In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and SebastianJunger’s The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventurein which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a greathistorical mystery–and make history themselves. For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was morethan a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents,braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigatingthrough wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselvesto their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than oncein the rusting hulks of sunken ships. But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers wereprepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in thefrigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: aWorld War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wastelandof twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones–all buried underdecades of accumulated sediment. No identifying marks were visible on

Whether he is evoking the blind carnage of the Tet offensive,the theatrics of his fellow Americans, or the unraveling of his ownillusions, Wolff brings to this work the same uncanny eye fordetail, pitiless candor and mordant wit that made This Boy's Life amodern classic.

Before writing his award-winning Going After Cacciato ,Tim O'Brien gave us this intensely personal account of his year asa foot soldier in Vietnam. The author takes us with him toexperience combat from behind an infantryman's rifle, to walk theminefields of My Lai, to crawl into the ghostly tunnels, and toexplore the ambiguities of manhood and morality in a war goneterribly wrong. Beautifully written and searingly heartfelt, IfI Die in a Combat Zone is a masterwork of its genre.

More than 100 compelling, true stories of personal heroismand valor– in a special expanded edition honoring courage in theface of war Here are dramatic accounts of the fearless actions thatearned American soldiers in Vietnam our highest militarydistinction–the Medal of Honor. Edward F. Murphy, head of the Medalof Honor Historical Society, re-creates the heroic acts ofindividual soldiers from official documents, Medal of Honorcitations, contemporary accounts, and, where possible, interviewswith survivors. Complete with a list of all Vietnam Medal of Honor recipients, thisbook offers a unique perspective on the war–from the early days ofU.S. involvement through the return home of the last soldiers. Itpays a fitting tribute to these patriotic, selfless souls.

As a senior foreign correspondent for The Times ofLondon, Janine di Giovanni was a firsthand witness to the brutaland protracted break-up of Yugoslavia. With unflinchingsensitivity, Madness Visible follows the arc of the wars inthe Balkans through the experience of those caught up in them:soldiers numbed by the atrocities they commit, women driven todespair by their life in paramilitary rape camps, civilians (diGiovanni among them) caught in bombing raids of uncertain origin,babies murdered in hate-induced rage. Di Giovanni’s searing memoir examines the turmoil of the Balkansin acute detail, and uncovers the motives of the leaders whocreated hell on earth; it raises challenging questions about ethnicconflict and the responsibilities of foreign governments in timesof mass murder. Perceptive and compelling, this unique work ofreportage from the physical and psychological front lines makes themadness of war wholly visible.

What ties Americans to one another? What unifies a nation ofcitizens with different racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds?These were the dilemmas faced by Americans in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries as they sought ways to bind the newly UnitedStates together. In A is for American, award-winning historian Jill Leporeportrays seven men who turned to language to help shape a newnation’s character and boundaries. From Noah Webster’s attempts tostandardize American spelling, to Alexander Graham Bell’s use of“Visible Speech” to help teach the deaf to talk, to Sequoyah’sdevelopment of a Cherokee syllabary as a means of preserving hispeople’s independence, these stories form a compelling portrait ofa developing nation’s struggles. Lepore brilliantly explores thepersonalities, work, and influence of these figures, seven mendriven by radically different aims and temperaments. Through thesesuperbly told stories, she chronicles the challenges faced by ayoung country trying to unify

Ernest Furgurson, author of Ashes of Glory and Chancellorsville 1863 , brings his talents to a pivotal andoften neglected Civil War battle–the fierce, unremitting slaughterat Cold Harbor, Virginia, which ended the lives of 10,000 Unionsoldiers. In June of 1864, the Army of the Potomac attacked heavilyentrenched Confederate forces outside of Richmond, hoping to breakthe strength of Robert E. Lee and take the capital. Facing almostcertain death, Union soldiers pinned their names to their uniformsin the forlorn hope that their bodies would be identified andburied. Furgurson sheds new light on the personal conflicts thatled to Grant’s worst defeat and argues that it was a watershedmoment in the war. Offering a panorama rich in detail and revealinganecdotes that brings the dark days of the campaign to life, NotWar But Murder is historical narrative as compelling as anynovel.

