Western Wars

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world.

King George V predicted that his son, Edward VIII, would destroy himself within a year of succeeding to the throne. In December 1936 he was proved right, and the world’s press revealed the king was abandoning his throne to marry Wallis Simpson. A life spent in the shadow of his charismatic elder brother left the new king, George VI, magnificently unprepared for the demands of ruling the kingdom and empire. Drawing on personal accounts from the royal archives, Deborah Cadbury uncovers the very private conflict.

Zach Cobb is haunted by bitter Civil War memories, but his fighting experience makes him a formidable Wells Fargo agent. When a series of payroll holdups rocks the Mojave Desert, Zach follows a trail of clues deep into the criminal underworld, where shady figures battle for control of the opium trade. Thoughts of his beloved Jenny Hays keep Zach warm at night, and maybe with a little help from above he'll crack the case and find himself some peace.

Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories. Well-publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting featured in the film Woman in Gold, illustrate the legacy of Nazi looting in the art world today. But what happened to looted art that was never returned to its rightful owners?

The Great War of 1914-1918 was the first mass conflict to fully mobilize the resources of industrial powers against one another, resulting in a brutal, bloody, protracted war of attrition between the world's great economies. Now, 100 years after the first guns of August rang out on the Western front, historian William Philpott reexamines the causes and lingering effects of the first truly modern war.

David Kilcullen was one of the architects of America's strategy in the late phases of the second Gulf War, and also spent time in Afghanistan and other hotspots. In Blood Year, he provides a view of the current situation in the Middle East and analyzes how America and the West ended up in such dire circumstances. This is an essential book for anyone interested in understanding not only why the region has collapsed into utter chaos, but also what the US can do to alleviate the grim situation.

The year is 1928. On the outskirts of a large German city, three young men are earning a thin and precarious living. Fully armed young storm troopers swagger in the streets. Restlessness, poverty, and violence are everywhere. For these three, friendship is the only refuge from the chaos around them. Then the youngest of them falls in love and brings into the group a young woman who will become a comrade as well, as they are all tested in ways they can have never imagined.

Callum Logan is a man of quick decision and execution. His fast gun has saved him on more than one occasion. Though hardened by the horrors of the Civil War, he gives each man a chance, unless they prove it’s undeserved. Now, on his way to begin a new life in the Colorado West, Callum is eager to put the killing behind him. But while rescuing a family from despicable outlaws, he is forced to kill the leader of the small band, putting himself in direct conflict with the outlaw’s brother, Elwood Wister, whose gang has become the scourge of Southwest Colorado.

World War I was the stage for a new form of mass destruction and violent chemical warfare. When the Bolsheviks pulled Russia out of the war in 1917, the Germans turned their offensive moves to the eastern front in hopes of winning the war in 1918. But as fresh American troops entered the front, the scales tipped against Germany.

First serialized in 1919, the novel takes place during WWI and tellls the story of Kurt Dorn, a wheat farmer in the state of Washington whose father is German and his mother American. Though he has a successful farm, there are groups that would like to prevent wheat from being harvested at all, including a group of Bolsheviks, the Industrial Workers of the World, which is led by a German spy financed not only by Germany but also secretly by a German wheat magnate.

Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John’s beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered. Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North in the late unpleasantness, and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down.

Admired by some, condemned by others, and feared by all - the military might of the West is undeniably colossal. In On Western Terrorism, world-renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky discusses Western power and propaganda with filmmaker and investigative journalist Andre Vltchek. It offers the perfect introduction to Chomsky’s significant political thought and provides an accessible approach for anyone who wishes to better understand the West’s fraught role in the world.

Harney County, Oregon, 1968: Nick Drake has a chest full of medals and enough demons to fill a duffel bag. He's been trained to kill but was never retrained to rejoin society. Drake flees to the lonesome high desert in search of redemption and takes a job patrolling wildlife refuges where the only conflicts are keeping out stray cows and ticketing poachers. But then he stumbles across a girl's body ritually placed in a gully. Her murder is only the beginning, and Drake must face humanity's heart of darkness once again if he's to stop a killer from turning even more gullies into graves.

History offers few records of war as vivid, haunting, and evocative as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. As enthralling to twenty-first century audiences as it was to those who first encountered the book in 1928, Remarque’s landmark tells the story of a young German volunteer who, with his comrades, moves from idealism to fatalism witnessing the horrors of mass killing and the intimate deaths of friends or the disfiguring survival of young men languishing in field hospitals.

Levon Cade and his daughters are on the run and living under assumed names in a remote corner of Idaho where Levon has taken on the role of gentlemen rancher. But when someone rustles his girls’ favorite horses, Levon puts aside his gentlemanly ways in exchange for hunting them down. Too bad Lew Dollinger, a man Levon unwisely allowed to live, is—at the same time—tasked with locating the runaway Cades by an international crime cartel.

Stuart Hills embarked his Sherman DD tank on to an LCT at 6:45 a.m., Sunday, June 4th, 1944. He was 20 years old, un-blooded, fresh from a public-school background, and officer cadet training. He was going to war. Two days later, his tank sunk; he and his crew landed from a rubber dinghy with just the clothes they stood in. After that, the struggles through the Normandy bocage in a replacement tank, engaging the enemy in a constant round of close encounters, led to a swift mastering of the art of tank warfare and remarkable survival in the midst of carnage and destruction.

Big Max Higgins ran the outlaw town of Hell's Creek up in the north Montana Rockies...and he decided to include the nearby town of Barlow in his cutthroat operation. What he didn't know was that Smoke Jensen was there with his wife, visiting relatives. It didn't take Smoke long to rout out the lot of them with angry fists and blazing guns...but Smoke didn't count on Big Max doing something as daring, desperate, and stupid as kidnapping his wife - and demanding the town of Barlow itself as ransom.

Novelist and prizewinning historian Winston Groom's gripping history of the four-year battle for Ypres in Belgian Flanders, the pivotal engagement of World War I that would forever change the way the world fought - and thought about - war. This is Groom's account of what would become the most dreaded place on Earth.

February 20, 1933: on an unremarkable day during a harsh Berlin winter, a meeting of twenty-four German captains of industry and senior Nazi dignitaries is being held in secret in the plush lounges of the Reichstag. They are there to "stump up" funding for the accession to power of the National Socialist Party and its fearsome Chancellor. This inaugural scene sets the tone of consent which will lead to the worst possible repercussions.

In 1870s New Mexico, the territory is at a crossroads. The indigenous population is being driven out—and driven down—by the white settlers migrating west after the Civil War. The center of power isn’t the governor but rather the Santa Fe Ring, a group of wealthy politicians, businessman, and landowners who exercise power through organized crime, theft, graft, and murder. Their main source of income is a mercantile store in Lincoln known as the House.