facade begins to crack, they hold the line against the Kremlin's oceanic might, playing a leading role in bringing down the Berlin Wall. It is the first time they have spoken out about their covert lives in the submarine service.This is the dramatic untold story of Britain's most secret service.

    It is a tale of immense bravery, endurance and great leadership of loyal Norwegians, plus a little good fortune and help from the British against intrigue and overwhelming odds.The German invasion of Norway on the night of April 8th/9th 1940 almost took Norway completely unawares; had it not been for the defiance of one small coastal battery, the Norwegian Royal Family, Government, and nearly 50 tons of Gold bullion would have had no chance to escape. In desperate haste the Royal Family fled Oslo by rail, dodging bombs and strafing, eventually reaching the port of Molde which was subsequently devastated by fire bombing. The gold with extraordinary ingenuity was moved by road, rail and fishing boat, hotly pursued by the Germans. Its weight and the need for total secrecy created unique transportation problems. After several instances of near disaster, the Norwegians managed to get the gold to the coast where the Royal Navy came to the rescue. Such was the difficulty of extricating the bullion, it was not possible to load it in one cargo, and it was taken off in three Royal Navy Cruisers, HMS Enterprise, Galatea and Glasgow, from different locations. The ships were attacked in port, then constantly harassed and bombed by the Luftwaffe as they made their way back to the UK.The loss of the bullion was a blow to the Germans. They had gained a country, but lost a King, a government and huge amount of bullion that would have financed their war machine. That loss is directly attributed to a visionary bank chief, a Colonel, a hastily assembled body of Norwegians and the ships and men of the Royal Navy, ever resourceful, brave and loyal to their respective countries. This is their story.Robert Pearson is a high school teacher and writer, who researches Norway in the Second World War. He is particularly passionate about the roles that the Norwegians and British played during the War, Naval Intelligence and the Special Operations Executive – better known as SOE.

    That's what preeminent baseball analyst Bill James and ESPN.com baseball columnist Rob Neyer realized over lunch more than a dozen years ago. Since then, they've been compiling the centerpiece of this book, the "Pitcher Census," which lists specific information for nearly two thousand pitchers, ranging throughout the history of professional baseball. The Guide also offers: A "dictionary" describing virtually every known pitchThe origins and development of baseball's most important pitchesTop ten lists: best fastballs, best spitballs, and everything in betweenBiographies of some of the great pitchers who have been overlookedMore knuckleballers and submariners than you ever thought existedAn open debate concerning pitcher abuse and durabilityA formula for predicting the Cy Young Award winnerSomething fresh and new: Bill James' "Pitcher Codes" The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers is about understanding pitchers, and baseball's action always starts with the pitchers. It's also about entertaining debates and having a great deal of fun with the history of a game that obsesses so many.

    Journalist Victor Sebestyen witnessed much of the 1989 fall of the Soviet empire at first hand, and in this book, he reassesses this decisive moment in modern history.

    They would establish a British colony, find gold, and discover a water route to Asia. But what awaited them was far different - fire, hunger, sickness, death, even cannibalism. Here, from the noted historian Marshall W. Fishwick, is the dramatic story of Jamestown and the struggle of its leader, Captain John Smith, who, with the help of Pocahontas, daughter of the Algonquian chief Powhatan, succeeded against all odds.

    Now revised and expanded, this edition of the splendidly detailed and lively history of the Middle Ages contains more than 30 percent new material.

     The way we see things now is not always how they looked at the time. The task Robert Kee set himself in his chronicle of 1939 was to cut across the demarcation lines of history, to capture the way people perceived the events of the time as they unfolded. Turning to the newspapers of the day, Kee revives for us a world in which the Second World War is not yet a certainty — a world which still has countless other concerns which have not yet been dwarfed into insignificance by the European emergency — a world in which Chamberlain is still to many a credible leader, and Churchill and Roosevelt, though giants in waiting, are less than monumental. Praise for 1939: The World We Left Behind: ‘Authentic, absorbing … and worth any number of conventional histories’ - The Times Robert Kee, born in 1919, sat for his Oxford History degree in the summer of 1940, when France was falling. He joined the RAF the day after taking his last paper, became a bomber pilot, and was shot down and taken prisoner in 1942. After the war he began his journalistic career on Picture Post. He has worked for more than thirty years in radio and television, for both the BBC and ITV. He won the bafta Richard Dimbleby Award in 1976.

    No other book covers the entire region, or offers such profound insights into the roots of Balkan violence, or explains so vividly the origins of modern Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. Misha Glenny presents a lucid and fair-minded account of each national group in the Balkans and its struggle for statehood. The narrative is studded with sharply observed portraits of kings, guerrillas, bandits, generals, and politicians. Glenny also explores the often-catastrophic relationship between the Balkans and the Great Powers, raising some disturbing questions about Western intervention.

    It includes a generous chronology of events and an extended bibliographical essay providing an examination of the historiography of the Revolution. Beginning with the accession of Louis XVI in 1774, leading historian William Doyle traces the history of France through revolution, terror, and counter-terror, to the triumph of Napoleon in 1802, along the way analyzing the impact of these events in France upon the rest of Europe. He explores how a movement which began with optimism and general enthusiasm soon became a tragedy, not only for the ruling orders, but for millions of ordinary people all over Europe who paid the price for the destruction of the old political order and the struggle to establish a new one. Highly readable and meticulously researched, The Oxford History of the French Revolution will provide new insight into one of the most important events in European history.