Georges Duby, one of this century's great medieval historians,has brought to life with exceptional brilliance and imaginationWilliam Marshal, adviser to the Plantagenets, knightextraordinaire, the flower of chivalry. A marvel of historicalreconstruction, William Marshal is based on a biographical poemwritten in the thirteenth century, and offers an evocation ofchivalric life -- the contests and tournaments, the rites of war,the daily details of medieval existence -- unlike any we have everseen. An enchanting and profoundly instructive book....Owing in signalpart to the imaginative scholarship of Georges Duby, darkness ismore and more receding from the Dark Ages." George Steiner New Yorker "A small masterpiece of its genre....It is a splendid story andProfessor Duby tells it splendidly....Duby has reconstructed aliving picture of a particular sector of society at a crucialmoment, at the brink of great change. The vividness, the intimacy,and the historical perception with which he presents his picture ofth

In this luminous portrait of wartime Washington, Ernest B.Furgurson–author of the widely acclaimed Chancellorsville1863 , Ashes of Glory , and Not War butMurder --brings to vivid life the personalities and events thatanimated the Capital during its most tumultuous time. Here amongthe sharpsters and prostitutes, slaves and statesmen are detectiveAllan Pinkerton, tracking down Southern sympathizers; poet WaltWhitman, nursing the wounded; and accused Confederate spy AntoniaFord, romancing her captor, Union Major Joseph Willard. Here aregenerals George McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant, railroad crew bossAndrew Carnegie, and architect Thomas Walter, striving to finishthe Capitol dome. And here is Abraham Lincoln, wrangling withofficers, pardoning deserters, and inspiring the nation. FreedomRising is a gripping account of the era that transformedWashington into the world’s most influential city.

Sherman's March is the vivid narrative of General William T.Sherman's devastating sweep through Georgia and the Carolinas inthe closing days of the Civil War. Weaving together hundreds ofeyewitness stories, Burke Davis graphically brings to life thedramatic experiences of the 65,000 Federal troops who plunderedtheir way through the South and those of the anguished -- and oftendefiant -- Confederate women and men who sought to protectthemselves and their family treasures, usually in vain. Dominatingthese events is the general himself -- "Uncle Billy" to his troops,the devil incarnate to the Southerners he encountered.

Twenty years in the making and greeted by stunning reviews,The Peabody Sisters is a landmark biography of three women who madeAmerican intellectual history. The story of the Peabody sisters andtheir central role in shaping the thought of their day is a pieceof history that has never before been fully told. Megan Marshall'smasterly and vivid work brings the sistersour American Brontstolife, along with the men they loved and influenced, including RalphWaldo Emerson, Horace Mann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Marshall castsnew light on a legendary American era in an epic tale with thescope and fascination of the great nineteenth-century novels.

In the spring of 2003, acclaimed journalist Anne Nivat set offfrom Tajikistan on a six-month journey through the aftermath of theAmerican invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Nivatfelt compelled to meet and write about the lives of everydaypeople, whom she allows to speak in their own voices, in their ownwords--words of hope, sadness, anger, and, above all, theuncertainty that fills their everyday lives. Her new Preface forthe paperback edition looks at the situation in Iraq today.

With a post* describing SEAL efforts in Afghanistan,The Warrior Elite takes you into the toughest, longest, and mostrelentless military training in the world. What does it take to become a Navy SEAL? What makes talented,intelligent young men volunteer for physical punishment, coldwater, and days without sleep? In The Warrior Elite, former NavySEAL Dick Couch documents the process that transforms young meninto warriors. SEAL training is the distillation of the humanspirit, a tradition-bound ordeal that seeks to find men withcharacter, courage, and the burning desire to win at all costs, menwho would rather die than quit.

In mid-1943 James Megellas, known as “Maggie” to his fellowparatroopers, joined the 82d Airborne Division, his new “home” forthe duration. His first taste of combat was in the rugged mountainsoutside Naples. In October 1943, when most of the 82d departed Italy to preparefor the D-Day invasion of France, Lt. Gen. Mark Clark, the FifthArmy commander, requested that the division’s 504th ParachuteInfantry Regiment, Maggie’s outfit, stay behind for a daring newoperation that would outflank the Nazis’ stubborn defensive linesand open the road to Rome. On 22 January 1944, Megellas and therest of the 504th landed across the beach at Anzio. Followinginitial success, Fifth Army’s amphibious assault, OperationShingle, bogged down in the face of heavy German counterattacksthat threatened to drive the Allies into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Anzioturned into a fiasco, one of the bloodiest Allied operations of thewar. Not until April were the remnants of the regiment withdrawnand shipped to England to r

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkestyears of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before orsince. Timothy Egan's critically acclaimed account rescues thisiconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour deforce of historical reportage. Following a dozen families and theircommunities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells oftheir desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dustblizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantlycapturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equaljustice to the human characters who become his heroes, "the stoic,long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgencyand respect" (New York Times). In an era that promises ever-greaternatural disasters, "The Worst Hard Time" is "arguably the bestnonfiction book yet" (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatestenvironmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and apowerful cautionary tale about the dangers of trifling withnature

In his writing, Borges always combined high seriousness with awicked sense of fun. Here he reveals his delight in re-creating (ormaking up) colorful stories from the Orient, the Islamic world, andthe Wild West, as well as his horrified fascination with knifefights, political and personal betrayal, and bloodthirsty revenge.Spark-ling with the sheer exuberant pleasure of story-telling, thiscollection marked the emergence of an utterly distinctive literaryvoice.

