True War

On December 7, 1941, the nation of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and prompted the United States’ entry into the bloodiest war in human history. Americans have long debated the cause of the bombing; many have argued that the attack was a brilliant Japanese military coup or a failure of US intelligence agencies or even a conspiracy of the Roosevelt administration. But despite the attention historians have paid to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the truth about that fateful day has remained a mystery - until now.

An instant hit in the UK, this is the true account of a German shepherd who was adopted by the Royal Air Force during World War II, joined in flight missions, and survived everything from crash-landings to parachute bailouts-ultimately saving the life of his owner and dearest friend. In the winter of 1939 in the cold snow of no-man's-land, two loners met and began an extraordinary journey that would turn them into lifelong friends.

After surviving the horrors of the Holocaust - in ghettos, on death marches, and in concentration camps - a young couple seeks refuge in Canada. They settle into a new life, certain that the terrors of their past are behind them. They build themselves a cozy little cottage on a lake in Muskoka, a cottage that becomes emblematic of their victory over the Nazis. The charming retreat is a safe haven, a refuge from haunted memories. That is, until a single act of unspeakable violence defiles their sanctuary.

The Last Stand of Fox Company is a fast-paced and gripping account of heroism and self-sacrifice in the face of impossible odds. The authors have conducted dozens of firsthand interviews with the battle's survivors, and they narrate the story with the immediacy of such classic accounts of single battles as Guadalcanal Diary, Pork Chop Hill, and Black Hawk Down.

April 2004: Dan Mills and his platoon of snipers flew into Southern Iraq, part of an infantry battalion sent to win hearts and minds. They were soon fighting for their lives. Back home we were told they were peacekeeping. But there was no peace to keep. Because within days of arriving in theatre, Mills and his men were caught up in the longest, most sustained firefight British troops had faced for over 50 years.

1941. A talented flier, Jessie Lovelace yearns for a career in aviation. When the civilian flight school in her small Texas town begins to clandestinely train British pilots for the RAF, she fights to become an instructor. But the task isn’t without its perils of near-misses and death. Faced with the weight of her responsibilities, she finds solace with a British officer who knows firsthand the heavy price paid in war . . . until he returns to the battles he never truly left behind.

Fishers of Men is the true account of secret operations in Northern Ireland carried out by the British Army's most clandestine unit. It tells the unique story, through Rob Lewis' own extraordinary experiences, of an essential instrument in the fight against terrorism, that of covert intelligence gathering. The men and women who work in this field are a special breed who undertake hazardous risks with unflinching tenacity and professionalism - the price of negligence is high and the need for secrecy must be preserved even at the expense of personal relationships.

Sprawling and illuminating, Dan Gretton’s I You We Them is an unprecedented study of perpetrators of crimes against humanity: the “desk killers” who ordered and directed some of the worst atrocities of the last century. From Albert Speer’s Nazi complicity to Royal Dutch Shell’s role in the murder of the Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, Gretton probes the depths of the figure “who, by giving orders, uses paper or a phone or a computer to kill, instead of a gun.”

Courage finds its way into the hearts of soldiers in the heat of war. A soldier's bravery is tested on the battlefield, where life-and-death decisions are made in a split second. These true stories detail the amazing events of soldiers who were outnumbered and staring death in the face but survived.

In a gripping, moment-by-moment narrative based on a wealth of recently declassified documents and in-depth interviews, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin tell the remarkable drama that unfolded over the final, heroic hours of the Vietnam War. This closing chapter of the war would become the largest-scale evacuation ever carried out, as improvised by a small unit of Marines, a vast fleet of helicopter pilots flying nonstop missions beyond regulation, and a Marine general who vowed to arrest any officer who ordered his choppers grounded while his men were still on the ground.

While the mainstream media protects the innermost circles of the establishment, this audiobook reveals the harrowing truth of elite child molesters and the calculated methods they employ to conceal their horrific activities, which often span decades.

August 1917. As the Allies launch a massive offensive on the Western front, Captain Richardson, a battlefield veteran of the trenches leads four heavy tanks on an impossible mission against the German front line. A brazen assault through the wasteland battlefield that could shatter the German defences and create an opening for Allied soldiers to pour through and hasten the end of the war. But when tank F41 becomes trapped in no-man-land, that battle is transformed. The men can neither advance nor retreat as the tank sinks deeper into the mud, all while shells rain down all around it.

In 1942, a rational fear was mounting that New York Harbor was vulnerable to sabotage. If the waterfront was infested with German and Italian agents then the US Navy needed a recourse just as insidious to secure it. Naval intelligence officer Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden had the solution: recruit as his own spies, members of La Cosa Nostra. Pier to pier, no one terrified the longshoremen, stevedores, shopkeepers, and boat captains along the harbor better than the Mafia gangs of New York, who controlled the docks in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Elida Friedman was not supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth. Yet, despite the fear of death, Dr. Jonah Friedman and his wife Tzila choose to bring a daughter into the world, a little girl they name Elida—meaning non-birth in Hebrew.

Powerful, epic, and compelling, Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen shines light on a nearly forgotten figure in history. Cathy Williams was born and lived a slave - until the Union army comes and destroys the only world she’s known. Separated from her family, she makes the impossible decision - to fight in the army disguised as a man with the Buffalo Soldiers. With courage and wit, Cathy must not only fight for her survival and freedom in the ultimate man’s world, but never give up on her mission to find her family, and the man she loves.

By the spring of 1970, American troops were ordered to pull out of Vietnam. The Marines of First Reconnaissance Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel "Wild Bill" Drumright, were assigned to cover the withdrawal of First Marine Division. The Marines of First RECON Bn operated in teams of six or seven men. Heavily armed, the teams fought a multitude of bitter engagements with a numerically superior and increasingly aggressive enemy. Michael C. Hodgins served in Company C, First RECON Bn (Rein), as a platoon leader. In powerful, graphic prose, he chronicles his experience.

In June 1940, 10-year-old Pam Hobbs and her sister Iris took the long journey from their council home in Leigh-on-Sea to faraway rural Derbyshire. Living away from Mum and Dad for two long years, Pam was moved between four foster homes. In some she and Iris found a second family, with babies to look after, car rides and picnics, and even a pet pig. But other billets took a more sinister turn, as the adults found it easy to exploit the children in their care.

A shattered Army veteran and a mischievous party girl, Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow commandeered Western Airlines Flight 701 as a vague protest against the war. Through a combination of savvy and dumb luck, the couple managed to flee across an ocean with a half-million dollars in ransom, a feat that made them notorious around the globe. Koerner spent four years chronicling this madcap tale, which involves a cast of characters ranging from exiled Black Panthers, to African despots, to French movie stars.

It is 1992, and Bihac, Amra's hometown, is a multicultural city with Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. But when tensions escalate, the Serbs turn on their Bosnian neighbors. The Serbs control the army, and now they have peaceful Bihac surrounded. Soon Amra and her family are dealing with starvation and the threat of brutal violence; school, friendships, and the attentions from a new boy have to take a back seat to finding food and the tragic fallout from rising bigotry and ethnic hatred. Through it all, a stray cat, Maci, serves as a guardian spirit to the entire family.

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.