In 1939, several hundred people - students, professors, international chess players, junior military officers, actresses and debutantes - reported to a Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire: Bletchley Park. This was to be 'Station X', the Allies' top-secret centre for deciphering enemy codes. Their task was to break the ingenious Enigma code used for German high-level communications. The settings for the Enigma machine changed continually and each day the German operators had 159 million million million different possibilities. Yet against all the odds this gifted group achieved the impossible, coping with even greater difficulties to break Shark, the U-Boat Enigma, and Fish, the cypher system used by Hitler to talk to his guards.

Even by SAS standards Mike Curtis has had a remarkable career. A former coal miner and likely Welsh international, he served with 2 Para in the Falklands before going on to join the SAS. In C.Q.B. he describes his gruelling experience in the Falklands and also focus on two more of his major SAS operations; the first in Iraq where he spent several weeks behind enemy lines; the second in Bosnia where he worked closely with all factions and latterly led a close protection team guarding visiting heads of State. Goose Green, the first land battle of the Falklands conflict, was the longest, hardest-fought, and most controversial. The outcome there was to set the tone for the remainder of the war, affect international opinion and the morale and determination of both armies. The SAS infiltrated Iraq in two guises - as road-watch patrols and mobile fighting columns. Constituting the biggest SAS overland fighting force since the Second World War, Mike Curtis's troop constituted a coherent, mobile weapon able to operate round the clock and defend itself against surprise attack. C.Q.B. is also the first published account of the SAS's activities in former Yugoslavia by a Close Quarter Battle Specialist and John Major's personal bodyguard.

Among the many technological advances of this century that have shrunk our country, few have had as great an impact as aviation. Technologies evolve and national priorities change, but the qualities necessary to design aircraft, fly them in war and peace, and manage airlines remain constant. In this, his second book about pioneers of Canadian aviation, Peter Pigott brings a richness and understanding of the individuals themselves to the reader.

Flying Canucks II takes us into Air Canada's boardroom with Claude I. Taylor, to the Avro Arrow design office with Jim Floyd, inside the incredible career of Aviation Hall of Fame pilot Herb Seagram, on C.D. Howe's historic dawn-to-dusk flight, and with Len Birchall in a Stranraer seaplane before he became, in Churchill's phrase, "The Saviour of Ceylon." It includes the story of how Scottish immigrant J.A. Wilson engineered a chain of airports across the country, how bush pilot Bob Randall explored the polar regions, and the ordeal of Erroll Boyd, the first Canadian to fly the Atlantic. The lives of "Buck" McNair and "Bus" Davey, half a century after the Second World War, are placed in the perspective of the entire national experience in those years. Whenever possible, Mr. Pigott has interviewed the players themselves, and drawing on his experience and contacts within the aviation community, has created a multi-faceted study of the business, politics, and technology that influenced the ten lives explored in depth in this book.

C.D. Howe, wartime Canada's absolute government czar used to say that running the country's airline was all he really wanted to do. With a rich aviation heritage such as this, Flying Canucks II depicts the elements and the enemy at their worst and the pioneers of Canadian aviation at their best.

"Before us, several remote and now absurd wars." For Robin Gajdusek, these fields represent the first step toward resurrection as he retrieves a lost personal past through a writing catharsis which refocuses the vast battlefields of history into a singular voice. Resurrection, A War Journey is Gajdusek's dramatic account of a single week in mid-November 1944 which has taken him more than fifty years to wrestle into words. Part of Patton's Third Army in World War II, Gajdusek's unit was chosen to spearhead the first assault on the impenetrable fortifications of Metz, France, held by the Germans. Uniquely structured, Resurrection intertwines a variety of narrative forms to give voice to experience. Gajdusek's war memories awaken in his own poetry, short stories, discursive reflections, and sometimes, abortive essays, as well as in borrowed historical fragments. The remembering of war makes it real. His own physical and spiritual resurrection from lying near death in a shell hole to a miraculous recovery is an intense individual chronicle about the bonds of pain and suffering which intimately bind soldiers together while forcing each man into the isolation of his own mental journey. Once captured, Gajdusek finds himself among German soldiers too young or too old or too hideously wounded to be effective in the Nazi war machine. With only high school German, he makes poignant and life-saving connections with a few who seem, despite the horrors they have inflicted on each other, to understand their common humanity. Resurrection is a strong anti-war statement stemming from the only honest indicator, personal experience.

