Yet despite his youth he was already one of the R.A.F.’s most experienced fliers and was immediately given the position of flight commander in 266 Squadron. Yet, the life of an R.A.F. pilot in the initial months of the war, with experience or not, was no easy feat. Just four months after war had broken out his Spitfire broke up while flying meaning that he was hurtling towards the earth from 18000ft without a plane. Fortunately, he still had his parachute, but it was a difficult start to his wartime career. After recovering from his injuries he was transferred to 87 Squadron, based in France, and there shot down two Me-110, one definite Bf 109, another probably Bf 109, two Do 17 bombers, and a shared He 111 bomber. This record set in two days made him the fastest R.A.F. pilot to have become an ace. Gleed’s book Arise to Conquer records his fascinating life through the course of World War Two as fights through the course of the Battle of Britain. “a candid, simply spoken record of a job done and likeable in the telling.” Kirkus Review Wing Commander Ian Gleed DSO, DFC, was a R.A.F. fighter pilot ace who shot down thirteen enemy planes through the course of his service in World War Two. He served in both the Battle of France and Battle of Britain. Tragically he lost his life at the age of twenty-six in Tunisia in 1943. His book Arise to Conquer was first published in 1942.

    It was covered by Court TV and profiled on the Ricki Lake Show. Now, here is the intimate memoir of a shocking crime and its aftermath...one family's immediate and unforgettable story of what victims can suffer long after they should be safe.

    '-means so much tay a man.'The crowd stamps and claps, a hundred and fifty thousand voices blending into one.In 2008 Glasgow Rangers FC reached a major European final. It was held in Manchester, a short hop from Scotland into England. Cue a colossal invasion: the largest movement of Scots over the border in history and the first time in hundreds of years that an English city was taken over. Chaos reigned.Pack Men is the fictional story of three pals and one child trapped inside this powderkeg. In a city rocking with beer, brotherhood and sectarianism, the boys struggle to hold onto their friendship, as they turn on each other and the police turn on them. And somehow one of them has to disclose a secret which he knows the others won't want to hear...With this novel, one of Scotland's leading young writers has created a scuffed comedy about male un-bonding and Britain unravelling.

    An improvised game of cricket was often the circuit-breaker Harry and his team needed after the tension of operations. He began a tradition of organising matches wherever he was sent, whether it was in the mountains of East Timor with a fugitive rebel leader, or on the dusty streets of Baghdad, or in exposed Forward Operating Bases in the hills of Afghanistan. Soldiers, locals and even visiting politicians played in these spontaneous yet often bridge-building games.As part of the tradition, Harry also started to take a cricket bat with him on operational tours, eleven of them in total. They'd often go outside the wire with him and end up signed by those he met or fought alongside. These eleven bats form the basis for Harry's extraordinary memoir. It's a book about combat, and what it takes to serve in one of the world's most elite formations. It's a book about the toll that war takes on soldiers and their loved ones. And it's a book about the healing power of cricket, and how a game can break down borders in even the most desperate of circumstances.

    Laura Collins, a widow, is struggling to make a good life for her daughters, Tess and Tina.They are living with Laura's sister Millie and her seven children so when Laura is offered a good job, with accommodation, she is delighted. Life is very different for the Brewsters, living on Manor Farm in Herefordshire.Danny and his girlfriend, Sophie, intend to marry one day so that they can run Manor Farm together but his cousin and best friend, Phil Ryland, feels differently.He longs to get away from farming and intends to escape as soon as he can. Then war comes and changes everything.Tina is evacuated and Tess joins the Land Army.She means to be true to her boyfriend, Mike, but he is far away.Danny and Phil join the RAF, Danny to pilot bombers and Phil as navigator.They end up on the same airfield and fall in love with the same girl...But Phil has a secret which could end his chance of happiness, and Danny is the only person who knows what that secret is ...