    Today, these brutal events are symbolized by one word, Katyn—a crime that still bitterly divides Poles and Russians. Paul’s richly updated account covers Russian attempts to recant their admission of guilt for the murders in Katyn Forest and includes recently translated documents from Russian military archives, eyewitness accounts of two perpetrators, and secret official minutes published here for the first time that confirm that U.S. government cover-up of the crime continued long after the war ended.Paul’s masterful narrative recreates what daily life was like for three Polish families amid momentous events of World War II—from the treacherous Nazi-Soviet invasion in 1939 to a rigged election in 1947 that sealed Poland’s doom. The patriarch of each family was among the Polish officers personally ordered by Stalin to be shot. One of the families suffered daily repression under the German General Government. Like thousands of other Poles, two of the families were deported to Siberia, where they nearly died from forced labor, starvation, and neglect. Through painstaking research, the author reconstructs the lives of these families including such stories as a miraculous escape on the last transport of Poles leaving Russia and a mother’s daring ski trek over the Carpathian Mountains to rescue a daughter she had not seen in six years. At the heart of the drama is the Poles’ uncommon belief in “victory in defeat”—that their struggles made them strong and that freedom and independence, inevitably, would be regained.

    Much of Europe once knew them as "child-devouring cannibals" and "bloodthirsty Huns." But it wasn't long before the Hungarians became steadfast defenders of the Christian West and fought heroic freedom struggles against the Tatars (1241), the Turks (16-18th centuries), and, among others, the Russians (1848-49 and 1956). Paul Lendvai tells the fascinating story of how the Hungarians, despite a string of catastrophes and their linguistic and cultural isolation, have survived as a nation-state for more than 1,000 years.Lendvai, who fled Hungary in 1957, traces Hungarian politics, culture, economics, and emotions from the Magyars' dramatic entry into the Carpathian Basin in 896 to the brink of the post-Cold War era. Hungarians are ever pondering what being Hungarian means and where they came from. Yet, argues Lendvai, Hungarian national identity is not only about ancestry or language but also an emotional sense of belonging. Hungary's famous poet-patriot, S�ndor Petofi, was of Slovak descent, and Franz Liszt felt deeply Hungarian though he spoke only a few words of Hungarian. Through colorful anecdotes of heroes and traitors, victors and victims, geniuses and imposters, based in part on original archival research, Lendvai conveys the multifaceted interplay, on the grand stage of Hungarian history, of progressivism and economic modernization versus intolerance and narrow-minded nationalism.He movingly describes the national trauma inflicted by the transfer of the historic Hungarian heartland of Transylvania to Romania under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920--a trauma that the passing of years has by no means lessened. The horrors of Nazi and Soviet Communist domination were no less appalling, as Lendvai's restrained account makes clear, but are now part of history.An unforgettable blend of eminent readability, vibrant humor, and meticulous scholarship, The Hungarians is a book without taboos or prejudices that at the same time offers an authoritative key to understanding how and why this isolated corner of Europe produced such a galaxy of great scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs.

    and qualifies to fly the Vulcan bomber. Piloting a Vulcan is an unforgettable experience: no other aircraft comes close to matching its all-round performance. And as bombers go, it's drop-dead gorgeous.But there's a catch. The Vulcan has only one role: to make a second strike. To act in retaliation for a Russian nuclear attack. Silk knows that knows that if he ever flies his Vulcan in anger, he'll be flying from a smoking wasteland, a Britain obliterated. But in the mad world of Mutually Assured Destruction, the Vulcan is the last--the only--deterrent.Derek Robinson returns with another rip-roaring, gung-ho R.A.F. adventure, one that exposes and confronts the brinkmanship and saber-rattling of the Cold War Era.

    Representing twenty years of research and reflection, Leni Yahil's book won the Shazar Prize, one of Israel's highest awards for historical work. Now available in English, The Holocaust offers a sweeping look at the Final Solution, covering not only Nazi policies, but also how Jews and foreign governments perceived and responded to the unfolding nightmare. The Holocaust is astonishingly comprehensive. Yahil weaves a gripping chronological narrative that stretches from the Norwegian fjords to the Greek islands, from Amsterdam to Tehran--and even Shanghai. Her writing is balanced, objective, and compelling, as she systematically explores the evolution of the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe, probing its politics, planning, goals, and key figures. Yahil uses her command of the many relevant languages to marshal an impressive array of documentary and statistical evidence, driving her narrative forward with telling details and personal accounts--such as a survivor's description of her perseverance during a death march, or the story of the Struma, a boat that sank with over 700 Jewish refugees when the British refused to receive it in Palestine. Along the way, she destroys persistent myths about the Holocaust: that Hitler had no plan for exterminating the Jews, that the Jews themselves went peacefully to the slaughter. Though Yahil finds that Nazi policies were often inconsistent, particularly during the years before the war, she conclusively demonstrates that Hitler was always working toward a final reckoning with world Jewry, envisioning his war as a war against the Jews. The book also recounts numerous uprisings and acts of resistance in ghettos and concentration camps, as well as the activities of Jewish partisan units. Yahil describes the work of Jews in America, Palestine, and world organizations on behalf of Hitler's victims--often in the face of resistance by the Allied governments and neutral states--and explores the factors that affected the success of rescue efforts. The Holocaust is a monumental work of history, unsurpassed in scope and insightful detail. Objective yet compassionate, Leni Yahil brings together the countless diverse strands of this epic event in a single gripping account.

    The authoritative account of the B-17 Flying Fortress, the most formidable heavy bomber of World War II, with 32 pages of photographs.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.