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Books > Fiction > True stories > War / combat / elite forces
Two months into a planned solo source-to-sea navigation of the Amazon River, adventure Davey du Plessis was ambushed and shot within the isolated jungles of Peru.
The adventure turned into an intense moment-to-moment struggle to survive as he made his way, wounded, through the dense jungle, seeking rescue and safety.
Choosing To Live is Davey's personal account of his Amazon experience. He retells the remarkable story with an endearing openness, while sharing unique insights into the power of compassion and his ability to maintain motivation in his balance between life and death.
The incredible true story of Louis Zamperini, now a major motion
picture directed by Angelina Jolie. THE INTERNATIONAL NUMBER ONE
BESTSELLER In 1943 a bomber crashes into the Pacific Ocean. Against
all odds, one young lieutenant survives. Louise Zamperini had
already transformed himself from child delinquent to prodigious
athlete, running in the Berlin Olympics. Now he must embark on one
of the Second World War's most extraordinary odysseys. Zamperini
faces thousands of miles of open ocean on a failing raft. Beyond
like only greater trials, in Japan's prisoner-of-war camps. Driven
to the limits of endurance, Zamperini's destiny, whether triumph or
tragedy, depends on the strength of his will ... Now a major motion
picture, directed by Angelina Jolie and starring Jack O' Connell.
'This is Doro and he is beautiful.' So begins the extraordinary
story of Doro Goumaneh, who faced an unimaginable series of
adversities on his journey from persecution in The Gambia to refuge
in France. Doro was once a relatively prosperous fisherman, but in
2014, when the country's fishing rights were stolen and secret
police began arresting Gambian fishermen, Doro left home, fleeing
for his life. From Senegal to Libya to Algeria and back to Libya,
Doro fell victim to the horrific cycle of abuse targeted at
refugees. He endured shipwreck, torture and being left for dead in
a mass grave. Miraculously, he survived. In 2019, during one of his
many attempts to reach Europe, Doro was rescued by the boat
Sea-Watch 3 in the Mediterranean, where he met volunteer Brendan
Woodhouse. While waiting out a two-week standoff - floating off the
coast of Sicily, as political leaders accused Sea-Watch, a German
organisation that helps migrants, of facilitating illegal entry to
Europe - a great friendship formed. Told through both Doro's and
Brendan's perspectives, Doro touches on questions of policy and
politics, brutality and bravery, survival and belonging - issues
that confront refugees everywhere. But ultimately it is one man's
incredible story - that of Doro: refugee, hero, champion, survivor
and friend.
WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2019 A BARACK
OBAMA BEST BOOK OF 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR
NONFICTION 2019 TIME's #1 Best Nonfiction Book of 2019 A NEW YORK
TIMES BESTSELLER 'A must read' Gillian Flynn One night in December
1972, Jean McConville, a mother of ten, was abducted from her home
in Belfast and never seen alive again. Her disappearance would
haunt her orphaned children, the perpetrators of the brutal crime
and a whole society in Northern Ireland for decades. Through the
unsolved case of Jean McConville's abduction, Patrick Radden Keefe
tells the larger story of the Troubles, investigating Dolours
Price, the first woman to join the IRA, who bombed the Old Bailey;
Gerry Adams, the politician who helped end the fighting but denied
his IRA past; and Brendan Hughes, an IRA commander who broke their
code of silence. A gripping story forensically reported, Say
Nothing explores the extremes people will go to for an ideal, and
the way societies mend - or don't - after long and bloody conflict.
