Military Politics

Richard Bessel, history professor at the University of York, specializes in the social and political history of Nazi Germany. In four compelling essays, he forcefully argues that racism made war inevitable. The Third Reich, led by "[A] band of political gangsters", came to power with a deep ideological commitment to war and racism. As the driving force behind the economics, social policy, and propaganda of Germany, racial hatred was the catalyst that plunged Europe into war.

Five-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower was arguably the single most important military figure of World War II. Crusade in Europe tells the complete story of the war as he planned and executed it. Through Eisenhower's eyes the enormous scope and drama of the war—strategy, battles, moments of great decision—become fully illuminated in all their fateful glory. Penned before his Presidency, this account is deeply human and helped propel him to the highest office.

Throughout history society has determined specific rules of engagement between adversaries in armed conflict. With advances in technology, from armor to in the Middle Ages to nerve gas in World War I to weapons of mass destruction in our own time, the rules have constantly evolved. Today, when killing the enemy can seem palpably risk-free and tantamount to playing a violent video game, what constitutes warfare? What is the effect of remote combat on individual soldiers? And what are the unforeseen repercussions that could affect us all?

Vince Carver left the CIA with a dead friend and a close call. So much for so-called intelligence work. No longer knowing what he was fighting for, Carver switched to the private sector and swore he'd never go back. Armed with the elite skills of a special operator, he now leads a team of security specialists far from the battlefield. But everything changes when his convoy is ambushed on American soil. The three-letter agencies all want a piece of him, and the CIA is front and center.

The Holocaust was perpetrated by the Germans, but it would not have been possible without the assistance of other countries. If we are to understand how and why the Holocaust happened, Götz Aly argues in this groundbreaking study, we must examine its prehistory throughout Europe. We must look at countries as far-flung as Romania and France, Russia and Greece, where, decades before the Nazis came to power, a deadly combination of envy, competition, nationalism, and social upheaval fueled a surge of anti-Semitism, creating the preconditions for the deportations and murder to come.

When Truman asked Stalin in 1945 whether Hitler was dead, Stalin replied bluntly, "No." As late as 1952, Eisenhower declared: "We have been unable to unearth one bit of tangible evidence of Hitler's death." What really happened? Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams have compiled extensive evidence - some recently declassified - that Hitler actually fled Berlin and took refuge in a remote Nazi enclave in Argentina.

In the tradition of bestsellers by Robert Ludlum and Vince Flynn, Termination Orders introduces Dan Morgan, a retired black-ops agent who must return to duty to thwart a deadly international conspiracy.

Once a trained killer for the CIA, Dan Morgan has built a new life for himself. But when he receives a desperate plea from his former black-ops partner - reportedly killed in a foreign battle zone - he flies in to help. It should be a routine mission, extracting a human asset from the region, but it’s not - it’s an ambush.

So Others May Live: Coast Guard Rescue Swimmers: Saving Lives, Defying Death is the award-winning untold story of the US Coast Guard's quiet but resolute rescue swimmers. From deep ocean caves on the Oregon coast to the panicked and chaotic streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, here are their stunningly heroic stories.

Communist China is ambitious. It wants to replace the United States as the world’s leading superpower. And it is well on its way. It is dominant in the world economy. It is a master at intellectual property theft. It shows strategic genius at cornering essential markets. It has been staggeringly successful in buying influence among American elites. And its military buildup is astonishing. So far, China has been waging a cold war on the United States and its Asian allies. But, emboldened by American weakness and decline, that cold war is about to turn hot.

Salmon P. Chase is best remembered as a rival of Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860—but there would not have been a national Republican Party, and Lincoln could not have won the presidency, were it not for the groundwork Chase laid over the previous two decades. Starting in the early 1840s, long before Lincoln was speaking out against slavery, Chase was forming and leading antislavery parties. He represented fugitive slaves so often in his law practice that he was known as the attorney general for runaway negroes.

The seventh book in the best-selling Danny Black series. A series of gruesome killings take place in Dubai, Ghana and America. The victims are all connected with the SAS. In Hereford Danny Black realises they have something more specific in common - they were all involved in training a young Muslim soldier, Ibrahim Khan. Khan has been working under cover in Islamic State in a mission organised by MI6.

On a wet afternoon in September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stepped off an airplane and announced that his visit to Hitler had averted the greatest crisis in recent memory. It was, he later assured the crowd in Downing Street, "peace for our time." Less than a year later, Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. Appeasement is a groundbreaking history of the disastrous years of indecision, failed diplomacy, and parliamentary infighting that enabled Hitler's domination of Europe.

In the aftermath of the First World War, the seeds of fascism were sown in Italy. While the country reeled in shock, a new movement emerged from the chaos: one that preached hatred for politicians and love for the fatherland; one that promised to build a ‘New Roman Empire’, and make Italy a great power again.

A prelude to Hidden Order, Brad Thor's most recent pulse-pounding Scot Harvath thriller.

A deadly betrayal is at the center of The Athens Solution. When a game-changing weapon falls into the wrong hands, the US ambassador to Greece must risk everything to recover it, even if it means participating in a ruse that costs his life. With the ambassador dead and the device still at large, covert counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath rushes to eliminate a terror cell about to sell the dangerous technology to Iran.

Tom Clancy is an unstoppable force in fiction, nonfiction, and even on the silver screen. Now listeners can take a journey with America's most proficient covert team as they struggle to avoid full-fledged war in Clancy's latest edge-of-your-seat thriller. Tom Clancy's newest Op-Center is a gripping, powerful profile of America's defense, intelligence, and crisis management technology - from the master of the technological thriller. As with all of the titles in the series, elements of technology, diplomacy, military might, and espionage come together....

In Paris, an elderly man is assassinated as he takes his morning walk. In the war-torn cities of Syria, government forces wage a bloody war against their own people. The Russians are propping up the government, the French are backing one rebel fraction and the British are backing another. And in north Africa, young SAS trooper Jamie Truman is coming to the end of a gruelling tour of duty, or so he thinks. Jamie has a new mission.

1991. A restless young man called Dox is back home in Texas. His friends have missed him, and his mother and sisters need him. But after four years as a Marine and another two as a CIA contractor fighting the Soviet Union alongside the Afghan mujahideen, small-town life in Abilene is a suffocating dead end. Another secret war, this one in Southeast Asia, offers a big payday and the solution to his family’s troubles. But secret wars are never what they’re billed to be, and Dox is about to get the education of his young life.

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century - but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them.

Even without the right to vote, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy proved to have enormous social and political influence throughout the South - all in the name of preserving Confederate culture. Karen L. Cox's history of the UDC, an organization founded in 1894 to vindicate the Confederate generation and honor the Lost Cause, shows why myths surrounding the Confederacy continue to endure.