World Elite

Best-selling author and legendary conspiracy researcher Jim Marrs, who has investigated the recent financial crisis, the JFK assassination, and the national socialist takeover of America, now takes on his biggest subject: the history of mankind. Offering mind-blowing information that will radically alter the way we think about the world and our place in it, Marrs goes beyond the revelations of his classic Alien Agenda, interweaving science and authentic archaeological finds with provocative speculation to show how human civilization may have originated with nonhumans who visited earth eons ago.

A single company of US paratroopers—calling themselves the "Chosen Few"—arrived in eastern Afghanistan in late 2007 hoping to win the hearts and minds of the remote mountain people and extend the Afghan government's reach into this wilderness. Instead, they spent the next fifteen months in a desperate struggle, living under almost continuous attack, forced into a slow and grinding withdrawal, and always outnumbered by Taliban fighters descending on them from all sides.

Britain's Special Air Service - or SAS - was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II's African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel's desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: Given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war matériel.

In December of 1943, as Nazi forces sprawled around the world and the future of civilization hung in the balance, a group of highly trained US and Canadian soldiers from humble backgrounds was asked to do the impossible: capture a crucial Nazi stronghold perched atop stunningly steep cliffs. The men were a rough-and-ready group, assembled from towns nested in North America's most unforgiving terrain, where many of them had struggled through the Great Depression relying on canny survival skills and the fearlessness of youth.

In the late 2000s, Molly Bloom, a twenty something petite brunette from Loveland Colorado, ran the highest stakes, most exclusive poker game Hollywood had ever seen - she was its mistress, its lion tamer, its agent, and its oxygen. Everyone wanted in, few were invited to play. Hundreds of millions of dollars were won and lost at her table. Molly's game became the game for those in the know - celebrities, business moguls, and millionaires.

In the bleak moments after defeat on mainland Europe in winter 1939, Winston Churchill knew that Britain had to strike back hard. So Britain's wartime leader called for the lightning development of a completely new kind of warfare, recruiting a band of eccentric free-thinking warriors to become the first 'deniable' secret operatives to strike behind enemy lines, offering these volunteers nothing but the potential for glory and all-but-certain death.

From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen, Somalia, and beyond, Scahill speaks to the CIA agents, mercenaries, and elite Special Operations Forces operators who populate the dark side of American war-fighting. He goes deep into al Qaeda-held territory in Yemen and walks the streets of Mogadishu with CIA-backed warlords. We also meet the survivors of US night raids and drone strikes - including families of US citizens targeted for assassination by their own government - who reveal the human consequences of the dirty wars the United States struggles to keep hidden.

From the award-winning historian, war reporter, and author Damien Lewis (Zero Six Bravo, Judy) comes the incredible true story of the top-secret "butcher-and-bolt" black ops units Prime Minister Winston Churchill tasked with stopping the unstoppable German war machine. Criminals, rogues, and survivalists, the brutal tactics and grit of these "deniables" would define a military unit the likes of which the world had never seen.

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.

Ever since she was a child, every aspect of Julia Haart’s life—what she wore, what she ate, what she thought—was controlled by the dictates of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. At 19, after a lifetime spent caring for her seven younger siblings, she was married off to a man she barely knew. For the next 23 years, her marriage would rule her life. Eventually, when Haart’s younger daughter, Miriam, started to innocently question why she wasn’t allowed to sing in public, run in shorts, or ride a bike without being covered from neck to knee, Haart reached a breaking point.

Each of them is one in a million. They number 6,000 on a planet of six billion. They run our governments, our largest corporations, the powerhouses of international finance, the media, world religions, and, from the shadows, the world's most dangerous criminal and terrorist organizations. They are the global superclass, and they are shaping the history of our time.

There's no team better suited to giving Artemis Fowl fans a fairy-level look at the LEP and the world beyond than Foaly, Commander Root, and Holly. With inside access granted by the LEP's finest, listeners will get unprecedented insight into the inner workings of the LEP, the enchanting subterranean world of fairies, and the fairy perspectives on the world above.

On a scorching September day in 1942, the Special Air Service (SAS), a special forces unit of the British Army, pulled off one of the most daring, top-secret ruses of the Second World War. The plan (sanctioned by Churchill): cover a grueling 2,000 miles of the Sahara desert to attack German general Erwin Rommel's seemingly impregnable port fortress in North Africa from the rear to break free and arm more than 30,000 Allied POWs.

Simo Häyhä was a man of action who spoke very little, but he was respected by his men and his superiors and given many difficult missions, including taking out specific targets. Able to move silently and swiftly through the landscape, melting into the snowbound surroundings in his white camouflage fatigues, his aim was deadly and his quarry rarely escaped. The Russians learned of his reputation as a marksman and tried several times to kill him by indirect fire. He was promoted from corporal to second lieutenant and he was awarded the Cross of Kollaa.

The story of one of the most remarkable–and feared–British aircraft of the Second World War: the de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito fighter-bomber.

In No Mission Is Impossible, Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal return with the intensely absorbing, fast-paced story of 30 of the boldest missions of the Israeli special forces. Bar-Zohar and Mishal depict in electrifying detail major battles, raids in enemy territory, and death-defying commando missions while also sharing the personal stories of both soldiers and top commanders, revealing their hopes and fears. The stories are often of victories, but sometimes they're of immense failures.

A elite do atraso se tornou um clássico contemporâneo da sociologia brasileira, um livro fundamental de Jessé Souza. Por meio de uma linguagem fluente, irônica e ousada, Jessé apresenta uma nova visão sobre as causas da desigualdade que marca nosso país e reescreve a história da nossa sociedade. No âmago da interpretação de Jessé não está a corrupção política. Para ele, a questão a partir da qual se deve explicar a história passada e atual do Brasil - e de suas classes, portanto - não é outra senão a escravidão.

Yevgeni Nikolaev was one of Russia's leading snipers in World War II, and his memoir provides an unparalleled account of front-line action in crucial theaters of war. Nikolaev is credited with a remarkable 324 kills, and his wartime service included time in the siege of Leningrad in 1941/1942. His memoir is not a neutral, apolitical account. As a member of the NKVD, it is not surprising that his memoir is full of historical misinterpretation and justification of the agency's actions.

It's a story of how the shock of defeat propelled an unlikely group of renegades into the frontline of the war. An adventure that reaches back from the trenches of the Western Front to high piracy in the deserts of North Africa to the final assault on Germany. It's a story that comes together in the corridors of headquarters, on long nights at the long bar in Shepherd's Hotel in Cairo, and on the deadliest battlefields in history, around a cast of insubordinate mavericks who didn't fit into the tight military hierarchy.

When England went to war against Hitler in 1939, it mobilized its entire military and industrial resources. But there was no place in that vast army for legendary stage magician Jasper Maskelyne, whose family was renowned for creating modern theatrical illusions. Maskelyne was determined to fight the Nazis using his only weapon: he intended to apply the techniques of popular magic to the battlefield. Initially ignored and ridiculed by the staid military leadership, he eventually cajoled his way into the Camouflage Corps.