'10 Best Books of 2019' - The New York Times, Washington Post,
Chicago Tribune, Slate, NPR's Fresh Air 'Best History Book of 2019'
- Amazon '10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2019' - TIME '10 Best
Nonfiction Books of the Decade' - Entertainment Weekly '20 Best
Nonfiction Books of the Decade' - Literary Hub '10 Best True Crime
Books of the Decade' - CrimeReads
A Times History Book of the Year 2022 From Sunday Times bestselling
historian Saul David, the dramatic tale of the first American
troops to take the fight to the enemy in the Second World War, and
also the last. The 'Devil Dogs' of K Company, 3/5 Marines, were
part of the legendary first Marine Division. They landed on the
beaches of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in 1942 - the first
US ground offensive of the war - and were present when Okinawa,
Japan's most southerly prefecture, finally fell to American troops
after a bitter struggle in June 1945. In between they fought in the
'Green Hell' of Cape Gloucester on the island of New Britain, and
across the coral wasteland of Peleliu in the Palau Islands, a
campaign described by one K Company veteran as 'thirty days of the
meanest, around-the-clock slaughter that desperate men can inflict
on each other.' Ordinary men from very different backgrounds, and
drawn from cities, towns, and settlements across America, the Devil
Dogs were asked to do something extraordinary: take on the
victorious Imperial Japanese Army, composed of some of the most
effective soldiers in world history - and defeat it. This is the
story of how they did just that and, in the process, forged bonds
of brotherhood that still survive today. Remarkably, the company
contained an unusually high number of talented writers, whose
first-hand accounts and memoirs provide the colour, emotion, and
context for this extraordinary story. In Devil Dogs, award-winning
historian Saul David sets the searing experience of K Company into
the broader context of the brutal war in the Pacific and does for
the U.S. Marines what Band of Brothers did for the 101st Airborne.
Gripping, intimate, authoritative and far-reaching, this is a
unique and incredibly personal narrative of war. Saul David's
previous book SBS -Silent Warriors was in the Sunday Times
Bestseller Chart in the 35th and 36th week of 2021.
From the shattered land of Israel and Occupied Palestine comes a
vivid account of anguish and determination. In his passionate
essays penned during the violence of the Second Intifada, writer
Henry Ralph Carse, practical theologian, pilgrim and scholar, seeks
meaning in the seemingly senseless conflict. Living in the heart of
East Jerusalem, Carse is an educator and the father of four
children growing up in the midst of the mayhem. Driven by hope and
concern, he chronicles his daily ventures into No-One Land,
engaging both Israelis and Palestinians in the terrible and
inspiring realities of their lives in the crossfire.
The extraordinary story of how a Derbyshire coal miner survived as
an escaped POW in occupied Poland by posing as a deaf-mute for
three years. A few years before Colin Marshall died in 1993 he
wrote his story and gave it to his daughter Hazel. She knew he'd
had an extraordinary life but she read things he had never talked
about, and it seemed part of another world. Years later, after
Hazel's mother Nancy died, Hazel found tucked away in a cupboard,
unseen letters, postcards and photographs that her mother had saved
from Colin's time in Poland during WWII. As a tribute to her dad
and the Polish people who helped him, Hazel decided to turn it into
a book. This true story takes the reader from Colin growing-up in a
Derbyshire mining village in the 1920s: starting work at the local
colliery, joining the Lincolnshire Regiment of the Royal Engineers,
being called-up at the outbreak of war, captured at Dunkirk and
escaping from a POW camp in Poland - to being befriended by a
Polish family, in a village occupied by German soldiers. Unable at
that time to speak Polish, he posed as a deaf-mute for three years
to avoid capture. Any slip-up and Colin knew that his Polish
friends would be shot. It is a story of courage and determination
and of two Polish families who risked their lives in order to save
others.
'The Book Collectors of Daraya celebrates the political and
therapeutic power of the written word . . . defiant and cautiously
optimistic' Financial Times '[An] incredible chronicle . . . The
book tells the kind of story that often gets buried beneath images
of violence' LitHub In 2012 the rebel suburb of Daraya in Damascus
was brutally besieged by Syrian government forces. Four years of
suffering ensued, punctuated by shelling, barrel bombs and chemical
gas attacks. People's homes were destroyed and their food supplies
cut off; disease was rife. Yet in this man-made hell, forty young
Syrian revolutionaries embarked on an extraordinary project,
rescuing all the books they could find in the bombed-out ruins of
their home town. They used them to create a secret library, in a
safe place, deep underground. It became their school, their
university, their refuge. It was a place to learn, to exchange
ideas, to dream and to hope. Based on lengthy interviews with these
young men, conducted over Skype by the award-winning French
journalist Delphine Minoui, The Book Collectors of Daraya is a
powerful testament to freedom, tolerance and the power of
literature. Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud.
You don't have to be born confident. You can learn to be confident.
Here's how. Dr Nate Zinsser works with the cream of the US military
to prepare them mentally for leadership and for action. He also
trains top sportsmen and women to develop the self-belief essential
for world-class performance. Now he shares the tried and tested
techniques he has perfected over many years to help anyone who
wants to acquire the confidence that will enable them to perform at
their very best, whatever the environment, however stressful the
situation. In the process he shows how to make positive use of
nervousness, what acquiring a 'success cycle' involves, and why
self-assurance, like all skills, requires constant practice.