The author was part of Patton's Third Army in World War II in a unit chosen to spearhead the first assault on the impenetrable fortifications of Metz, France, held by the Germans. This is his dramatic account of a single week in mid-November 1944 - a retrieval of his personal past.

"From the moment I got to Auschwitz I was completely detached. I disconnected my heart and intellect in an act of self-defense, despair, and hopelessness." With these words Sara Nomberg-Przytyk begins this painful and compelling account of her experiences while imprisoned for two years in the infamous death camp. Writing twenty years after her liberation, she recreates the events of a dark past which, in her own words, would have driven her mad had she tried to relive it sooner. But while she records unimaginable atrocities, she also richly describes the human compassion that stubbornly survived despite the backdrop of camp depersonalization and imminent extermination.
Commemorative in spirit and artistic in form, "Auschwitz" convincingly portrays the paradoxes of human nature in extreme circumstances. With consummate understatement Nomberg-Przytyk describes the behavior of concentration camp inmates as she relentlessly and pitilessly examines her own motives and feelings. In this world unmitigated cruelty coexisted with nobility, rapacity with self-sacrifice, indifference with selfless compassion. This book offers a chilling view of the human drama that existed in Auschwitz.
From her portraits of camp personalities, an extraordinary and horrifying profile emerges of Dr. Josef Mengele, whose medical experiments resulted in the slaughter of nearly half a million Jews. Nomberg-Przytyk's job as an attendant in Mengle's hospital allowed her to observe this Angel of Death firsthand and to provide us with the most complete description to date of his monstrous activities.
The original Polish manuscript was discovered by Eli Pfefferkorn in 1980 in the Yad Vashem Archive in Jerusalem. Not knowing the fate of the journal's author, Pfefferkorn spent two years searching and finally located Nomberg-Przytyk in Canada. Subsequent interviews revealed the history of the manuscript, the author's background, and brought the journal into perspective.

**Formerly published as The Lost Boys** 'Remarkable. A powerful, engrossing story of a journey into the heart of darkness and final escape from it' Sunday Times In September, 1944, the SS march into a remote Italian castle, arrest a mother and seize her two sons, aged just two and three. If Hitler has his way she will never see them again. For Fey Pirzio-Biroli is the daughter of Ulrich von Hassell, executed days before after the failed assassination of the Fuhrer. Mercilessly cast into the Nazi death machine, Fey must cling to the hope that one day she will escape and rescue her lost children . . . 'Riveting, important, reads like a terrifying thriller' Daily Telegraph 'Heartbreaking. It started with a plot to kill Hitler. It ended in one of the most astonishing and moving stories of the war' Daily Mail 'Extraordinary. A rich, deep, gripping read' Guardian 'As thrilling as any novel. Bailey has an extraordinary talent for bringing history to life' Kate Atkinson

Deep in the Congo's Garamba National Park in the dead of night, Joseph Kony - the notorious warlord wanted by the International Criminal Court - made a shocking admission. Loosened by home-made wine, exposing a vulnerability he could never show the world, Kony looked George Omona in the eye, 'You need to know that if I had a choice I would not be doing this ... I wish I could be a man of books, like you.' Three years earlier George was expelled from one of Uganda's best schools, just weeks before he was due to graduate with exemplary grades, destroying his dreams of becoming a teacher. In desperation, his uncle found him a role in Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). George's education and fluent command of English allowed him to rapidly rise through the ranks, eventually becoming one of Kony's bodyguards, before he finally made his escape. George's story - based on many hours of interviews with acknowledged LRA expert Ledio Cakaj - provides a vivid, personal and fascinating insight into the inner workings of the LRA, and the mind of Kony, its self-appointed prophet.

