American Military

Across Cultures and Empires is above all an immigrant's story. Mahir Ibrahimov's fluency in multiple languages offers the perspective of someone who found a way to successfully cross boundaries amid the fall of empire and the resulting cascade of conflicts, even as he provides the listener with insight into an era where mass migration has become a defining dynamic. In the course of telling his personal story and reflecting upon his experiences, Ibrahimov offers clear observations on the deep connections he has made about freedom and America's role in the world.

George Wilson has garnered much acclaim for this shattering and enlightening memoir. Detailing his odyssey from July, 1944 until the following summer, If You Survive is a startling first-person account of the final year of World War II. Wilson was the only man from his original company to finish the war. As a Second Lieutenant, he went ashore at Utah Beach after the D-Day invasion amidst burned vehicles, sunken landing craft, and broken fortifications.

As a 23-year veteran of the United States Navy SEAL Teams, Ryan Zinke received two Bronze Stars for battle valor and eventually rose to command the elite members of SEAL Team Six. During his career Zinke trained and commanded many of the men who would one day run the covert operations to hunt down Osama bin Laden and save Captain Phillips ( Maersk Alabama). He also served as mentor to now famous SEALs Marcus Luttrell ( Lone Survivor) and Chris Kyle ( American Sniper).

Colin Powell is the embodiment of the American dream. He was born in Harlem to immigrant parents from Jamaica. He knew the rough life of the streets. He overcame a barely average start at school. Then he joined the Army. The rest is history - including Vietnam, the Pentagon, Panama, and Desert Storm - but a history that until now has been known only on the surface.

Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict. Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland....

Christmas is almost here, and guys are the last thing on personal shopper Ainsley Garrett's list. But her icy resolution melts when she sees an incredibly hot marine shopping for toys. A man in uniform with a hot bod and a heart of gold? Maybe a gal can believe in Santa after all.

Ryan Smithson joined the Army Reserve when he was 17. Two years later, he was deployed to Iraq as an Army engineer. In this extraordinary and harrowing memoir, readers march along one GI's tour of duty. It will change the way you feel about what it means to be an American.

Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner were the new media moguls of their day. With their photographs they brought the Civil War - and all of its terrible suffering - into Northern living rooms. By the end of the war, they were locked in fierce competition. And when the biggest story of the century happened - the assassination of Abraham Lincoln - their paparazzi-like competition intensified.

Dillard Johnson was at the forefront of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But surviving the enemy was only the beginning. Johnson would use the intensity, focus, and humor that kept him alive on the battlefield to fight stage three Hodgkin's Lymphoma. A man determined not to die, Johnson made a miraculous recovery - and then returned to Iraq for a second combat tour as an Army sniper. Funny and exciting, Carnivore offers fresh insight into the mind and heart of a warrior and offers a look at the lives of troops on the ground not seen before.

A riveting account of the extraordinary abolitionist, liberator, and writer Thomas Smallwood, who bought his own freedom, led hundreds out of slavery, and named the underground railroad, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, Scott Shane. Flee North tells the story for the first time of an American hero all but lost to history.

During the Second World War, Allied air forces dropped nearly two million tons of bombs on Germany, destroying some 60 cities, killing more than half a million German citizens, and leaving 80,000 pilots dead. But the terrible truth is that much of the bombing was carried out against the expressed demands of the Allied military leadership, leading to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Focusing on the crucial period from 1942 to 1945, Fire and Fury tells the story of the American and British bombing campaign through the eyes of those involved.

The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants: Edda L. Fields-Black shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats.

Loss and Redemption at St Vith closes a gap in the record of the Battle of the Bulge by recounting the exploits of the 7th Armored Division in a way that no other study has. Most accounts of the Battle of the Bulge give short-shrift to the interval during which the German forward progress stopped and the American counterattack began. This narrative centers on the 7th Armored Division for the entire length of the campaign, in so doing reconsidering the story of the whole battle through the lens of a single division and accounting for the reconstitution of the Division while in combat.

Fall, 1944. Paris has been liberated, saved from destruction, but this diversion on the road to Berlin has given the Germans time to regroup. The American and British armies press on from the west, facing the enemy time and again in the Hurtgen Forest, during the Market-Garden invasion, and at the Battle of the Bulge, all while American general George Patton and British field marshal Bernard Montgomery vie for supremacy as the Allies’ top battlefield commander.

LRPs were all volunteers. They were in the spine-tingling, brain-twisting, nerve-wracking business of Long Range Patrolling. They varied in age from eighteen to thirty. These men operated in precision movements, like walking through a jungle quietly and being able to tell whether a man or an animal is moving through the brush without seeing the cause of movement. They could sit in an ambush for hours without moving a muscle except to ease the safety off the automatic weapon in their hand at the first sign of trouble. These men were good because they had to be to survive.

The American war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, is now the longest armed conflict in the nation's history. It is currently winding down, and American troops are likely to leave soon - but only after a stay of nearly two decades.

Through oral histories and original interviews with surviving family members, Dan Goldberg brings 13 forgotten heroes away from the margins of history and into the spotlight. He reveals the opposition these men faced: the racist pseudoscience, the regular condescension, the repeated epithets, the verbal abuse, and even violence. Despite these immense challenges, the Golden Thirteen persisted—understanding the power of integration, the opportunities for black Americans if they succeeded, and the consequences if they failed.

Very soon, when the government is bankrupt and battling civil unrest...a ruthless, global conspiracy will rise from the shadows to seize control of everything. But that’s only the start. They’ll soon unleash a mysterious red rain, grounding all travelers, knocking out communications, and taking down the grid with a massive EMP.

Parker Hitt's proactive mentorship of Army cryptology during World War I laid the groundwork for the modern American cryptologic system. Though he considered himself an infantryman, Hitt is best known as the "father of American military cryptology".

A gripping, behind-the-scenes account of the personalities and contending forces in Tokyo during the volatile decade that led to World War II, as seen through the eyes of the American ambassador who attempted to stop the slide to war.