Case one: A little girl goes missing in the night. Case two: A beautiful young office worker falls victim to amaniac's apparently random attack. Case three: A new mother finds herself trapped in a hell of herown making - with a very needy baby and a very demanding husband -until a fit of rage creates a grisly, bloody escape. Thirty years after the first incident, as private investigatorJackson Brodie begins investigating all three cases, startlingconnections and discoveries emerge . . .
In 1986, Charles Henderson first published Marine Sniper-theincredible story of Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, whose 93confirmed kills in Vietnam have never been matched by any sniperbefore or since. Now, the incredible story of a remarkable Marine continues-withharrowing, never-before-published accounts of courage andperseverance. These are the powerful stories of a man who rose togreatness not for personal gain or glory, but for duty and honor. Arare inside look at the U.S. Marine's most challenging missions-andthe one man who made military history.
The veteran Wall Street Journal science reporterMarilyn Chase’s fascinating account of an outbreak of bubonicplague in late Victorian San Francisco is a real-life thriller thatresonates in today’s headlines. The Barbary Plague transports us to the Gold Rush boomtown in 1900, at the end of thecity’s Gilded Age. With a deep understanding of the effects onpublic health of politics, race, and geography, Chase shows how onecity triumphed over perhaps the most frightening and deadly of allscourges.
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
This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101stAirborne Division’s fabled 502nd Infantry Regiment—a unit known as“the Black Heart Brigade.” Deployed in late 2005 to Iraq’sso-called Triangle of Death, a veritable meat grinder just south ofBaghdad, the Black Hearts found themselves in arguably thecountry’s most dangerous location at its most dangerous time. Hit by near-daily mortars, gunfire, and roadside bomb attacks,suffering from a particularly heavy death toll, and enduring achronic breakdown in leadership, members of one Black Heartplatoon—1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion—descended, overtheir year-long tour of duty, into a tailspin of poor discipline,substance abuse, and brutality. Four 1st Platoon soldiers would perpetrate one of the mostheinous war crimes U.S. forces have committed during the IraqWar—the rape of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and the cold-bloodedexecution of her and her family. Three other 1st Platoon soldierswould be overrun at
On 22 June 1941, the German army invaded the Soviet Union, onehundred fifty divisions advancing on three axes in a surpriseattack that overwhelmed and destroyed whatever opposition theRussians were able to muster. The German High Command was under theimpression that the Red Army could be destroyed west of the DneprRiver and that there would be no need for conducting operations incold, snow, and mud. They were wrong. In reality, the extreme conditions of the German war in Russiawere so brutal that past experiences simply paled before them.Everything in Russia--the land, the weather, the distances, andabove all the people--was harder, harsher, more unforgiving, andmore deadly than anything the German soldier had ever facedbefore. Based on the recollections of four veteran German commanders ofthose battles, FIGHTING IN HELL describes in detail what happenedwhen the world's best-publicized "supermen" met the world's mostbrutal fighting. It is not a tale for the squeamish.
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.
Nominated for the National Book Award, this book is set incolonial Massachusetts where, in 1704, a French and Indian warparty descended on the village of Deerfield, abducting a Puritanminister and his children. Although John Williams was eventuallyreleased, his daughter horrified the family by staying with hercaptors and marrying a Mohawk husband.
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.
For the first time in one enthralling book, here is theincredible true story of the numerous attempts to assassinate AdolfHitler and change the course of history. Disraeli once declared that “assassination never changed anything,”and yet the idea that World War II and the horrors of the Holocaustmight have been averted with a single bullet or bomb has remained atantalizing one for half a century. What historian Roger Moorhousereveals in Killing Hitler is just how close–and how often–historycame to taking a radically different path between Adolf Hitler’srise to power and his ignominious suicide. Few leaders, in any century, can have been the target of so manyassassination attempts, with such momentous consequences in thebalance. Hitler’s almost fifty would-be assassins ranged fromsimple craftsmen to high-ranking soldiers, from the apolitical tothe ideologically obsessed, from Polish Resistance fighters topatriotic Wehrmacht officers, and from enemy agents to his closestassociates. And yet, up to
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.
In 1944,eighteen-year-old university student Leo Litwak finds himself in the middle of the waning European war,a medic trained to save lives but often powerless to do much more than watch life slip away.instead of a rifle he carries bandages, sulfa powder, morphine_and only a red cross to protect him.This is the true story of real people in war _friende and thieves,dreamers and killers,jokers and heroes_as wellas theper-sonal account of a young American plucked from a sheltered,comfort-asble life and sent to a foreign land to save the men fighting to save the world.Few books have portrayed the grit and wonder of war with such eloquence,and still fewer have shown how war looks through the eyes of a soldier whose mission was saving lives,not taking them.