    

    

    Union commander William Tecumseh Sherman’s relentless fight for the city secured the reelection of Abraham Lincoln, sealed the fate of the Southern Confederacy, and set a precedent for military campaigns that endures today. Its depiction in the novel and motion picture Gone with the Wind established the fight for Atlanta as an iconic episode in our nation’s most terrible war. In War Like the Thunderbolt: The Battle and Burning of Atlanta, award-winning author Russell S. Bonds takes the reader behind the lines and across the smoky battlefields of Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Ezra Church, and Jonesboro, and into the lives of fascinating characters, both the famous and the forgotten, including the fiery and brilliant Sherman; General John Bell Hood, the Confederacy’s last hope to defend Atlanta; Benjamin Harrison, the diminutive young Indiana colonel who would rise to become President of the United States; Patrick Cleburne, the Irishmanturned- Southern officer; and ten-year-old diarist Carrie Berry, who bravely withstood and bore witness to the fall of the city. Here also is the dramatic story of the ordeal of Atlanta itself—the five-week artillery bombardment, the expulsion of its civilian population, and the infamous fire that followed. Based on new research in diaries, newspapers, previously unpublished letters, and other archival sources, War Like the Thunderbolt is a combination of captivating narrative and insightful military analysis—a stirring account of the battle and burning of the “Gate City of the South.”

    Stanton raised, armed, and supervised the army of a million men who won the Civil War. He organized the war effort. He directed military movements from his telegraph office, where Lincoln literally hung out with him. He arrested and imprisoned thousands for “war crimes,” such as resisting the draft or calling for an armistice. Stanton was so controversial that some accused him at that time of complicity in Lincoln’s assassination. He was a stubborn genius who was both reviled and revered in his time.Stanton was a Democrat before the war and a prominent trial lawyer. He opposed slavery, but only in private. He served briefly as President Buchanan’s Attorney General and then as Lincoln’s aggressive Secretary of War. On the night of April 14, 1865, Stanton rushed to Lincoln’s deathbed and took over the government since Secretary of State William Seward had been critically wounded the same evening. He informed the nation of the President’s death, summoned General Grant to protect the Capitol, and started collecting the evidence from those who had been with the Lincolns at the theater in order to prepare a murder trial.Now with this worthy complement to the enduring library of biographical accounts of those who helped Lincoln preserve the Union, Stanton honors the indispensable partner of the sixteenth president. Walter Stahr’s essential book is the first major biography of Stanton in fifty years, restoring this underexplored figure to his proper place in American history.

    Meigs, who built the Union Army, was judged by Lincoln, Seward, and Stanton to be the indispensable architect of the Union victory. Civil War historian James McPherson calls Meigs “the unsung hero of northern victory.”Born to a well to do, connected family in 1816, Montgomery C. Meigs graduated from West Point as an engineer. He helped build America’s forts and served under Lt. Robert E. Lee to make navigation improvements on the Mississippi River. As a young man, he designed the Washington aqueducts in a city where people were dying from contaminated water. He built the spectacular wings and the massive dome of the brand new US Capitol. Introduced to President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward, Meigs became Lincoln’s Quartermaster. It was during the Civil War that Meigs became a national hero. He commanded Ulysses S. Grant’s base of supplies that made Union victories, including Gettysburg, possible. He sustained Sherman’s army in Georgia, and the March to the Sea. After the war, Meigs built Arlington Cemetery (on land that had been Robert E. Lee’s home). Robert O’Harrow Jr. brings Meigs alive in the commanding and intensely personal Quartermaster. We get to know this major military figure that Lincoln and his Cabinet and Generals called the key to victory and learn how he fed, clothed, and armed the Union Army using his ingenuity and devotion. O’Harrow tells the full dramatic story of this fierce, strong, honest, loyal, forward-thinking, major American figure.

    Yet within a few years of retiring from the ring, Tunney willingly receded into the background, renouncing the image of jock celebrity that became the stock in trade of so many of his contemporaries. To this day, Gene Tunney’s name is most often recognized only in conjunction with his epic “long count” second bout with Dempsey.In Tunney, the veteran journalist and author Jack Cavanaugh gives an account of the incomparable sporting milieu of the Roaring Twenties, centered around Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, the gladiators whose two titanic clashes transfixed a nation. Cavanaugh traces Tunney’s life and career, taking us from the mean streets of Tunney’s native Greenwich Village to the Greenwich, Connecticut, home of his only love, the heiress Polly Lauder; from Parris Island to Yale University; from Tunney learning fisticuffs as a skinny kid at the knee of his longshoreman father to his reign atop boxing’s glamorous heavyweight division. Gene Tunney defied easy categorization, as a fighter and as a person. He was a sex symbol, a master of defensive boxing strategy, and the possessor of a powerful, and occasionally showy, intellect–qualities that prompted the great sportswriters of the golden age of sports to portray Tunney as “aloof.” This intelligence would later serve him well in the corporate world, as CEO of several major companies and as a patron of the arts. And while the public craved reports of bad blood between Tunney and Dempsey, the pair were, in reality, respectful ring adversaries who in retirement grew to share a sincere lifelong friendship–with Dempsey even stumping for Tunney’s son, John, during the younger Tunney’s successful run for Congress. Tunney offers a unique perspective on sports, celebrity, and popular culture in the 1920s. But more than an exciting and insightful real-life tale, replete with heads of state, irrepressible showmen, mobsters, Hollywood luminaries, and the cream of New York society, Tunney is an irresistible story of an American underdog who forever changed the way fans look at their heroes.From the Hardcover edition.

