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Books > History > World history > From 1900
Here are the voices of London - rich and poor, native and
immigrant, women and men - witnessed by Craig Taylor, an acclaimed
journalist, playwright and writer, who spent five years exploring
the city and listening to its residents. From the woman whose voice
announces the stations on the London Underground to the man who
plants the trees along Oxford Street; from a Pakistani currency
trader to a Guardsman at Buckingham Palace - together, these voices
and many more, paint a vivid, epic and wholly fresh portrait of
Twenty-First Century London.
This is the second volume, but the last to be published of a
trilogy - the other volumes being Smashing the Atlantic Wall and
The Battle of the Bulge. Monty's Rhine Adventure begins immediately
after the Normandy invasion with the euphoria surrounding the
belief that the war would soon be won. However, it was not to be as
easy Monty hoped. The book covers the difficult next few months as
the Allies slogged through France and Belgium fighting stern and
skilled Nazi resistance. However, the centrepiece of Monty's Rhine
Adventure is Operation Market garden - Monty's bold plan to cut
through the German defences via the eight bridges which spanned the
Dutch/German border. The book deals with the plan, its execution
and its aftermath in rigorous detail. Had Market Garden gone to
plan, it might have led to the overall defeat of the Third Reich
before the end of 1944. As it was, it was the Russians that entered
Berlin first in May 1945. Nonetheless, this period remains one of
the boldest and most exciting of the Second World War.
Key title in the new Uniform Legends series. Up close and personal
accounts of pilots who were there, first written in the 1960's when
many of the surviving British and German airmen were in or entering
their middle years
Wonderful account of one of the top Battle of Britain fighter
pilots. Written by one of the foremost military aviation authors
who was an RAF Officer himself and personally knew Lacey.
David Danelo spent three months traveling the 1,952 miles that
separate the United States and Mexico - a journey that took him
across four states and two countries through a world of rivers and
canals, mountains and deserts, highways and dirt roads, fences and
border towns. Here the border isn't just an abstraction thrown
around in political debates in Washington; it's a physical reality,
infinitely more complex than most politicians believe. Danelo's
investigative report about a complex, longstanding debate that
became a central issue of the 2016 presidential race examines the
border in human terms through a cast of colorful characters. As
topical today as it was when Danelo made his trek, this revised and
updated edition asks and answers the core questions: Should we
close the border? Is a fence or wall the answer? Is the U.S.
government capable of fully securing the border?
An absorbing and definitive modern history of the Vietnam War from the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Secret War.
Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the 1968 Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and also much less familiar miniatures such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh’s warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people.
Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings, and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners’ victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls, and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, and Huey pilots from Arkansas.
No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences, in the fashion that Max Hastings’ readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the twenty-first century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.
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