Drawing on the latest research, and packed with real-life examples,
this is a supremely practical - and inspirational - guide to
achieving bullet-proof confidence.
Part One This book is based on the true story of Jesse Fredrick
Warren a 24 year old French Polisher by trade who was living in
Bethnal Green, East London with his wife Amelia and their two young
daughters Elizabeth and Beatrice. The start of the Great War in
1914 brought with it an end to regular employment and the beginning
of great hardships for Jesse and his young family. By the February
of 1915 they were destitute and starving. There was no money for
food, gas or coal. Like so many other young men who found
themselves in the same situation, there was only one option open to
him: without telling his wife he signed on and volunteered for
Kitchener's Army. It was not for King and Country that he joined up
but to put food on the table for his wife and children. For this he
was taken to France where he walked through the gates of hell. Part
Two This is the continuing story of Jesse and Amelia Warren now
living in Walthamstow, East London from the end of the Great War
which against all odds he survived, until their deaths many years
later...but firstly it takes the reader back to the meeting of a
young couple who were to survive many hardships including two World
Wars. It tells of their family, the good times they shared together
and the bad times but also it tells of many hilarious moments that
will certainly make the reader smile.
With the outbreak of World War I, whilst thousands of men were
being swallowed up in the patriotic surge of volunteering for the
Army, large numbers of physically fit men were being rejected out
of hand. These were those who were less than the mandatory height
for acceptance, five feet three inches. Six young men from very
different walks of life found that when they tried to volunteer,
they were summarily rejected because they were not tall enough. All
this would change in December, 1914 when "Bantam" units were raised
in order to tap this otherwise wasted source of manpower. These six
men who enlisted at the same time and recruiting office made a pact
that if they could manage to do so, they would stay together as a
group whilst they were in the Army. The narrative sees them through
their training in the Yorkshire Dales and on Salisbury Plain thence
to France in the winter of 1916 where they are introduced to the
hardships of trench warfare in the flooded battlefields of French
Flanders. Ultimately, they move to the Somme where their luck runs
out. Having recovered from their wounds, two of the survivors take
part in the mining operations at Messines Ridge, before moving on
to Passchendaele and all its horrors. One of them is shipped back
to England after more wounding. As a result of his experiences
catching up with him, he will not return to active service in
France. This story is based on facts, the service history of the
author's father.
My grandfather, Frank Carollo, was a prisoner of war in the
infamous POW camp Stalag 17 B during World War II. During these
dark days, he managed to keep a diary of his experiences, depicting
everyday life within, through beautiful short stories, poetry, and
drawings. Now years later, I've taken his accounts, adding
background details from friends and family, to create a memoir of
hope, love, and survival; a story of one man's life before, during,
and after being confined within one of the most notorious of Nazi
camps. 20% of the profits from each book sold will be donated to
the national Alzheimer's Association, in memory of Frank Carollo.
Foreword by Dan Snow. Ten holders of the Victoria Cross, the
highest British military honour - for 'valour in the face of the
enemy' - are associated with the Borough of Tunbridge Wells, Kent,
UK. They include the very first VC to be awarded (in the Crimea,
1856).
The gripping, vividly told story of the largest POW escape in the
Second World War - organized by an Australian bank clerk, a British
jazz pianist and an American spy. In August 1944 the most
successful POW escape of the Second World War took place - 106
Allied prisoners were freed from a camp in Maribor, in present-day
Slovenia. The escape was organized not by officers, but by two
ordinary soldiers: Australian Ralph Churches (a bank clerk before
the war) and Londoner Les Laws (a jazz pianist by profession), with
the help of intelligence officer Franklin Lindsay. The American was
on a mission to work with the partisans who moved like ghosts
through the Alps, ambushing and evading Nazi forces. How these
three men came together - along with the partisans - to plan and
execute the escape is told here for the first time. The Greatest
Escape, written by Ralph Churches' son Neil, takes us from Ralph
and Les's capture in Greece in 1941 and their brutal journey to
Maribor, with many POWs dying along the way, to the horror of
seeing Russian prisoners starved to death in the camp. The book
uncovers the hidden story of Allied intelligence operations in
Slovenia, and shows how Ralph became involved. We follow the
escapees on a nail-biting 160-mile journey across the Alps, pursued
by German soldiers, ambushed and betrayed. And yet, of the 106 men
who escaped, 100 made it to safety. Thanks to research across seven
countries, The Greatest Escape is no longer a secret. It is one of
the most remarkable adventure stories of the last century.