The myths of the ancient Greeks have inspired us for thousandsof years. Where did the famous stories of the battles of their godsdevelop and spread across the world? The celebrated classicistRobin Lane Fox draws on a lifetime’s knowledge of the ancientworld, and on his own travels, answering this question by pursuingit through the age of Homer. His acclaimed history explores how theintrepid seafarers of eighth-century Greece sailed around theMediterranean, encountering strange new sights—volcanic mountains,vaporous springs, huge prehistoric bones—and weaving them into themyths of gods, monsters and heroes that would become thecornerstone of Western civilization.

David Kenyon Webster’s memoir is a clear-eyed, emotionallycharged chronicle of youth, camaraderie, and the chaos of war.Relying on his own letters home and recollections he penned justafter his discharge, Webster gives a first hand account of life in E Company, 101st Airborne Division , crafting a memoir thatresonates with the immediacy of a gripping novel. From the beaches of Normandy to the blood-dimmed battlefields ofHolland, here are acts of courage and cowardice, moments ofirritating boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, andpitched urban warfare. Offering a remarkable snapshot of what itwas like to enter Germany in the last days of World War II, Websterpresents a vivid, varied cast of young paratroopers from all walksof life, and unforgettable glimpses of enemy soldiers and haplesscivilians caught up in the melee. Parachute Infantry is at onceharsh and moving, boisterous and tragic, and stands today as anunsurpassed chronicle of war--how men fight it, survive it, andremember it.

The experience of war has affected every generation in thetwentieth and twenty-first centuries, and every soldier has a storyto tell. Since the year 2000, the Veteran's History Project, a newpermanent department of the Library of Congress, has beencollecting and preserving the memories of veterans. In addition tomore than 50,000 recorded oral histories, the Veteran's HistoryProject has amassed thousands of letters, photographs, scrapbooks,and invaluable mementos from nearly a century of warfare. In the first book to showcase the richness and depth of thiscollection, Voices of War tells a compelling, emotional, history ofthe experience of war, weaving together veterans' stories from inWorld Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. Thestories are organized thematically into sections-from signing up tocoming home, generations of veterans recall individual experiencesthat together tell the extraordinary story of America at war.Letters, photographs, sketches and paintings enrich the compellingoral hi

When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the CivilWar, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lostits philosophical moorings and looked eastward to “Old Japan,” withits seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance andperspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as amore cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, inthe course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to aninternational power. This great wave of historical and culturalreciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified duringthe late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-lifepersonalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures promptedpilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific. In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knitgroup of nineteenth-century travelers—connoisseurs, collectors, andscientists—who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving OldJapan. As Benfey writes, “A sense of urgency impelled them, forthe

Award-winning historian Deborah Lipstadt gives us acom?pelling reassessment of the groundbreaking trial that hasbecome a touchstone for judicial proceedings throughout the worldin which victims of genocide confront its perpetrators. The capture of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eich?mann by Israeliagents in Argentina in May of 1960 and his subsequent trial in TelAviv by an Israeli court electrified the world. The public debateit sparked on where, how, and by whom Nazi war criminals should bebrought to justice, and the international media cov?erage of thetrial itself, is recognized as a watershed moment in how thecivilized world in general and Ho?locaust survivors in particularfound the means to deal with the legacy of genocide on a scale thathad never been seen before. In The Eichmann Trial, award-winning historian Deborah Lipstadtgives us an overview of the trial and analyzes the dramatic effectthat the testimony of sur?vivors in a court of law—which was itselfnot without controversy—had o

In this gripping memoir, the daughter of a man who conspiredto assassinate Hitler tells the story of three generations of herfamily and offers unparalleled insight into the German experiencein the last century. On August 15, 1944, Major Hans Georg Klamroth was tried fortreason for his part in the July Plot to kill Hitler. Eleven dayslater, he was executed. His youngest daughter, Wibke Bruhns, wassix years old. Decades later, watching a documentary about theevents of July 20, she saw images of her father in court suddenlyappear on-screen. “I stare at this man with the empty face. I don'tknow him. But I can see myself in him.” How could her familysuccumb to Nazi sympathies? And what made her father finallyrenounce Hitler?