In 1942, a dashing young man who liked nothing so much as aheated game of poker, a good bottle of scotch, and the company of apretty girl hopped a merchant ship to England. He was Robert Capa,the brilliant and daring photojournalist, and Collier's magazinehad put him on assignment to photograph the war raging in Europe.In these pages, Capa recounts his terrifying journey through thedarkest battles of World War II and shares his memories of the menand women of the Allied forces who befriended, amused, andcaptivated him along the way. His photographs are masterpieces --John G. Morris, Magnum Photos' first executive editor, called Capa"the century's greatest battlefield photographer" -- and hiswriting is by turns riotously funny and deeply moving. From Sicily to London, Normandy to Algiers, Capa experienced someof the most trying conditions imaginable, yet his compassion andwit shine on every page of this book. Charming and profound,Slightly Out of Focus is a marvelous memoir told in words andpictur

A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force,this bestseller is Styron's true account of his descent into acrippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps thefirst writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychiclandscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.

"It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us intotrouble," nineteenth-century humorist Josh Billings remarked. "It’sthe things we know that just ain’t so." In this bold New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author andtalk-radio host Michael Medved zeroes in on ten of the biggestfallacies that millions of Americans believe about our country–inspite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. The Big Lies exposed and dissected include: ? America was founded on genocide against Native Americans. ? The United States is uniquely guilty for the crime of slaveryand built its wealth on stolen African labor. ? Aggressive governmental programs offer the only remedy foreconomic downturns and poverty. ? The Founders intended a secular, not Christian, nation. Each of the ten lies is a grotesque, propagandisticmisrepresentation of the historical record. Medved’s witty,well-documented rebuttal supplies the ammunition necessary to fireback the next time

Each year, the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps selects onebook that he believes is both relevant and timeless for reading byall Marines. The Commandant's choice for 1993 was We Were SoldiersOnce . . . and Young. In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry,under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopterinto a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediatelysurrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later,only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped topieces. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray andAlbany constituted one of the most savage and significant battlesof the Vietnam War. How these men persevered--sacrificed themselves for theircomrades and never gave up--makes a vivid portrait of war at itsmost inspiring and devastating. General Moore and Joseph Galloway,the only journalist on the ground throughout the fighting, haveinterviewed hundreds of men who fought there, including the Nort

The winner of Britain's prestigious Whitbread Prize and abestseller there for months, this wonderfully readable biographyoffers a rich, rollicking picture of late-eighteenth-centuryBritish aristocracy and the intimate story of a woman who for atime was its undisputed leader. Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt ofDiana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day. In1774, at the age of seventeen, Georgiana achieved immediatecelebrity by marrying one of England's richest and most influentialaristocrats, the Duke of Devonshire. Launched into a world ofwealth and power, she quickly became the queen of fashionablesociety, adored by the Prince of Wales, a dear friend ofMarie-Antoinette, and leader of the most important salon of hertime. Not content with the role of society hostess, she used herconnections to enter politics, eventually becoming more influentialthan most of the men who held office. Her good works and social exploits made her loved by themultitudes

Tutankhamun has mesmerized the world ever since HowardCarter's dramatic discovery of his treasure-filled tomb in theValley of the Kings in 1922, a fascination fanned anew by thecurrent world tour of the spectacular artifacts buried with him, apriceless trove that casts a spell on everyone who sees them. In this richly illustrated book, Egypt's leading archaeologistchronicles the Boy King and the royal dynasty that bred him. Andwhat a dynasty! Tut's grandfather, the Sun King Amenhotep III,married queen Tiye before they reached their teens, then ruled for40 years. Their heretical son, Akhenaten, abandoned Egypt'spantheon to worship a single god; his wife Nefertiti is stillremembered as one of history's legendary beauties. Tutankhamunascended the throne as a child and died before the age of twenty,but the splendor of his brief reign and the sensational unearthingof his tomb have made him the most famous of all thepharaohs. Zahi Hawass brings these fabled figures and their tumultuous,astonishin

Explores problems of community and the search for a nationalidentity. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize.

