But Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride would have never made history, and humankind would not have touched the stars, if not for the men and women on the ground who lit the fuse that launched the first rockets.Enthralled as a boy by the exploits of Flash Gordon and the novels of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke—who put the science in science fiction—James French became one of the original unsung engineers of America’s groundbreaking space program. His fascinating memoir offers an up-close-and-technical look at building, testing, and perfecting the pioneering Saturn rockets and original lunar landing module, and he shares true tales, both humorous and harrowing, of life—and near death—on the front lines of scientific exploration.If you’ve ever said, “It’s not rocket science,” you’re right. It’s rocket engineering—and here’s your chance to marvel at how it changed the world and made it possible to explore all that lies beyond Earth. James R French graduated from MIT in 1958 with a degree of BSME Specializing in Propulsion. His first job was with Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation where he worked on developmental testing of H-1 engines and combustion devices hardware for F-1 and J-2 engines used in Saturn 5. Mr. French has also worked at TRW Systems, where he was Lead Development Test Engineer on the Lunar Module Descent Engine, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he was Advanced Planetary studies Manager as well as Chief Engineer for the SP-100 Space Nuclear Power System and worked on Mariners 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9; Viking 1 & 2 and Voyager 1 & 2. . In 1986, he helped found American Rocket Co., a commercial launch company.Since 1987, Mr. French has been consultant to a variety of aerospace companies, SDIO, NASA, and USAF. He has participated in various startup companies in the private space flight arena and currently consults extensively to Blue Origin. Mr. French is co-author with Dr. Michael Griffin of the best-selling text Space Vehicle Design, published by AIAA. The second edition of the book has received the Summerfield Book Award for 2008. Mr. French is a Fellow of both AIAA and the British Interplanetary Society and a 50+ year member of AIAA. He has held several Technical Committee and other posts in AIAA. Cover design by Evan Twohy

    The old château echoes with voices from the past, and soon Abi finds herself drawn to one remarkable woman’s story, a story that could change the course of her summer—and her life.In 1938, Eliane Martin tends beehives in the garden of the beautiful Château Bellevue. In its shadow she meets Mathieu Dubosq and falls in love for the first time, daring to hope that a happy future awaits. But France’s eastern border is darkening under the clouds of war, and history has other plans for Eliane…When she is separated from Mathieu in the chaos of German occupation, Eliane makes the dangerous decision to join the Resistance and fight for France’s liberty. But with no end to the war in sight, her loyalty to Mathieu is severely tested.From the bestselling author of Sea of Memories comes the story of two remarkable women, generations apart, who must use adversity to their advantage and find the resilience deep within.

    On May 11, 1945, McKinney returned fire on the Japanese attacking his unit, using every available weapon-even his fists-standing alone against wave after wave of dedicated Japanese soldiers. At the end, John McKinney was alive-with over forty Japanese bodies before him. This is the story of an extraordinary man whose courage and fortitude in battle saved many American lives, and whose legacy has been sadly forgotten by all but a few. Here, the proud legacy of John McKinney lives on.

    Delta Air Lines, on September 14, 2005, was nothing like the world-beating company it had been just five years earlier, let alone decades before that. On this day, Delta found itself surrounded by lawyers, dejectedly filing for bankruptcy. Few believed it could ever reclaim its perch atop the US airline industry.But it did. Glory Lost and Found: How Delta Climbed from Despair to Dominance in the Post-9/11 Era tells the story of Delta’s dramatic tumble into bankruptcy and how it climbed its way back to pre-eminence despite hurricane-force headwinds: high fuel prices, a hostile takeover bid, relentless competition, economic meltdowns and geopolitical shocks.This book stems from a decade of research and countless interviews by Airline Weekly’s Seth Kaplan and Jay Shabat. It’s a profile in leadership: Delta became not only the greatest turnaround story in its own industry but also one of the greatest in the history of corporate America. Delta did the unimaginable by simultaneously resurrecting its finances and the spirits of its employees and customers. And while redefining itself, Delta also redefined an industry.

