I looked around and people's faces were distorted...lights were flashing everywhere...the screen at the end of the room had three or four different films on it at once, and the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been...the band was playing but I couldn't hear the music...people were dancing...someone came up to me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected images on the back of my eye-lids...I sought out a person I trusted and he laughed and told me that the Kool-Aid had been spiked and that I was beginning my first LSD experience...

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.
Drury and Clavin focus on the story of the eleven young Marines who were the last men to leave, rescued from the U.S. Embassy roof just moments before capture, having voted to make an Alamo-like last stand. As politicians in Washington struggled to put the best face on disaster and the American ambassador refused to acknowledge that the end had come, these courageous men held their ground and helped save thousands of lives. Drury and Clavin deliver a taut and stirring account of a turning point in American history that unfolds with the heartstopping urgency of the best thrillers--a riveting true story finally told, in full, by those who lived it.

A BARACK OBAMA AND A BILL GATES SUMMER READING PICK 2022 A NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER 'This book helped me understand modern politics better' - Bill Gates, Summer Reading Pick 2022 'Superbly researched and written' - Francis Fukuyama, The Washington Post 'It's been a long time since I learned so much from one book.' - Rutger Bregman author of Utopia for Realists 'Powerful [and] intelligent.' - Fareed Zakaria, CNN America's political system isn't broken. The truth is scarier: it's working exactly as designed. In Why We're Polarized, Ezra Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America's deep political divisions, revealing how a system filled with rational, functional parts can combine into a dysfunctional whole. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump's rise to the Democratic Party's leftward shift to the politicisation of everyday culture. Klein shows how and why American politics polarised in the twentieth century, what that polarisation did to Americans' views of the world and one another, and how feedback loops between polarised political identities and polarised political institutions drive the system toward crisis. This revelatory book will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.

"An author's quest to discover what really happened to his uncle in World War II"

To all appearances, Anthony "Tony" Korkuc was just another casualty of World War II. A gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress, Korkuc was lost on a bombing mission over Germany, and his family believed that his body had never been recovered. But when they learned in 1995 that Tony was actually buried at Arlington National Cemetery, his nephew Bob Korkuc set out on a seven-year quest to learn the true fate of an uncle he never knew.

"Finding a Fallen Hero" is a compelling story that blends a wartime drama with a primer on specialized research. Author Bob Korkuc initially set out to learn how his Uncle Tony came to rest at Arlington. In the process, he also unraveled the mystery of what occurred over the skies of Germany half a century ago.

Korkuc dug up military documents and private letters and interviewed people in both the United States and Germany. He tracked down surviving crewmembers and even found the brother of the Luftwaffe pilot who downed the B-17. Dozens of photographs help readers envision both Tony Korkuc's fateful flight and his nephew's dogged search for the truth.

A gripping chronicle of exhaustive research, "Finding a Fallen Hero" will strike a chord with any reader who has lost a family member to war. And it will inspire others to satisfy their own unanswered questions.

A massively destructive and transformative event, the First World War left in its wake many legacies. Beyond 1917 explores both the consequences of the war for the United States (and the world) and American influence on shaping the legacies of the conflict in the decades after US entry in 1917. From the fields, seas, and airspace of battle, we live today with the consequences of the Great War's poison gas, post-traumatic stress disorder, and technological inventions such as air bombardment of civilians, submarine and tank warfare, and modern surgical techniques. Conscription, pacifism, humanitarian campaigns, and socialist movements emerged from the war to shape politics within countries for decades to come. Governments learned the value of propaganda, both in print and in film. Society changed: women were emancipated in some countries and citizenship was altered in many places, while aristocracy and monarchies went into decline. European empires were transformed and in some cases destroyed; in the Middle East, the change was enormous, beginning with the final collapse of Ottoman hegemony in the region. Fascism and communism, mass migration, independence, militarism, an influenza epidemic, the rise of Wall Street and American economic power, a slowdown in the process of globalization, and the pursuit of world peace by an organization based on collective security numbered among the most significant and lasting legacies of this conflict. Beyond 1917 explores how and why the war has become an integral milepost for human history, reflects the importance of the conflict, the forces that led to it, and the forces it unleashed. On the occasion of the centennial commemorations, an international group of scholars considers the long-term policy, political, social, economic, and cultural consequences of the war for the United States itself and for the world. In addition to interpretive essays, the volume provides a comprehensive bibliography and timeline of events.