Here is the crucial summer of 1944 as seen by both sides, fromthe British spy, code-named “Garbo,” who successfully misled theNazis about the time and place of the D-day landings, to the poorplanning for action after the assault that forced the allies tofight for nine weeks “field to field, hedgerow to hedgerow.” Heretoo are the questionable command decisions of Montgomery,Eisenhower, and Bradley, the insatiable ego of Patton. Yet,fighting in some of the most miserable conditions of the war, theallied soldiers used ingenuity, resilience, and raw courage todrive the enemy from France in what John Keegan describes as “thebiggest disaster to hit the German army in the course of the war.”Normandy is an inspiring tribute to the common fighting men of fivenations who won the pivotal campaign that lead to peace andfreedom.

National Bestseller New York Times Editors’ Choice Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign Relations Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award For six months in 1919, after the end of “the war to end allwars,” the Big Three—President Woodrow Wilson, British primeminister David Lloyd George, and French premier GeorgesClemenceau—met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmarkwork of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic andintimate view of those fateful days, which saw new politicalentities—Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them—born out ofthe ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern worldredrawn.

In 1521, Suleiman the Magnificent, Muslim ruler of the OttomanEmpire, dispatched an invasion fleet to the Christian island ofRhodes. This would prove to be the opening shot in an epic clashbetween rival empires and faiths for control of the Mediterraneanand the center of the world. In Empires of the Sea, acclaimedhistorian Roger Crowley has written a thrilling account of thisbrutal decades-long battle between Christendom and Islam for thesoul of Europe, a fast-paced tale of spiraling intensity thatranges from Istanbul to the Gates of Gibraltar. Crowley conjures upa wild cast of pirates, crusaders, and religious warriorsstruggling for supremacy and survival in a tale of slavery andgalley warfare, desperate bravery and utter brutality. Empires ofthe Sea is a story of extraordinary color and incident, andprovides a crucial context for our own clash ofcivilizations.

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

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.

The secret diaries of a twenty-three-year-old White Russianprincess who worked in the German Foreign Office from 1940 to 1944and then as a nurse, these pages give us a unique picture ofwartime life in that sector of German society from which the 20thof July Plot -- the conspiracy to kill Hitler -- was born.

In this pioneering study of the ways in which the firstsettlers defined the power, prerogatives, and responsibilities ofthe sexes, one of our most incisive historians opens a window ontothe world of Colonial America. Drawing on a wealth of contemporarydocuments, Mary Beth Norton tells the story of the Pinion clan,whose two-generation record of theft, adultery, and infanticide mayhave made them our first dysfunctional family. She reopens the caseof Mistress Ann Hibbens, whose church excommunicated her forarguing that God had told husbands to listen to their wives. Andhere is the enigma of Thomas, or Thomasine Hall, who livedcomfortably as both a man and a woman in 17th century Virginia.Wonderfully erudite and vastly readable, Founding Mothers Fathers reveals both the philosophical assumptions and intimatedomestic arrangements of our colonial ancestors in all their rigor,strangeness, and unruly passion. "An important, imaginative book. Norton destroys our nostalgicimage of a 'golden age' of family

Every few months you'll read a newspaper story of thediscovery of some long-lost art treasure hidden away in a Germanbasement or a Russian attic: a Cranach, a Holbein, even, not longago, a da Vinci. Such treasures ended up far from the museums andchurches in which they once hung, taken as war loot by Allied andAxis soldiers alike. Thousands of important pieces have never beenrecovered. Lynn Nicholas offers an astonishingly good account ofthe wholesale ravaging of European art during World War II, of howteams of international experts have worked to recover lostmasterpieces in the war's aftermath and of how governments "arestill negotiating the restitution of objects held by theirrespective nations." --This text refers to an out of print orunavailable edition of this title.

Two of the most influential figures in American history. Twoopposing political philosophies. Two radically different visionsfor America. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were without question twoof the most important Founding Fathers. They were also the fiercestof rivals. Of these two political titans, it is Jefferson—–therevered author of the Declaration of Independence and our thirdpresident—–who is better remembered today. But in fact it isHamilton’s political legacy that has triumphed—–a legacy that hassubverted the Constitution and transformed the federal governmentinto the very leviathan state that our forefathers fought againstin the American Revolution. How did we go from the Jeffersonian ideal of limited governmentto the bloated imperialist system of Hamilton’s design? Acclaimedeconomic historian Thomas J. DiLorenzo provides the troublinganswer in Hamilton’s Curse. DiLorenzo reveals how Hamilton, first as a delegate to theConstitutional Convention and

