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.
Nathaniel Tripp grew up fatherless in a house full of women,and he arrived in Vietnam as a just-promoted second lieutenant inthe summer of 1968 with no memory of a man’s example to guide andsustain him. The father missing from Tripp’s life had gone off towar as well, in the navy in World War II, but the terrors were toomuch for him, he disgraced himself, and after the war ended hecould not bring himself to return to his wife and young son. Tripptells of how he learned as a platoon leader to become something ofa father to the men in his care, how he came to understand thestrange trajectory of his mentally unbalanced father’s life, andhow the lessons he learned under fire helped him in the raising ofhis own sons.
A memoir by a World War II ordinance officer offers abehind-the-scenes account of his ordnance inspections during theEuropean campaign, detailing his experiences on the front line andhis job coordinating the recovery and repair of damaged Americantanks. Reprint.
When the Second World War broke out, Philipp Freiherr vonBoeselager, then 25-years-old, fought enthusiastically for Germanyas a cavalry officer. But after discovering Nazi crimes, vonBoeselager’s patriotism quickly turned to disgust, and he joined agroup of conspirators who plotted to kill Adolf Hitler and HeinrichHimmler. In this elegant but unflinching memoir, von Boeselagergives voice to the spirit of the small but determined band of menwho took a stand against the Third Reich in what culminating in thefailed “Valkyrie” plot—one of the most fascinating near misses oftwentieth-century history.
November 11, 1918. The final hours pulsate with tension asevery man in the trenches hopes to escape the melancholydistinction of being the last to die in World War I. The Alliedgenerals knew the fighting would end precisely at 11:00 A.M, yet inthe final hours they flung men against an already beaten Germany.The result? Eleven thousand casualties suffered–more than duringthe D-Day invasion of Normandy. Why? Allied commanders wanted topunish the enemy to the very last moment and career officers saw afast-fading chance for glory and promotion. Joseph E. Persico puts the reader in the trenches with theforgotten and the famous–among the latter, Corporal Adolf Hitler,Captain Harry Truman, and Colonels Douglas MacArthur and GeorgePatton. Mainly, he follows ordinary soldiers’ lives, illuminatingtheir fate as the end approaches. Persico sets the last day of thewar in historic context with a gripping reprise of all that led upto it, from the 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke, FranzFerdinand
When Deborah Rudacille was a child growing up in theworking-class town of Dundalk, Maryland, a worker at the localSparrows Point steel mill made more than enough to comfortablysupport a family. But in the decades since, the decline of Americanmanufacturing has put tens of thousands out of work and left thepeople of Dundalk pondering the broken promise of the Americandream. In Roots of Steel, Rudacille combines personal narrative,interviews with workers, and extensive research to capture thecharacter and history of this once-prosperous community. She takesus from Sparrows Point’s nineteenth-century origins to its heightin the twentieth century as one of the largest producers of steelin the world, providing the material that built America’s bridges,skyscrapers, and battleships. Throughout, Rudacille dissects thecomplicated racial, class, and gender politics that played out inthe mill and its neighboring towns, and details both the arduousand dangerous work at the plant and the environmental cos
December 1814: its economy in tatters, its capital city ofWashington, D.C., burnt to the ground, a young America was again atwar with the militarily superior English crown. With an enormousenemy armada approaching New Orleans, two unlikely allies teamed upto repel the British in one of the greatest battles ever fought inNorth America. The defense of New Orleans fell to the backwoods general AndrewJackson, who joined the raffish French pirate Jean Laffite tocommand a ramshackle army made of free blacks, Creole aristocrats,Choctaw Indians, gunboat sailors and militiamen. Together theseleaders and their scruffy crew turned back a British force morethan twice their number. Offering an enthralling narrative andoutsized characters, Patriotic Fire is a vibrant recounting of theplots and strategies that made Jackson a national hero and gave thenascent republic a much-needed victory and surge of pride andpatriotism.
On January 5, 1924, a well-dressed young woman, accompanied bya male companion, walked into a Brooklyn grocery, pulled a “babyautomatic” from the pocket of her fur coat, emptied the cashregister, and escaped into the night. Dubbed “the Bobbed HairedBandit” by the press, the petite thief continued her escapades inthe months that followed, pulling off increasingly spectacularrobberies, writing taunting notes to police officials, and eludingthe biggest manhunt in New York City history. When laundress CeliaCooney was finally caught in Florida and brought back to New York,media attention grew to a fever pitch. Crowds gathered at thecourts and jails where she appeared, the public clamored to knowher story, and newspapers and magazines nationwide obliged bypublishing sensational front-page articles.
In this gripping, page-turning account, Sam Moses has told astory in the tradition of Sebastian Junger’s A Perfect Storm,Robert Kurson’s Shadow Divers, and Hampton Sides’s Ghost Soldiers.It’s a story about the heroism of two men in battle at sea duringWorld War II, and one woman fleeing Nazi Norway with her child.It’s about how courage can change the course of history. AT ALL COSTS: How a Crippled Ship and Two American MerchantMarines Turned the Tide of World War II is the astonishing untoldaccount, with original historical reporting, of how two men facedunfathomable danger to help save the island of Malta, Churchill’scrux of the war. In 1942, the tiny island of Malta was the most heavily bombedplace on earth. Hitler needed Malta as a stepping-stone to get tothe oil in Iraq and Iran (Persia at the time). Blockaded by sea,Malta was running on empty, in food, fuel and ammunition. AxisU-boats and dive-bombers made supply convoys to Malta more likesuicide missions. In this last-hope
Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters wasplaying cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendouscrash. It was like roaring surf, one of them said later. Like arunaway two-horse team smashing through a fence, said another. Athird firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window-"Ohmy God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!" A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons ofmolasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging itscontents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outsettraveled at 35 miles an hour. It demolished wooden homes, even thebrick fire station. The number of dead wasn't known for days. Itwould be years before a landmark court battle determined who wasresponsible for the disaster.
A battle is like just. The frenzy passes. Consequence remains." Such are the observations made and ill-gotten lessons learned in this fic tional autobiographical narrative of breathtaking range and power.Ross Leckie not only presents a vivid re-creation of the great strug gle o.f the Punic wars and the profoundly bloody battle for Rome,but succeeds in bringing the almost mythical figure of Hannibal to life. Introspective, educated on the Greeks, but steeped in animus for Rome, Hannibal has never been presented quite like this.
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.