     Imprisoned for a crime he never committed, deserted by the woman he loved and betrayed by his own family. His bad luck seems to be running out when he is released early from prison and finds a job on the railroads. But it doesn’t last long. First he gets into a fight with a man who turns up dead. Then, while still on the run, his train is held up by his own brother’s gang. Then he somehow manages to offend the railroad boss’ daughter, the beautiful Elizabeth. With the fates out to get him, Glen has to use all his wits and strength to take control of his own destiny. Will that be enough to see him through, or will his past catch up with him before he gets a chance? Quick on the Draw is a hard fighting story of the Old West, where lives were cheap and danger was great. Praise for Gordon Landsborough 'A punchy tale coupled with plenty of action - an engaging read!' - Philip McCormac, bestselling western author Gordon Landsborough (1913-1984) was a publisher, author and bookseller. Writing tales about the exploits of gun-toting cowboys fighting out on the arid sands of the Wild West, Landsborough was himself a pioneering in the English paperback publishing world of the 1950s. He was widely known amongst his peers as the ‘maverick publishing genius’. Pioneering Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK’s leading independent digital publisher. We publish new and classic westerns by authors from the US and the UK. Follow us on Twitter: @PioneeringPress Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/PioneeringPress

    But it was at Gettysburg that the most searing experience of his wartime career took place. He charged with Pickett's Division behind General Lewis Armistead across that now-fabled field towards the center of the Union line. With great pride and seemingly no lasting bitterness, John Lewis recalls that fateful day and all his other days in a butternut uniform. But it's not all blood and glory. Lewis had a wry sense of humor and used it to twit both the Blue and the Gray in this wonderful small memoir of a Johnnie from Virginia. Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever. For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers, tablets, and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

     That becomes hard to do when Lieutenant Reese Armstrong sieges it for use as a hospital for his wounded soldiers and encampment grounds during the forty-seven day standoff for control of the Mississippi River before the surrender of Vicksburg. Widow Alexis Bella Seaborne led a sheltered life in the arms of massive oaks at Azalea Plantation with her husband Luke Wyatt until the Civil War forced her to forget about the elegant dress of a lady and embrace survival when a Yankee officer took control of her home. Reese never thought he’d fall for a Southern belle, but he can’t deny the attraction he feels each time Alexis’s haunted blue eyes show passion for the home she loves and her beloved South. He can’t help but envy the love and regard she held for her husband and longs for love like it. Alexis never thought she could love again when her husband died in the war. How could she fall for a Yankee when Union soldiers killed him? Left with nothing but a war-ravaged rundown plantation after the invasion of an ocean of blue, can she find trust and faith to move on? As movement flutters in her stomach, can she let go of the past to find a future for her and her unborn child? Her first love was sweet, young, and innocent, and she loved him with all of her heart, yet this handsome Yankee devil invaded her home and made her blood sizzle. His touch seared her skin as well as her heart. Worse yet, his kisses entrapped her lips and devoured her, consuming her with a passion that told her she was still alive and had not been buried with her husband. Despite her efforts to die on the inside, he awoke the spirit, heart, and passion she thought she’d buried for good. Book one of a two book serial, but may be read as a stand-alone. The second book will pick up with Reese still battling the raging Civil War and focus on the ending of the war. This one focused on the Battle of Vicksburg.

    After a year-long scramble to finish first, in a race filled with intrigue and second guessing, blundering and genius, the two ships -- the Monitor and the Merrimack -- after a four-hour battle, ended the three-thousand-year tradition of wooden men-of-war and ushered in "the reign of iron."In the first major work on the subject in thirty-five years, novelist, historian, and tall-ship sailor James L. Nelson, acclaimed author of the Brethren of the Coast trilogy, brilliantly recounts the story of these magnificent ships, the men who built and fought them, and the extraordinary battle that made them legend.