Officially they were The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and their mission was to create a safe passage for pilgrims visiting war-torn Jerusalem in the early 12th century. This work covers the reality of this mystic-warrior society, and the medieval religious campaigns that shaped them.

All too often, highly fictionalized cinematic depictions of the past are accepted as the unassailable truth by those unfamiliar with the "real" account. This book profiles sixty movies that portray actual moments in history, and compares the mythologized account of each event to what really happened. Movies chronicled include The Ten Commandments, Spartacus, A Man for All Seasons, Gladiator, Gandhi, Apollo 13, The Thin Red Line, Dances with Wolves, Braveheart, The Last Emperor, All the Presidents Men, Mutiny on the Bounty, Gone with the Wind, Bonnie & Clyde, Patton, and Elizabeth. Sanello also contrasts several historical figures with their filmed treatments, including Julius Caesar, Henry V, Christopher Columbus, Joan of Arc, Sir Thomas More, Jesus Christ, Catherine the Great, Sigmund Freud, and Harry Houdini. Lavishly illustrated with sixty film stills, Reel v. Real shows how a happening's genuine details are frequently reshaped and distorted by Hollywood's bottomless appetite for over-the-top flamboyance and melodrama.

Based on more than a half dozen interviews with the director himself, this unauthorized biography recounts Spielberg's childhood, education, career, philanthropic and charitable endeavors, and his extremely private personal life. This updated edition explores Spielberg's latest filmmaking efforts, from Schindler's List to Men in Black 2.

In this tragic and powerful story, the two Opium Wars of 1839??1842 and 1856??1860 between Britain and China are recounted for the first time through the eyes of the Chinese as well as the Imperial West. Opium entered China during the Middle Ages when Arab traders brought it into China for medicinal purposes. As it took hold as a recreational drug, opium wrought havoc on Chinese society. By the early nineteenth century, 90 percent of the Emperor's court and the majority of the army were opium addicts.
Britain was also a nation addicted-to tea, grown in China, and paid for with profits made from the opium trade. When China tried to ban the use of the drug and bar its Western smugglers from it gates, England decided to fight to keep open China's ports for its importation. England, the superpower of its time, managed to do so in two wars, resulting in a drug-induced devastation of the Chinese people that would last 150 years.
In this page-turning, dramatic and colorful history, The Opium Wars responds to past, biased Western accounts by representing the neglected Chinese version of the story and showing how the wars stand as one of the monumental clashes between the cultures of East and West.
"A fine popular account."-Publishers Weekly
"Their account of the causes, military campaigns and tragic effects of these wars is absorbing, frequently macabre and deeply unsettling."-Booklist

In his new novel, Frank Sanello vividly recreates the Third Reich and World War II as seen through the eyes and daily diary of Hitler's imaginary wife, Countess Christina Bernadotte (1916-1948). The granddaughter of the king of Sweden, the countess is forced at the age of 16 to marry the 43-year-old Nazi dictator by her socially ambitious and abusive mother, an heiress to the Vanderbilt fortune. Her husband, strung out on morphine and cocaine, makes revolting sexual demands on his virginal wife involving coprophilia, a fetish that eroticizes feces. Lonely and isolated, Frau Hitler throws herself into a series of transient love affairs with the Third Reich's handsome foreign minister, the corrupt Joachim von Ribbentrop, Cary Grant, and Ernst Rohm, leader of the SA (Storm Troopers). Because of her many romantic liaisons, she doesn't know the identity of the father of her son, Folke, except that he's not her husband's. As the Holocaust claims more victims, Christina begins smuggling Jews out of Germany right under her drug-addled husband's nose. During the war, she travels to Auschwitz to rescue Jewish friends and bribes the Gestapo to allow other Jews to flee Nazi Germany. With her uncle, Count Folke Bernadotte, she helps organize the White Buses operation, a dangerous mission that transports 30,000 Jews and POWs to safety in Sweden aboard Red Cross buses painted white to avoid bombing the Allies or the Luftwaffe. As First Lady of the Reich, she meets or corresponds with various historical figures such as Sigmund Freud, Pope Pius XII and MGM chief Louis B. Mayer. Toward the end of the war, as she tries to flee home to Sweden with her son and adopted daughter, her arch-nemesis, Hermann Goring, Hitler's second in command and pedophile, forces her to choose one of her children to leave behind with him. The choice haunts the countess until tragedy intervenes during her work as UN mediator between warring Palestinian Jews and Arabs in 1948. These dramatic events are recorded in her daily diary, which her grandson finds hidden in a Holocaust memorial library and publishes as "The Autobiography of Frau Adolf Hitler."

In "Victims and Victimizer: Gays and Lesbians in the Third Reich," historian and novelist Frank Sanello ("The Opium Wars," "The Knights Templars, "Invisible People: History's Homosexuals Unhidden") explores the life and times of gays and lesbians in Weimar and Nazi Germany. From the Anything Goes Roaring Twenties of tres gay Berlin, where a gay think tank stood across the street from the Reichskanzlerei, the German White House, to the pink triangles of detention camps turned death camps, Sanello investigates a terrifying time in history to be gay and German. Homosexuals thrived in pre-Nazi Germany and may have been more accepted than anywhere else in the world - until Hitler came to power in 1933. From there, gays and lesbians who couldn't or wouldn't escape paid the ultimate penalty for their decision to remain in a country that hated them, if possible, more than its Jews.