Between 1969 and 1998, over 4,000 people lost their lives in the small country of Northern Ireland. The vast majority of these deaths were sectarian in nature and involved ordinary civilians, killed by the various paramilitary groups. These organisations murdered freely and without remorse, considering life a cheap price to pay in the furtherance of their cause. The words 'Why us?' were uttered by many families whose lives were ripped asunder by The Troubles. Thousands of innocents received a life sentence at the hands of the terrorists; these, then, are their words, the words of those who survived such attacks, and of those left behind. These poignant and tragic stories come from the people who have been forced to live with the emotional shrapnel of terrorism.

'A gripping new collection from Max Hastings that puts you at the heart of the battle ... Compelling' Daily Mail 'An unmissable read' Sunday Times Soldiers is a very personal gathering of sparkling, gripping tales by many writers, about men and women who have borne arms, reflecting bestselling historian Max Hastings's lifetime of studying war. It rings the changes through the centuries, between the heroic, tragic and comic; the famous and the humble. The nearly 350 stories illustrate vividly what it is like to fight in wars, to live and die as a warrior, from Greek and Roman times through to recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here you will meet Jewish heroes of the Bible, Rome's captain of the gate, Queen Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Cromwell, Wellington, Napoleon's marshals, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton and the modern SAS. There are tales of great writers who served in uniform including Cobbett and Tolstoy, Edward Gibbon and Siegfried Sassoon, Marcel Proust and Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell and George MacDonald Fraser. Here are also stories of the female 'abosi' fighters of Dahomey and heroic ambulance drivers of World War I, together with the new-age women soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stories reflect a change of mood towards warfare through the ages: though nations and movements continue to inflict terrible violence upon each other, most of humankind has retreated from the old notion of war as a sport or pastime, to acknowledge it as the supreme tragedy. This is a book to inspire in turn fascination, excitement, horror, amazement, occasionally laughter. Max Hastings mingles respect for the courage of those who fight with compassion for those who become their victims, above all civilians, and especially in the twenty-first century, which some are already calling 'the Post-Heroic Age'.

Approximately 2.5 million men and women have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in the service of the U.S. War on Terror. Marian Eide and Michael Gibler have collected and compiled personal combat accounts from some of these war veterans. In modern warfare no deployment meets the expectations laid down by stories of Appomattox, Ypres, Iwo Jima, or Tet. Stuck behind a desk or the wheel of a truck, many of today's veterans feel they haven't even been to war though they may have listened to mortars in the night or dodged improvised explosive devices during the day. When a drone is needed to verify a target's death or bullets are sprayed like grass seed, military offensives can lack the immediacy that comes with direct contact. After Combat bridges the gap between sensationalized media and reality by telling war's unvarnished stories. Participating soldiers, sailors, marines, and air force personnel (retired, on leave, or at the beginning of military careers) describe combat in the ways they believe it should be understood. In this collection of interviews, veterans speak anonymously with pride about their own strengths and accomplishments, with gratitude for friendships and adventures, and also with shame, regret, and grief, while braving controversy, misunderstanding, and sanction. In the accounts of these veterans, Eide and Gibler seek to present what Vietnam veteran and writer Tim O'Brien calls a "true war story" - one without obvious purpose or moral imputation and independent of civilian logic, propaganda goals, and even peacetime convention.

In his fascinating, terrifying and often very funny book, James Hider takes his doubts about religious beliefs straight into the dark heart of the world's holy wars--from Israel to Gaza to Iraq--the birthplace that spawned so many faiths--and then back to Jerusalem. From hardcore Zionist settlers still fighting ancient Biblical battles in the hills of the West Bank to Shiite death squads roaming the lawless streets of Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam; whether it's the misappropriation and martyrdom of Mickey Mouse by Gaza's Islamists, or a US president acting on God's orders, Hider sees the hallucinatory effect of what he calls the 'crack cocaine of fanatical fundamentalism' all around him. As he meets terrorists, suicide bombers, soldiers, ayatollahs, clerics, and ordinary and extraordinary people alike, the question that sparked his journey continues to plague his thoughts: how can people not only believe in this madness, but die and kill for it too? This extraordinary and timely book takes the God Delusion debate onto the streets of the Middle East. It casts an unflinching yet compassionate eye on the very worst and most violent crimes committed in the name of religion, and then sharply asks the questions the world needs to answer if we are ever to stand a chance of facing our own worst demons.

