Unwilling to accept the idea of the twice-married American as future Queen of England, the government was determined to pressure the King into giving up Mrs. Simpson and, when that failed, into giving up his crown. The King's phone lines were tapped by his own government, dubious police reports poisoned Mrs Simpson's reputation, and threats to sabotage her divorce were deployed to edge the King towards abdication.The hopeless attempts of the King's allies, particularly Winston Churchill, to keep him on the throne were dismissed as sinister conspiracy, whilst the King wrecked his own chances with wildly unrealistic goals and ill-thought-out schemes that served only to frame him as erratic and unreliable as a monarch. As each side was overwhelmed by desperation and distrust, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin fought to steer events to a smooth conclusion.In this fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the royal abdication crisis of 1936, Adrian Phillips reveals the previously untold story of the hidden political machinations and insidious battles in Westminster and Whitehall that settled the fate of the King and Mrs Simpson.

    He had thirteen days to go before he got to go back home to his wife in Southern California. That homecoming would eventually happen, but not in thirteen days, and not as the person he once was. The moment his vehicle struck a Vietcong land mine divided his life into before and after.He survived, barely, with third-degree burns over his face and much of his body.  It would have been easy to give up.  Instead, Robert Timberg began an arduous and uncertain struggle back—not just to physical recovery, but to a life of meaning.  Remarkable as his return to health was—he endured thirty-five operations, one without anesthesia—just as remarkable was his decision to reinvent himself as a journalist and enter one of the most public of professions. Blue-Eyed Boy is a gripping, occasionally comic account of what it took for an ambitious man, aware of his frightful appearance but hungry for meaning and accomplishment, to master a new craft amid the pitying stares and shocked reactions of many he encountered on a daily basis.By the 1980s, Timberg had moved into the upper ranks of his profession, having secured a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and a job as White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. Suddenly his work brought his life full circle: the Iran-Contra scandal broke. At its heart were three fellow Naval Academy graduates and Vietnam-era veterans, Oliver North, Bud McFarlane, and John Poindexter. Timberg’s coverage of that story resulted in his first book, The Nightingale’s Song, a powerful work of narrative nonfiction that follows these three academy graduates and two others—John McCain and Jim Webb—from Annapolis through Vietnam and into the Reagan years. In Blue-Eyed Boy, Timberg relates how he came to know and develop a deep understanding of these five men, and how their stories helped him understand the ways the Vietnam War and the furor that swirled around it continued to haunt him, and the nation as a whole, as they still do even now, nearly four decades after its dismal conclusion.Like others of his generation, Robert Timberg had to travel an unexpectedly hard and at times bitter road. In facing his own life with the same tools of wisdom, human empathy, and storytelling grit he has always brought to his journalism, he has produced one of the most moving and important memoirs of our time.

    Taylor Jr. and his brother Marines are assembled into a new reaction force that is immediately tested in the fire of a bloody conflict known as Operation Beaver Cage. After a traumatic first fight, they push through back-to-back operations with little time to rest or reflect. Those who survive will return home ensnared by everlasting memories of a real, but entirely surreal nightmare. Now after more than fifty years of holding everything in, Taylor shares his experience in explicit and often horrific detail and with a reverent honor for those Marines who did not live to tell the tale.Taylor reveals what it truly means to walk the path of a warrior, to sacrifice, and to live a lifetime with the memories of a war—seeking answers to the question, “Was it worth it?"

    This minute-by-minute account of the only manned NASA mission to have malfunctioned outside Earth's orbit describes the entire episode.

    But since the end of the Vietnam War much of this vast transport network has been reclaimed by jungle, while remaining sections are littered with a deadly legacy of unexploded bombs. For Antonia, a veteran of ridiculous adventures in unfeasible vehicles, the chance to explore the Trail before it’s lost forever was a personal challenge she couldn’t ignore – yet it would sometimes be a terrifying journey.Setting out from Hanoi on an ageing Honda Cub, she spent the next two months riding 2,000 miles through the mountains and jungles of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Battling in hospitable terrain and multiple breakdowns, her experiences ranged from the touching to the hilarious, meeting former American fighter pilots, tribal chiefs,illegal loggers and bomb disposal experts.The story of her brave journey is thrilling and poignant: a unique insight into a little known face of Southeast Asia.

    We must learn more about Vietnamese culture and Vietnamese paradigms in order to untangle the muddled debates about our own. Realizing that we must do this is the first and most important lesson of Vietnam. And it is one we Americans have been exasperatingly slow to learn. We remain far too ready to assume that other people are, or want to be, or should be, like us.

    To this day, many survivors–most of whom are in their eighties–still cannot talk about their experiences without unearthing terrible memories. Surviving the Sword gives voice to these tens of thousands of Allied POWs and offers us a powerful reminder of the terror and depravations of war and the resilience of the human spirit. In this important book, Brian MacArthur draws on the diaries of American, British, Dutch, and Australian Fepows (Far Eastern prisoners of war), some of whose recollections are published here for the first time. These soldiers wrote and kept their diaries, in secret, because they were determined that to record for posterity how they were starved and beaten, marched almost to death, or transported on “hellships”; how their fellows were summarily executed by guards or felled by the thousands by tropical diseases; and how they were used as slave labor–most notoriously on the Burma-Thailand railway, as depicted in The Bridge on the River Kwai. The diaries excerpted in this book make plain why the Fepows believed that their brutal treatment by Japanese and Korean guards was, literally, incomprehensible to those who did not live it. The prisoners whose stories appear here risked torture and execution to keep diaries and make sketches and drawings that they hid from the guards wherever they could, sometimes burying them in the graves of lost comrades. The survivors’ narratives reveal not just a litany of horrors, but are a moving testament to the nobler instincts of humanity as well, detailing how the POWs prevailed over horrible conditions, even finding or creating a precious few creature comforts and sustaining the rudiments of culture, learning, and play. Forced into solidarity by inhuman conditions, the soldiers showed incredible compassion for one another, improvising ingenious ways to care for the sick, boost morale by subtly mocking their jailers’ authority, or even turn meager rations into the occasional feast. Countless thousands died in Japanese prison camps during World War II. Those fortunate enough to emerge from their ordeal were never the same again. Surviving the Sword at last fills a notable historical gap in our understanding, while also commemorating and memorializing the Fepows’ struggle and sacrifice.