    Sophia is stunned, halting in mid-step. This is rare praise from her cold mother, so she must, indeed, look very good. At Frederick's side during the elaborate court dinner, Sophia shines and sparkles with youth and wit. The monarch is very pleased with his choice. Indeed, he is so enamored with the girl that he opens his purse to outfit mother and daughter, both woefully deficient in material matters appropriate for court life.So begins the transformation of Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst into Catherine the Great of Russia. The personal and professional triumphs and tribulations of this remarkable woman are retold by Sigrid Weidenweber, whose research into the life of Catherine reveals a new perspective on Catherine, from the inside out. Sigrid portrays with heartfeld understanding what it was like to have been such a major European political and military, social and cultural figure during the eighteenth century. WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ... “The admirers of literature and history will welcome this trilogy as a ray of light suddenly invading our age of darkness. Well researched and well written, it gives a unique insight into the tragic and fascinating story of Volga Germans over three centuries. Pasrts of it (such as volume 3) can and should be turned into an excellent movie, too. A reader who prides himself in his knowledge of history will still learn much from this book. A reader of most refined literary taste will still find it difficult to put down. Both will be eagerly waiting for Sigrid's next work.” – Vladimir Bukovsky, Russian political activist and author“With great skill and passion Sigrid Weidenweber unveils an epic and important historical journey, bringing to life the danger, violence, and intrigue of European royalty through the eyes of one of its most prominent and fascinating members.” – Tim Green, New York Times bestselling author“Great nations become great because of great people. Sigrid has combined her research and writing skills to trace the story of one of Russia’s great leaders. Catherine is superb reading about an exciting monarch who changed the course of European history – a real ‘page turner’!” – John Van Diest, Founder, Multnomah Press, & Associate Publisher, Tyndale House Publishers “Sigrid Weidenweber has carefully researched the history of the times, and presented it so colorfully that one would think she was an eyewitness to all the intrigue at the Russian court in the 18th century. It's excellent, engrossing reading!” – Paul L. Maier, Western Michigan University“… a splendid fictional, yet historical romp through the fragile crystal of the eighteenth century.” – Dona Reeves-Marquardt, Texas State University

    One chance to escape. Who will pay the price? 13 August 1961.Nationale Volksarmee soldiers roll barbed wire across a war-torn city—families are separated, livelihoods destroyed, and death comes easily as crippling fear paralyzes the occupants of both sides of the Berlin Wall. In one fate driven moment, Fifteen-year-old Ella Kühn must make the agonizing decision to remain with her dying father or flee with her brother and best friend to the West.Caught in the crossfire of duty and survival, Ella’s enforced occupation exposes her to the evil workings of the secret police and the deadly plans of a destructive regime. Torn between loyalty and temptation, she seeks comfort in the belief she will be reunited with one man, while another challenges her heart.Will Ella risk her life for freedom? Or will her restless soul find comfort in the shadows of East Berlin?Ensnare, the first book in the "Berlin Butterfly" series, is a story of life, love, survival, and the struggle of living through the early years of the Berlin Wall. Readers will be captivated with Ella's strength, determination, and vulnerability as she opens her heart amidst a dangerous and terrifying journey.Fans of Historical and German war fiction will love this extraordinary twentieth-century political drama.

    Feroz Ahmad provides a full survey of Turkey's chequered history, from its beginnings as a disparate group of tribes to its status as the first secular republic in the Islamic world. In addition to providing a detailed account of the key cultural, economic and social events, this accessible text also examines the problems faced by modern Turkey, from the rise of Islamic militancy to current tension in Turkey's government.

    I am what you may call a "defector" from the USSR, and I have a message for you: I love you very much. I love all of you-- liberals and conservatives, "decadent capitalists" and "oppressed masses," blacks and whites and browns and yellows, rednecks and intellectuals. For me you are the people who created a unique nation, country and society in the history of mankind,-- by no means a perfect one, but, let's face it-- the most free, affluent and just in today's world.I am not alone in this love. People all over the Earth, whether they praise America or bitterly criticize her, look upon you as the only hope for mankind's survival and the last stronghold of freedom. Some may not think in these idealistic terms, but they certainly enjoy the fruits of your civilization, often forgetting to be grateful for them. Millions of people in the so-called "socialist camp" or in the "Third World" literally owe their lives to America.