The diplomatic origins, so-called, of the War are only thefever chart of the patient; they do not tell us what caused thefever. To probe for underlying causes and deeper forces one mustoperate within the framework of a whole society and try to discoverwhat moved the people in it. --Barbara W. Tuchman The fateful quarter-century leading up to the World War I was atime when the world of Privilege still existed in Olympian luxuryand the world of Protest was heaving in its pain, its power, andits hate. The age was the climax of a century of the mostaccelerated rate of change in history, a cataclysmic shaping ofdestiny. In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman concentrates on societyrather than the state. With an artist's selectivity, Tuchman bingsto vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the yearsleading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy and the endof their reign; the Anarchists of Europe and America, who voicedthe protest of the oppressed; Germany, as portrayed thr

Though it lasted for only six tense days in June, the 1967Arab-Israeli war never really ended. Every crisis that has rippedthrough this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur Warof 1973 to the ongoing intifada, is a direct consequence of thosesix days of fighting. Michael B. Oren’s magnificent Six Days ofWar, an internationally acclaimed bestseller, is the firstcomprehensive account of this epoch-making event. Writing with a novelist’s command of narrative and a historian’sgrasp of fact and motive, Oren reconstructs both the lightning-fastaction on the battlefields and the political shocks thatelectrified the world. Extraordinary personalities—Moshe Dayan andGamal Abdul Nasser, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin—rose andtoppled from power as a result of this war; borders were redrawn;daring strategies brilliantly succeeded or disastrously failed in amatter of hours. And the balance of power changed—in the MiddleEast and in the world. A towering work of history and anenthral

An examination of privacy and the evolution of communication,from broken sealing wax to high-tech wiretapping A sweeping story of the right to privacy as it sped alongcolonial postal routes, telegraph wires, and even today’sfiber-optic cables, American Privacy traces the lineage of culturalnorms and legal mandates that have swirled around the FourthAmendment since its adoption. Legally, technologically, andhistorically grounded, Frederick Lane’s book presents a vivid andpenetrating exploration that, in the words of people’s historianHoward Zinn, “challenges us to defendour most basic rights.”

In Lone Star Nation , Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W.Brands demythologizes Texas’s journey to statehood and restores thegenuinely heroic spirit to a pivotal chapter in Americanhistory. From Stephen Austin, Texas’s reluctant founder, to the alcoholicSam Houston, who came to lead the Texas army in its hour of crisisand glory, to President Andrew Jackson, whose expansionistaspirations loomed large in the background, here is the story ofTexas and the outsize figures who shaped its turbulent history.Beginning with its early colonization in the 1820s and taking inthe shocking massacres of Texas loyalists at the Alamo and Goliad,its rough-and-tumble years as a land overrun by the Comanches, andits day of liberation as an upstart republic, Brands’ livelyhistory draws on contemporary accounts, diaries, and letters toanimate a diverse cast of characters whose adventures, exploits,and ambitions live on in the very fabric of our nation.

One of our most provocative military historians, Victor DavisHanson has given us painstakingly researched and pathbreakingaccounts of wars ranging from classical antiquity to thetwenty-first century. Now he juxtaposes an ancient conflict withour most urgent modern concerns to create his most engrossing workto date, A War Like No Other. Over the course of a generation, the Hellenic city-states ofAthens and Sparta fought a bloody conflict that resulted in thecollapse of Athens and the end of its golden age. Thucydides wrotethe standard history of the Peloponnesian War, which has givenreaders throughout the ages a vivid and authoritative narrative.But Hanson offers readers something new: a complete chronologicalaccount that reflects the political background of the time, thestrategic thinking of the combatants, the misery of battle inmultifaceted theaters, and important insight into how these eventsecho in the present. Hanson compellingly portrays the ways Athens and Sparta fought onland and se

Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salemwitch trials in this startlingly original, meticulously researched,and utterly riveting study. In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and notsolely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attackshad all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and manytraumatized refugees—including the main accusers of witches—hadfled to communities like Salem. Meanwhile the colony’s leaders,defensive about their own failure to protect the frontier, ponderedhow God’s people could be suffering at the hands of savages. Struckby the similarities between what the refugees had witnessed andwhat the witchcraft “victims” described, many were quick to see avast conspiracy of the Devil (in league with the French and theIndians) threatening New England on all sides. By providing thisessential context to the famous events, and by casting her net wellbeyond the borders of Salem itself, Norton sheds new light on oneof the most pe