The unique and harrowing account of the most destructive battle of the Falklands War as seen through the eyes of eight ordinary Argentinian soldiers from the seventh infantry regiment and five British paratroopers. Vincent Bramley was a Lance-Corporal and gives a unique and chilling perspective on the horrors of battle. This is a testament to those who bear the brunt of the fighting and a no-holds-barred account of what it is really like to have to do the dirty work of war, where you have to kill or be killed, and sometimes you are pushed over the edge.

On March 23, 2003, in the city of An Nasiriyah, Iraq, members of the 507th Maintenance Company came under attack from Iraqi forces who killed or wounded twenty-one soldiers and took six prisoners, including Private Jessica Lynch. For the next week, An Nasiriyah rocked with battle as the marines of Task Force Tarawa fought Saddam's fanatical followers, street by street and building to building, ultimately rescuing Private Lynch.

Eddie Chapman was a womaniser, blackmailer and safecracker. He was also a great hero - the most remarkable double agent of the Second World War. Chapman became the only British national ever to be awarded an Iron Cross for his work for the Reich. He was also the only German spy ever to be parachuted into Britain twice. But it was all an illusion: Eddie fooled the Germans in the same way he conned his victims in civilian life. He was working for the British all along. Until now, the full story of Eddie Chapman's extraordinary exploits has never been told, thwarted by the Official Secrets Act. Now at last all the evidence has been released, including Eddie's M15 files, and a complete account of what he achieved is told in this enthralling book.

Ghost Soldiers meets The Perfect Storm in the remarkable true story of the sinking of the S.S. City of Benares

In September 1940, ninety lucky English children were placed aboard the S.S. City of Benares by their parents, bound from Liverpool to Canada. They were pioneers in a program designed to spirit British children from their war-ravaged homes to safer shores. But they had no way of knowing that in the darkness of September 17, a German U-boat would sink their ship, tossing them and the other 316 people on board into a rough, gale-driven sea. How any of them survived is a miracle. Journalist Tom Nagorski's stirring account, based on interviews with survivors including his own great-uncle, brings their saga to light for the first time.

James Bond meets Michael Schumacher The idea of racing drivers working as secret agents is at best far-fetched but The Grand Prix Saboteurs tells the amazing TRUE story of how three top Grand Prix drivers from the 1920s and 1930s worked for a clandestine British secret service in occupied France, during World War II. The product of 18 years of research, The Grand Prix Saboteurs tells a story that remained top secret until the British Government finally agreed to release them in 2003. The book dazzles with swashbuckling escapes, shocking betrayals and a story you will never forget.

"The most important political book of the year."-Gregg Easterbrook, author of The Progress Paradox Everyone knows: wars are getting worse, more civilians are dying, and peacemaking achieves nothing, right? Wrong. Despite all the bad-news headlines, peacekeeping is working. Fewer wars are starting, more are ending, and those that remain are smaller and more localized. But peace doesn't just happen; it needs to be put into effect. Moreover, understanding the global decline in armed conflict is crucial as America shifts to an era of lower military budgets and operations. Preeminent scholar of international relations, Joshua Goldstein, definitively illustrates how decades of effort by humanitarian aid agencies, popular movements-and especially the United Nations-have made a measureable difference in reducing violence in our times. Goldstein shows how we can continue building on these inspiring achievements to keep winning the war on war. This updated and revised edition includes more information on a post-9-11 world, and is a perfect compendium for those wishing to learn more about the United States' armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What is it like to drive a Challenger tank over desert terrain for six days in a row? Or hover an Apache AH1 attack helicopter a hundred metres above enemy ground? How quickly can a Sapper clear a field of unexploded devices, or build a bridge - or blow one up? What is it like to fix bayonets, and engage in hand to hand combat, or train a 5.56 mm SA80 sniper sight on an enemy soldier, and pull the trigger? How do you find out what a soldier must learn on his way to war...? Ask him. In this extraordinary book, Danny Danziger interviews the people who fight our wars for us, providing a unique insight into the reality of what we ask of our armed forces. Groundbreaking and utterly compelling, WE ARE SOLDIERS takes the reader to the heart of the 21st century soldier's experience.