    But as scientists are discovering, much of the trusted advice that has been passed down through generations needs to be carefully reexamined.A thought-provoking combination of practical parenting information and scientific analysis, Our Babies, Ourselves is the first book to explore why we raise our children the way we do--and to suggest that we reconsider our culture's traditional views on parenting.In this ground-breaking book, anthropologist Meredith Small reveals her remarkable findings in the new science of ethnopediatrics. Professor Small joins pediatricians, child-development researchers, and anthropologists across the country who are studying to what extent the way we parent our infants is based on biological needs and to what extent it is based on culture--and how sometimes what is culturally dictated may not be what's best for babies.Should an infant be encouraged to sleep alone? Is breast-feeding better than bottle-feeding, or is that just a myth of the nineties? How much time should pass before a mother picks up her crying infant? And how important is it really to a baby's development to talk and sing to him or her?These are but a few of the important questions Small addresses, and the answers not only are surprising but may even change the way we raise our children.

    Clashing personalities have joined in unholy matrimony to form such infamous couples as Russia’s Peter II and Catherine the Great, and France's Henri II and Catherine de Medici—all with the purpose of begetting a male heir. But with tensions high and silverware flying, kings like England’s Henry II have fled to the beds of their nubile mistresses, while queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine have plotted their revenge...Full of the juicy gossip and bad behavior that characterized Royal Affairs, this book chronicles the love-hate marriages of the crowned heads of Europe—from the Angevins to Meghan Markle and Prince Harry—and ponders how dynasties ever survived at all.

    But now, astonishing new research is revealing patterns in human behavior previously thought to be purely random. Precise, orderly, predictable patterns... Albert Laszlo Barabasi, already the world's preeminent researcher on the science of networks, describes his work on this profound mystery in Bursts, a stunningly original investigation into human nature. His approach relies on the digital reality of our world, from mobile phones to the Internet and email, because it has turned society into a huge research laboratory. All those electronic trails of time stamped texts, voicemails, and internet searches add up to a previously unavailable massive data set of statistics that track our movements, our decisions, our lives. Analysis of these trails is offering deep insights into the rhythm of how we do everything. His finding? We work and fight and play in short flourishes of activity followed by next to nothing. The pattern isn't random, it's "bursty." Randomness does not rule our lives in the way scientists have assumed up until now. Illustrating this revolutionary science, Barabasi artfully weaves together the story of a 16th century burst of human activity-a bloody medieval crusade launched in his homeland, Transylvania-with the modern tale of a contemporary artist hunted by the FBI through our post 9/11 surveillance society. These narratives illustrate how predicting human behavior has long been the obsession, sometimes the duty, of those in power. Barabási's astonishingly wide range of examples from seemingly unrelated areas include how dollar bills move around the U.S., the pattern everyone follows in writing email, the spread of epidemics, and even the flight patterns of albatross. In all these phenomena a virtually identical, mathematically described bursty pattern emerges.Bursts reveals what this amazing new research is showing us about where individual spontaneity ends and predictability in human behavior begins. The way you think about your own potential to do something truly extraordinary will never be the same.

    In If These Walls Could Talk: Chicago Blackhawks, Mark Lazerus chronicles the team's rise from the dark ages of the 2000s to the golden age of the 2010s through never-before-told stories from inside the dressing room, aboard the team plane, at the players' homes, and — especially in the case of the rowdy 2009-2010 team that started it all — in countless Chicago bars. If These Walls Could Talk: Chicago Blackhawks will bring readers closer to their favorite players than ever before. It's a book Hawks fans won't want to be without.

    The beginning of the twenty-first century has rudely disposed of such ideas--most obviously through 9/11and its aftermath. But just as damaging has been the rise in the West of a belief that a single model of political behaviour will become a worldwide norm and that, if necessary, it will be enforced at gunpoint. In "Black Mass," celebrated philosopher and critic John Gray explains how utopian ideals have taken on a dangerous significance in the hands of right-wing conservatives and religious zealots. He charts the history of utopianism, from the Reformation through the French Revolution and into the present. And most urgently, he describes how utopian politics have moved from the extremes of the political spectrum into mainstream politics, dominating the administrations of both George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and indeed coming to define the political centre. Far from having shaken off discredited ideology, Gray suggests, we are more than ever in its clutches."Black Mass "is a truly frightening and challenging work by one of Britain's leading political thinkers. John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including "Straw Dogs "and "Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern." A regular contributor to "The New York Review of Books," he is a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics.