    The original text (which traces the complex currents of history and politics of Malaysia and Singapore neighbours with a common past) is also revised to re-evaluate events in the context of an expanded history.

    In The Vietnam War, Mark Atwood Lawrence draws upon the latest research in archives around the world to offer readers a superb account of a key moment in U.S. as well as global history.While focusing on American involvement between 1965 and 1975, Lawrence offers an unprecedentedly complete picture of all sides of the war, notably by examining the motives that drove the Vietnamese communists and their foreign allies. Moreover, the book carefully considers both the long- and short-term origins of the war. Lawrence examines the rise of Vietnamese communism in the early twentieth century and reveals how Cold War anxieties of the 1940s and 1950s set the United States on the road to intervention. Of course, the heart of the book covers the American war, ranging from the overthrow of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem to the impact of the Tet Offensive on American public opinion, Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the 1968 presidential race, Richard Nixon's expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, and the problematic peace agreement of 1973, which ended American military involvement. Finally, the book explores the complex aftermath of the war--its enduring legacy in American books, film, and political debate, as well as Vietnam's struggles with severe social and economic problems.A compact and authoritative primer on an intensely relevant topic, this well-researched and engaging volume offers an invaluable overview of the Vietnam War.

    His memoir is a story of extraordinary challenges met for honor, freedom, and the Corps.

    The Khmer Rouge imprisoned, enslaved, and murdered the educated and intellectual members of the population, resulting in the harrowing "killing fields"–rice paddies where the harvest yielded nothing but millions of skulls.Young Sichan Siv–a target since he was a university graduate–was told by his mother to run and "never give up hope!" Captured and put to work in a slave labor camp, Siv knew it was only a matter of time before he would be worked to death–or killed. With a daring escape from a logging truck and a desperate run for freedom through the jungle, including falling into a dreaded pungi pit, Siv finally came upon a colorfully dressed farmer who said, "Welcome to Thailand."He spent months teaching English in a refugee camp in Thailand while regaining his strength, eventually Siv was allowed entry into the United States. Upon his arrival in the U.S., Siv kept striving. Eventually rising to become a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Siv returned with great trepidation to the killing fields of Cambodia in 1992 as a senior representative of the U.S. government. It was an emotionally overwhelming visit.

    This book is a memorial to those men and women, and in many cases it includes the last photographs they took.    Horst Faas and Tim Page, two photographers who worked and were wounded in Vietnam, have gathered many thousands of pictures by those who were killed. Their search has taken them through the archives in Hanoi as well as those of Western agencies. In some cases families have generously provided access to private files where unknown bodies of work have lain unseen for more than forty years.    The list of the dead includes some of the greatest photographers of the century, such as Robert Capa and Larry Burrows, and some who had been working in Vietnam for only a matter of days before their deaths. A number of the Cambodian photographers working for the Western press were executed. Other photographers, like Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, disappeared. Their loss inspired Tim Page to begin this memorial.    The resulting sequence of photographs follows the course of the war and the transformation of the serene landscapes of Cambodia and Vietnam into scenes of nightmarish devastation. At the moments of intense battle one is reminded not only of the courage of the photographers but of the compassion amid the brutality of war. These photographers were intimate with war to a degree that may well be denied future generations. That intimacy led to their deaths. Their photographs are their legacy.

    In the Pacific theater during World War II there were more than one hundred D-Days. The largest—and last—was the invasion of Okinawa on April 1, 1945, which brought together the biggest invasion fleet ever assembled, far larger than that engaged in the Normandy invasion.D-Days in the Pacific tells the epic story of the campaign waged by American forces to win back the Pacific islands from Japan. Based on eyewitness accounts by the combatants, it covers the entire Pacific struggle from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Pacific war was largely a seaborne offensive fought over immense distances. Many of the amphibious assaults on Japanese-held islands were among the most savagely fought battles in American history: Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, New Guinea, Peleliu, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. Generously illustrated with photographs and maps, D-Days in the Pacific is the finest one-volume account of this titanic struggle.

    So begins The Dying Place, David Maurer’s unflinching look at MACV-SOG, Vietnam, and a young man’s entry into war. Fresh from the folds of the Catholic Church, Sgt. Sam Walden is quickly embraced by another religion, jungle warfare. After four years there may be no resolution between the two; God knows Sam has tried. But how many Hail Mary’s will absolve him of what he has done in Laos? Walden is a war-weary Green Beret, regularly tested beyond normal limits by the ever-changing priorities of the puzzle palace in Saigon. And yet he overcomes, staying alive to go on mission after mission with his one-one and his little people. To them he is everything – strength, compassion, courage. He will not let them down. David Maurer’s own experiences at MACV-SOG’s Command and Control North come to life in this tense action-packed story. The U.S. was not supposed to be in Laos during the Vietnam War and by all accounts, we weren’t. Some know better, and fortunately, Maurer is one of those. With a fine ear for dialogue Maurer takes you back and sets you down squarely on the LZ, where inner turmoil is quelled and external conflict takes over, if only for awhile. If you’re lucky, you just might make it out alive.

    Contains previously classified material on US offensive movements and offers original, authoritative, and thought-provoking arguments from a highly regarded author.