Famous homosexuals of the past and why historians ignore or hide them

Fractured History Tales or Why (Almost) Everything You Thought You Knew About the Past Never Happened

"To Kill a King" is a nonfiction compilation about the gallons of blue blood that have been spilled throughout history. The author reports little-known details about famous and obscure royal victims and offers theories about the murderers' motivations despite royalty's semi-divine status as God's anointed representatives on earth. Just one of many compelling examples to be found in "To Kill a King" Gen. MacArthur's advisors urged him not to prosecute or execute Emperor Hirohito for war crimes because the Japanese ruler was considered a living god by his subjects. It was feared that the emperor's execution would have had the same effect as "crucifying Jesus Christ" in the West and cause riots, complicating America's occupation of Japan after World War II.

INSIDE

SAVING AMERICA

"Don't be afraid to guilt-trip your representatives on Capitol Hill. Remind them that whenever they vote for a war funding bill that fails to tie financing to troop withdrawal, three or more American soldiers die needlessly in Iraq and Afghanistan every day. Remind them that the blood of these unfortunate military personnel who only joined the armed forces for college money is on their palms, greased by lobbyists and their corporate paymasters.

You probably wont get a response -- or at best, a form letter that says something like, "Thank you for your interest in this unspecified, natch] issue. Be assured, Congressman X is doing everything possible..."

No, he's not, or the bloodbath in Iraq, a ballooning deficit that will be our grandchildren's curse, obscene tax cuts for "nouveau grosse" CEOs who blow $6,000 on shower curtains paid for with company money, the continued proliferation of handguns which end 37,000 American lives each year and which a preponderance of voters say they want taken off the market, crumbling schools infested with military-grade firearms, drugs, and illiterates who hold high school diplomas, a scandalous healthcare situation that leaves 48 million citizens uninsured, a Supreme Court and Evangelicals who want to return women to coat-hanger abortions -- and all the other plagues afflicting the nation -- would be far closer to resolution than at present.

If your concerns are ignored by your elected representatives, make good on your threat to throw da bums out. But you have to find someone to vote for, not just someone to vote against. In most states, prior to every election, sample ballots are sent to all registered voters. These brochures not only contain a list of candidates and ballot propositions, but often include a one-page statement by each candidate describing his political platform. Do your homework and read these statements, then vote for the candidate whose political philosophy most closely reflects your own.

To paraphrase Lenin, "Couch potatoes of the world, unite You have nothing to lose but your TV remotes." So get off the sofa, stop window-shopping on eBay, put down The Da Vinci Code, and start harassing your Congressman and Senators with emails, letters and phone calls.

You may end up "Saving America" in the process."

Hope for a Nation in Crisis

"Although "Saving America's" subtitle calls the U.S. a Nation in Crisis, 'which it is, right thinking - as opposed to right-wing narrow-mindedness - will save us once again, just as it has in times of even greater political trauma like the Civil War and the Depression. America remains the greatest nation on earth, but it needs to change direction now, sooner rather than later, before our temporary dilemmas become permanent tragedies."

-- the Honorable John Duran,

Mayor of West Hollywood, California

INSIDE

SAVING AMERICA

"Don't be afraid to guilt-trip your representatives on Capitol Hill. Remind them that whenever they vote for a war funding bill that fails to tie financing to troop withdrawal, three or more American soldiers die needlessly in Iraq and Afghanistan every day. Remind them that the blood of these unfortunate military personnel who only joined the armed forces for college money is on their palms, greased by lobbyists and their corporate paymasters.

You probably wont get a response -- or at best, a form letter that says something like, "Thank you for your interest in this unspecified, natch] issue. Be assured, Congressman X is doing everything possible..."

No, he's not, or the bloodbath in Iraq, a ballooning deficit that will be our grandchildren's curse, obscene tax cuts for "nouveau grosse" CEOs who blow $6,000 on shower curtains paid for with company money, the continued proliferation of handguns which end 37,000 American lives each year and which a preponderance of voters say they want taken off the market, crumbling schools infested with military-grade firearms, drugs, and illiterates who hold high school diplomas, a scandalous healthcare situation that leaves 48 million citizens uninsured, a Supreme Court and Evangelicals who want to return women to coat-hanger abortions -- and all the other plagues afflicting the nation -- would be far closer to resolution than at present.

If your concerns are ignored by your elected representatives, make good on your threat to throw da bums out. But you have to find someone to vote for, not just someone to vote against. In most states, prior to every election, sample ballots are sent to all registered voters. These brochures not only contain a list of candidates and ballot propositions, but often include a one-page statement by each candidate describing his political platform. Do your homework and read these statements, then vote for the candidate whose political philosophy most closely reflects your own.

To paraphrase Lenin, "Couch potatoes of the world, unite You have nothing to lose but your TV remotes. "So get off the sofa, stop window-shopping on eBay, put down The Da Vinci Code, and start harassing your Congressman and Senators with emails, letters and phone calls.

You may end up "Saving America" in the process."

Hope for a Nation in Crisis

"Although "Saving America's" subtitle calls the U.S. a Nation in Crisis, 'which it is, right thinking - as opposed to right-wing narrow-mindedness - will save us once again, just as it has in times of even greater political trauma like the Civil War and the Depression. America remains the greatest nation on earth, but it needs to change direction now, sooner rather than later, before our temporary dilemmas become permanent tragedies."

-- the Honorable John Duran,

Mayor of West Hollywood, California

Although they looked like typical medieval knights, they were also monks who took vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. These were the members of the Knights Templars, a group of French aristocrats whose mission during the Crusades was to protect pilgrims visiting Jerusalem. (Biblical Studies)