War Military Women

Caroline Johnson was an unlikely aviator candidate. A tall blonde debutante from Colorado, she could have just as easily gone into fashion or filmmaking, and yet she went on to become an F/A-18 Super Hornet Weapons System Operator. She was one of the first women to fly a combat mission over Iraq since 2011, and she was the first woman to drop bombs on ISIS. Jet Girl tells the remarkable story of the women fighting at the forefront in a military system that allows them to reach the highest peaks and yet is in many respects still a fraternity.

Who says women don’t go to war? From Vikings and African queens to cross-dressing military doctors and WWII Russian fighter pilots, these are the stories of women for whom battle was not a metaphor.

In December 1774, Benjamin Franklin met Caroline Howe, the sister of British General Sir William Howe and Richard Admiral Lord Howe, in a London drawing room for “half a dozen Games of Chess”. But as historian Julie Flavell reveals, these meetings were about much more than board games: They were cover for a last-ditch attempt to forestall the outbreak of the American War of Independence.

The untold story of generations of Middle Eastern freedom fighters—horsewomen who safeguarded an ancient breed of Caspian horse—and their efforts to defend their homelands from the Taliban and others seeking to destroy them, Book of Queens reaches back centuries to the Persian Empire and a woman disguised as a man, facing an invading army, protected only by light armor and the stallion she sat astride. Mahdavi draws a thread from past to present.

Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were talented, courageous, and strikingly attractive women who fought convention to make their names in the male-dominated field of flight in 1930s Germany. With the war, both became pioneering test pilots and were awarded the Iron Cross for service to the Third Reich. But they could not have been more different, and neither woman had a good word to say for the other.

Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive World War II.

In January 2003, 28-year-old GCHQ translator Katharine Gun received an email from the US National Security Agency that would turn her world upside down. The message requested Katharine’s assistance in co-ordinating an illegal US-UK spy operation which would secure UN authorisation for the Iraq invasion. Horrified, she decided to leak the information to the British press. Katharine’s decision would change her life forever, as she was arrested under the Official Secrets Act whilst becoming a cause célèbre for political activists.

Though Chris and Taya Kyle's marriage had its difficult moments, it was always a love story. Together they'd endured military service, a best-selling book, unexpected fame, and a film deal starring a hot Hollywood actor. But just when Taya thought that she and Chris were finally going to live their dream together, her husband was murdered. In the wake of his death, a grieving Taya was left to raise her two young children and handle the many things Chris left behind.

Eileen Collins was an aviation pioneer her entire career, from her crowning achievements as the first woman to command an American space mission as well as the first to pilot the space shuttle to her early years as one of the Air Force's first female pilots. She was in the first class of women to earn pilot's wings at Vance Air Force Base and was their first female instructor pilot. She was only the second woman admitted to the Air Force's elite Test Pilot Program at Edwards Air Force Base.

Heroines of Mercy Street tells the true stories of the nurses at Mansion House, the Alexandria, Virginia, mansion turned wartime hospital and setting for the new PBS drama Mercy Street. Among the Union soldiers, doctors, wounded men from both sides, freed slaves, politicians, speculators, and spies who passed through the hospital in the crossroads of the Civil War were nurses who gave their time freely and willingly to save lives and aid the wounded.

Relato en forma de diario personal que abarca de los ocho a los veinte años de Nieve Guerra. Todos se van narra la infancia y la adolescencia de su protagonista, quien, desde su nacimiento, viaja a la deriva de su propia vida gracias a que el Estado cubano decide su destino, siempre supeditado a un incierto desenlace signado por un matiz político-social. Nieve resiste la vida azarosa de sus padres y el pánico de crecer en una sociedad controladora hasta la asfixia que le va restando todas sus posesiones afectivas.

In the 1850s, Harriet Tubman, strategically brilliant and uncannily prescient, rescued some seventy enslaved people from Maryland’s Eastern Shore and shepherded them north along the underground railroad. One of her regular stops was Auburn, New York, where she entrusted passengers to Martha Coffin Wright, a Quaker mother of seven, and Frances A. Seward, the wife of William H. Seward. Through exhaustive research, Wickenden traces the second American revolution these women fought to bring about, the toll it took on their families, and its lasting effects on the country.

Gertrude "Gertie" Legendre was a big-game hunter from a wealthy industrial family who lived a charmed life in Jazz Age America. Her adventurous spirit made her the inspiration for the Broadway play Holiday, which became a film starring Katharine Hepburn. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Legendre, by then married and a mother of two, joined the OSS, the wartime spy organization that preceded the CIA.

Jiang Ying Yue assumed her kidnapping was random, that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. After all, who would want to harm her? But then her rescuer - a charismatic former soldier who takes her breath away - uncovers a traitor in her father's organization. Now, Ying Yue realizes that she's become a pawn in a dangerous game, and her kidnapper won't be satisfied until she disappears for good. Zu Anyanwu's work with Search and Protect and his canine partner Buck have always been his first priority...until he's tasked with keeping Ying Yue safe.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Sisters of Battle Road by J. M. Maloney, read by Annie Aldington. In 1939, Annie Jarman and her six young daughters were evacuated from their South London home and sent to the Sussex countryside to wait out the war. Little did they know what was in store for them or how their lives would change.

When James Bond was still in diapers, Virginia Hall was behind enemy lines, playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Hitler’s henchmen. Virginia was the baddest broad in any room she walked into. When the State Department proved to be a sexist boys’ club that wouldn’t let her in, she became a spy for the British. This boss lady helped arm and train the French Resistance and organized sabotage missions. There was just one problem: The Butcher of Lyon, a notorious Gestapo commander, was after her. But Virginia’s classmates didn’t call her the Fighting Blade for nothing.

When some of America's military men are captured or go missing during the Vietnam War, a small group of military wives become their champions. Never had families taken on diplomatic roles during wartime, nor had the fate of our POWs and missing men been a nationwide concern. In cinematic detail, authors Taylor Baldwin Kiland and Judy Silverstein Gray plunge you directly into the political maneuvering the women navigated, onto the international stage they shared with world leaders, and through the landmark legacy they created.

Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House is the life story of Elizabeth Keckley, a shrewd entrepreneur who, while enslaved, raised enough money to purchase freedom for herself and her son. Working as a seamstress and dressmaker for the wives of influential politicians, Keckley helped organize an auction of dresses that belonged to Mary Todd Lincoln, the former first lady. The auction elicited strong criticism from the Washington elite.

In The Warrior Code, entrepreneur, philanthropist, reality star, and retired gunnery sergeant Tee Marie Hanible serves up 11 principles to awaken your inner badass and thrive in the face of adversity. With insightful honesty and wisdom and set against the backdrop of Tee’s life, The Warrior Code will help you understand that things can beat us back from realizing our true potential...but the key is finding the way to realize one’s own innate strength.

Mary Boleyn, ‘the infamous other Boleyn girl’, began her court career as the mistress of the king of France. François I of France would later call her ‘The Great Prostitute’ and the slur stuck. Mary would emerge the sole survivor of a family torn apart by lust and ambition, and it is in Mary and her progeny that the Boleyn legacy rests.