Military Politics

Action-packed from the start, Hidden Order demonstrates yet again why Brad Thor is the "master of thrillers". A string of high-profile kidnappings has Washington, D.C., in a frenzy. When the victims begin turning up dead, frenzy turns to panic. And when the ransom demand is finally made public, panic will turn to terror. In Brad Thor's riveting new thriller, the stakes have never been higher, nor the lines between good and evil so hard to discern.

We have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding - "tribes". This tribal connection has been largely lost in modern society, but regaining it may be the key to our psychological survival.

Catherine the Great was a woman of notorious passion and imperial ambition. Prince Potemkin was the love of her life and her co-ruler. Together they seized Ukraine and Crimea, territories that define the Russian sphere of influence to this day. Their affair was so tumultuous that they negotiated an arrangement to share power, leaving each of them free to take younger lovers. But these “twin souls” never stopped loving each other.

Theodore Rex is the story—never fully told before—of Theodore Roosevelt’s two world-changing terms as President of the United States. A hundred years before the catastrophe of September 11, 2001, “TR” succeeded to power in the aftermath of an act of terrorism.

The year was 1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous - the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls. As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses.

Armored cars, burner phones, top-notch weaponry, and top-secret missions - this is the life of today's private military contractor. Like author Simon Chase, many PMCs were once the world's top military operatives, and since retiring from outfits like US Navy SEAL TEAM Six and the UK's Special Boat Service, they have devoted their lives to executing missions too sensitive for the government to acknowledge. Chase reveals here for the first time the operations too hazardous and politically volatile to be officially sanctioned by his employers.

On January 24, 1943, 230 women were placed in four cattle trucks on a train in Compiegne, in Northeastern France, and the doors bolted shut for the journey to Auschwitz. They were members of the French Resistance, ranging in age from teenagers to the elderly, women who before the war had been doctors, farmers' wives, secretaries, biochemists, schoolgirls. With immense courage they had taken up arms against a brutal occupying force; now their friendship would give them strength as they experienced unimaginable horrors.

Two agents, Russian and American, are brutally murdered. College students, working as drug mules, die gruesome deaths from radiation poisoning. Powerful dirty bombs explode minutes apart in San Francisco and St. Petersburg, Russia - slaughtering citizens and spreading blind panic throughout the world. But this is only a warning. The next attack will be nuclear.

In this epic 1885 work, General Ulysses S. Grant, 18th president of the United States and staunch supporter of the Union cause, set the record straight on his storied life and career. At its heart is Grant, victor and eyewitness to the defining moments of the Civil War, including the Battles of Shiloh, Chattanooga, and the Wilderness; the Siege of Vicksburg; and the Appomattox campaign, which concluded with the surrender of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

A group of some of the most powerful people in the government, the military, and the private sector has begun a brutal plan to quietly take over the reins of the US government. They've begun to remove the people who stand in their way - and replace them with their own sympathizers and puppets. They've already taken out the Speaker of the House - whose death was made to look like an accidental drowning - and the president and vice president are next.

In the first multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln to be published in decades, Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame offers a fresh look at the life of one of America's greatest presidents. Incorporating the field notes of earlier biographers along with decades of research in multiple manuscript archives and long-neglected newspapers, this remarkable work will both alter and reinforce our current understanding of America's 16th president.

The shattering of Yugoslavia in the 1990s showed that, after nearly 50 years of peace, war could return to Europe. It came to its bloody conclusion in Kosovo in 1999. Tim Marshall, then diplomatic editor at Sky News, was on the ground covering the Kosovo War. This is his illuminating account of how events unfolded, a thrilling journalistic memoir drawing on personal experience, eyewitness accounts, and interviews with intelligence officials from five countries.

Osama bin Laden is dead. Saddam Hussein is buried. Baghdad lies in ruins. Now the eyes of the world are on Jerusalem as Jon Bennett - a Wall Street strategist turned senior White House advisor - his beautiful CIA partner Erin McCoy, and the U.S. Secretary of State arrive in the Middle East to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Peter Maass went to the Balkans as a reporter at the height of the nightmarish war there, but this audiobook is not traditional war reportage. Maass examines how an ordinary Serb could wake up one morning and shoot his neighbor, once a friend - then rape that neighbor's wife. He conveys the desperation that makes a Muslim beg the United States to bomb his own city in order to end the misery.

For more than two thousand years, The Art of War has stood as a cornerstone of Chinese culture, a lucid epigrammatic text that reveals as much about human psychology, politics, and economics as it does about battlefield strategy. The influence of Sun-Tzu's text has grown tremendously in the West in recent years, with military leaders, politicians, and corporate executives alike finding valuable insight in these ancient words.

Korean Sun-hee and her brother, Tae-yul, must study Japanese language and culture in school. The symbols of their beloved Korea - like its flag and the rose of Sharon tree - can never be displayed or mentioned in public. When the emperor of Japan decrees that all Koreans must take Japanese names, Sun-hee and Tae-yul become Keoko and Nobuo. But as World War II explodes all around them, Sun-hee and Tae-yul wage their own war to stay true to their family, their country, and themselves.

In a small town in Utah, people are contracting a horrific disease with alarming plague-like symptoms. The CDC quarantines the area, but outbreaks are already being reported in China, Japan, and England. Evidence suggests this is not a new strain of superbug - but an act of war, an orchestrated deployment of unstoppable terror....

When veteran operator Pike Logan and partner Jennifer Cahill receive a letter from Blaisdell Consulting - the umbrella cover company for their real employer, a top secret counterterrorist unit called the Taskforce - they expect orders for their next mission-impossible tasking. Instead, they learn that their latest actions have gotten them fired, despite having saved thousands of innocent lives. Pike's shock and fury is redirected when their commander Colonel Kurt Hale asks him and Jennifer for help with a personal matter.

In 1943 John Steinbeck was on assignment for The New York Herald Tribune, writing from Italy and North Africa, and from England in the midst of the London blitz. In his dispatches he focuses on the human-scale effect of the war, portraying everyone from the guys in a bomber crew to Bob Hope on his USO tour and even fighting alongside soldiers behind enemy lines. Taken together, these writings create an indelible portrait of life in wartime.

John Boyd may be the most remarkable unsung hero in all of American military history. Some remember him as the greatest US fighter pilot ever - the man who, in simulated air-to-air combat, defeated every challenger in less than 40 seconds. Some recall him as the father of our country's most legendary fighter aircraft - the F-15 and F-16. Still, others think of Boyd as the most influential military theorist since Sun Tzu. They know only half the story.