    Pouring into developing-world “instant cities” like Dubai and Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront a modern world cobbled together from fragments of a West they have never seen. Do these fantastical boomtowns, where blueprints spring to life overnight on virgin land, represent the dawning of a brave new world? Or is their vaunted newness a mirage?In a captivating blend of history and reportage, Daniel Brook travels to a series of major metropolitan hubs that were once themselves instant cities— St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai—to watch their “dress rehearsals for the twenty-first century.” Understanding today’s emerging global order, he argues, requires comprehending the West’s profound and conflicted influence on developing-world cities over the centuries.In 1703, Tsar Peter the Great personally oversaw the construction of a new Russian capital, a “window on the West” carefully modeled on Amsterdam, that he believed would wrench Russia into the modern world. In the nineteenth century, Shanghai became the fastest-growing city on earth as it mushroomed into an English-speaking, Western-looking metropolis that just happened to be in the Far East. Meanwhile, Bombay, the cosmopolitan hub of the British Raj, morphed into a tropical London at the hands of its pith-helmeted imperialists.Juxtaposing the stories of the architects and authoritarians, the artists and revolutionaries who seized the reins to transform each of these precociously modern places into avatars of the global future, Brook demonstrates that the drive for modernization was initially conflated with wholesale Westernization. He shows, too, the ambiguous legacy of that emulation—the birth (and rebirth) of Chinese capitalism in Shanghai, the origins of Bollywood in Bombay’s American-style movie palaces, the combustible mix of revolutionary culture and politics that rocked the Russian capital—and how it may be transcended today.A fascinating, vivid look from the past out toward the horizon, A History of Future Cities is both a crucial reminder of globalization’s long march and an inspiring look into the possibilities of our Asian Century.

    Drawing on his experience as one of the foremost statesmen of the modern era—advising presidents, traveling the world, observing and shaping the central foreign policy events of recent decades—Kissinger now reveals his analysis of the ultimate challenge for the twenty-first century: how to build a shared international order in a world of divergent historical perspectives, violent conflict, proliferating technology, and ideological extremism.There has never been a true “world order,” Kissinger observes. For most of history, civilizations defined their own concepts of order. Each considered itself the center of the world and envisioned its distinct principles as universally relevant. China conceived of a global cultural hierarchy with the Emperor at its pinnacle. In Europe, Rome imagined itself surrounded by barbarians; when Rome fragmented, European peoples refined a concept of an equilibrium of sovereign states and sought to export it across the world. Islam, in its early centuries, considered itself the world’s sole legitimate political unit, destined to expand indefinitely until the world was brought into harmony by religious principles. The United States was born of a conviction about the universal applicability of democracy—a conviction that has guided its policies ever since.Now international affairs take place on a global basis, and these historical concepts of world order are meeting. Every region participates in questions of high policy in every other, often instantaneously. Yet there is no consensus among the major actors about the rules and limits guiding this process, or its ultimate destination. The result is mounting tension.Grounded in Kissinger’s deep study of history and his experience as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, World Order guides readers through crucial episodes in recent world history. Kissinger offers a unique glimpse into the inner deliberations of the Nixon administration’s negotiations with Hanoi over the end of the Vietnam War, as well as Ronald Reagan’s tense debates with Soviet Premier Gorbachev in Reykjavík. He offers compelling insights into the future of U.S.–China relations and the evolution of the European Union, and examines lessons of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Taking readers from his analysis of nuclear negotiations with Iran through the West’s response to the Arab Spring and tensions with Russia over Ukraine, World Order anchors Kissinger’s historical analysis in the decisive events of our time.Provocative and articulate, blending historical insight with geopolitical prognostication, World Order is a unique work that could come only from a lifelong policymaker and diplomat.