Mention female spies, and most people think of Mata Hari. But
during the Roaring Twenties, Marguerite Harrison and Stan Harding
were the cause celebre: two beautiful, accomplished women whose
names were splashed across newspapers around the world. Almost a
century later, it is easy to understand the fascination with these
two remarkable women. Marguerite was a highly respectable and
recently widowed American journalist and socialite from Baltimore;
Stan was a runaway, a bohemian artist and dancer of British
heritage who left her wealthy, religious family to make a life for
herself in the expatriate community in Florence. The two women were
very different, yet both were strong-willed, independent and highly
ambitious women unafraid of taking risks. And both, as the Great
War ended and Central Europe dissolved into violent chaos, were
looking for adventure. Their paths first crossed in war-ravaged
Berlin during the Armistice and the the Spartacist Uprising in
1919. Fellow travellers, they became friends and, the evidence
suggests, lovers. Dodging bullets and interviewing colourful
characters in war-torn Europe led these intrepid women, separately,
to Bolshevik Russia, a country closed to outsiders since the
October Revolution of 1917. Their fateful meeting had repercussions
that spanned three decades, involving heads of state and
politicians in Britain, the United States and Soviet Russia. The
Lady is a Spy tells their forgotten story: that of two women who,
far in advance of their time, worked as foreign correspondents, who
operated as spies in dangerous shadowlands of international
politics, and who were both imprisoned in Lubyanka, one of the most
desperate places on earth. Their lives are reconstructed through
numerous primary sources, not only the poems, diaries and letters
of their friends and lovers, but also government documents
(including newly declassified US State Department papers) that
reveal the truth about their espionage careers and - in one case -
evidence of a shocking betrayal.
This adventure story is also the biography of Heinrich Harrer,
already a famous mountaineer and Olympic ski champion when he was
caught by the outbreak of the World War II while climbing in the
Himalayas.;Being an Austrian he was interned in India but succeeded
in escaping into Tibet. After a series of experiences in a country
never before crossed by a Westerner he reached the forbidden city
of Lhasa. He stayed there for seven years, learned the language and
acquired an understanding of Tibet and the Tibetans.;He became the
friend and tutor of the young Dalai Lama and finally accompanied
him into India when he was put to flight by the Red Chinese
invasion.;As a mountaineer Heinrich Harrer was a member of the
party which successfully ascended the North Wall of the Eiger in
1938.
Uit die aard van hul hoogs geheime werk heers groot
geheimsinnigheid oor die Recce's, maar nou het een van hulle - Koos
Stadler - sy ervarings neergepen. Die boek bied 'n onthullende blik
op die lewe van 'n Recce, op hul amper bomenslike fisieke vermoens
en kameraderie. Verwag naelbyt-aksie en dramatiese verhale.
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of
best-loved, essential classics. In 1936, George Orwell volunteered
as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War. In Homage to Catalonia,
first published just before the outbreak of World War II, Orwell
documents the chaos and bloodshed of that moment in history and the
voices of those who fought against rising fascism. His experience
of the civil war would spark a significant change in his own
political views, which readers today will recognise in much of his
later literary work; a rage against the threat of totalitarianism
and control.
What are the hidden factors that motivate armies to prevail and
conquer against all the odds? What is it that encourages soldiers
to perform unbelievable acts of courage even when the odds against
them look overwhelming? The words of inspired leaders and generals
are often the key factor. Sometimes it is just the soldier on
ground who sums up the situation best. It would seem that the day
of the set-piece conventional battle is over. For centuries their
format changed little. Even if this scenario has now changed, the
need for leaders to communicate in times of adversity has not.
Words of War covers an immense breadth - from Ancient Greece,
Alexander the Great, mediaeval battles, the American Civil War, the
two World Wars through to 21st century conflicts. Words of War
highlights the fascinating contrasts in style and content of
military and political leaders (most absorbing of all are the
extraordinary differences, and also some of the similarities it has
to be said, between the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
and German leader Adolf Hitler during WWII). Interspersed with the
longer speeches are brief quotes, insightful one-liners and the
light-hearted look at conflict. All throw some light onto what
words drive heroic deeds in the face of adversity.
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