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).

A propulsive and "entertaining" (The Wall Street Journal) history chronicling the conception and creation of the iconic Disneyland theme park, as told like never before by popular historian Richard Snow. One day in the early 1950s, Walt Disney stood looking over 240 acres of farmland in Anaheim, California, and imagined building a park where people "could live among Mickey Mouse and Snow White in a world still powered by steam and fire for a day or a week or (if the visitor is slightly mad) forever." Despite his wealth and fame, exactly no one wanted Disney to build such a park. Not his brother Roy, who ran the company's finances; not the bankers; and not his wife, Lillian. Amusement parks at that time, such as Coney Island, were a generally despised business, sagging and sordid remnants of bygone days. Disney was told that he would only be heading toward financial ruin. But Walt persevered, initially financing the park against his own life insurance policy and later with sponsorship from ABC and the sale of thousands and thousands of Davy Crockett coonskin caps. Disney assembled a talented team of engineers, architects, artists, animators, landscapers, and even a retired admiral to transform his ideas into a soaring yet soothing wonderland of a park. The catch was that they had only a year and a day in which to build it. On July 17, 1955, Disneyland opened its gates...and the first day was a disaster. Disney was nearly suicidal with grief that he had failed on a grand scale. But the curious masses kept coming, and the rest is entertainment history. Eight hundred million visitors have flocked to the park since then. In Disney's Land, "Snow brings a historian's eye and a child's delight, not to mention superb writing, to the telling of this fascinating narrative" (Ken Burns) that "will entertain Disneyphiles and readers of popular American history" (Publishers Weekly).

A riveting account of the only mutiny in the history of the United States Navy--a little-known event that cost three innocent young men their lives--part murder mystery, part courtroom drama, and as propulsive and dramatic as the bestselling novels of Patrick O'Brian. On December 16, 1842, the US brig-of-war Somers dropped anchor in Brooklyn Harbor at the end of a cruise intended to teach a group of adolescents the rudiments of naval life. But this seemingly harmless exercise ended in catastrophe. Commander Alexander Slidell Mackenzie came ashore saying he had narrowly prevented a mutiny that would have left him and his officers dead. Some of the thwarted mutineers were being held under guard, but three had been hanged: Boatswain's Mate Samuel Cromwell, Seaman Elisha Small, and Acting Midshipman Philip Spencer, whose father was the secretary of war, John Spencer. Eighteen-year-old Philip Spencer, according to Mackenzie, had been the ringleader who encouraged the crew to seize the ship and become pirates, raping and pillaging their way across the old Spanish Main. And while the young man might have been a rebel fascinated by pirates, it soon became clear the order that condemned the three men had no legal basis. And worse, that perhaps a mutiny had never really occurred, and that the ship might instead have been seized by a creeping hysteria that ended in the sacrifice of three innocents. Months of accusations and counteraccusations were followed by a highly public court martial which put Mackenzie on trial for his life, and a storm of anti-Navy sentiment drew the attention of the leading writers of the day (Washington Irving thought Mackenzie a hero; James Fenimore Cooper damned him with a ferocity that still stings). But some good did come out of it: public disgust with Mackenzie's training cruise gave birth to Annapolis, the place that within a century, would produce the greatest navy the world had ever known. Vividly told and filled with tense action based on court martial transcripts, Snow's masterly account of this all-but-forgotten episode is naval history at its finest.

From the acclaimed popular historian Richard Snow, who "writes with verve and a keen eye" ("The New York Times Book Review"), comes a fresh and entertaining account of Henry Ford and his invention of the Model T--the ugly, cranky, invincible machine that defined twentieth-century America.
Every century or so, our republic has been remade by a new technology: 170 years ago the railroad changed Americans' conception of space and time; in our era, the microprocessor revolutionized how humans communicate. But in the early twentieth century the agent of creative destruction was the gasoline engine, as put to work by an unknown and relentlessly industrious young man named Henry Ford. Born the same year as the battle of Gettysburg, Ford died two years after the atomic bombs fell, and his life personified the tremendous technological changes achieved in that span.
Growing up as a Michigan farm boy with a bone-deep loathing of farming, Ford intuitively saw the advantages of internal combustion. Resourceful and fearless, he built his first gasoline engine out of scavenged industrial scraps. It was the size of a sewing machine. From there, scene by scene, Richard Snow vividly shows Ford using his innate mechanical abilities, hard work, and radical imagination as he transformed American industry.
In many ways, of course, Ford's story is well known; in many more ways, it is not. Richard Snow masterfully weaves together a fascinating narrative of Ford's rise to fame through his greatest invention, the Model T. When Ford first unveiled this car, it took twelve and a half hours to build one. A little more than a decade later, it took exactly one minute. In making his car so quickly and so cheaply that his own workers could easily afford it, Ford created the cycle of consumerism that we still inhabit. Our country changed in a mere decade, and Ford became a national hero. But then he soured, and the benevolent side of his character went into an ever-deepening eclipse, even as the America he had remade evolved beyond all imagining into a global power capable of producing on a vast scale not only cars, but airplanes, ships, machinery, and an infinity of household devices.
A highly pleasurable read, filled with scenes and incidents from Ford's life, particularly during the intense phase of his secretive competition with other early car manufacturers, "I Invented the Modern Age "shows Richard Snow at the height of his powers as a popular historian and reclaims from history Henry Ford, the remarkable man who, indeed, invented the modern world as we know it.

Blue at the Mizzen (novel #20) ended with Jack Aubrey getting the news, in Chile, of his elevation to flag rank: Rear Admiral of the Blue Squadron, with orders to sail to the South Africa station. The next novel, unfinished and untitled at the time of the author's death, would have been the chronicle of that mission, and much else besides. The three chapters left on O'Brian's desk are presented here both in printed version-including his corrections to the typescript-and a facsimile of his manuscript, which goes several pages beyond the end of the typescript to include a duel between Stephen Maturin and an impertinent officer who is courting his fiancee. Of course we would rather have had the whole story; instead we have this proof that O'Brian's powers of observation, his humor, and his understanding of his characters were undiminished to the end. Includes a Facsimile of the Manuscript.

How do you get over knowing that you could have prevented your sister's murder? Cameron Oakwood is an intelligence analyst whose sister and nephew were killed in a car bomb explosion outside a politician's office in Melbourne Australia. Cameron knew terrorists had made death threats against the politician. His family blames him for not warning his sister to stay away from that building. The case was never solved. Consumed by guilt, he is becoming addicted to alcohol and tranquilizers. Cameron is assigned to work with visiting FBI agent Jodie Finch on a terrorist threat to release a genetically engineered virus at an international sporting event in Melbourne. She is attracted to his intelligence, his humor and his honesty, but she wonders if he is ready for a new relationship. As they fight against the clock to prevent the attack, they make a stunning discovery about the identity of the bomb maker who killed Cameron's sister. But they make their discovery in the most frightening possible circumstances, when bothl their lives hang in the balance.

Of all the threats that faced his country in World War II, Winston Churchill said, just one really scared him--what he called the "measureless peril" of the German U-boat campaign.
In that global conflagration, only one battle--the struggle for the Atlantic--lasted from the very first hours of the conflict to its final day. Hitler knew that victory depended on controlling the sea-lanes where American food and fuel and weapons flowed to the Allies. At the start, U-boats patrolled a few miles off the eastern seaboard, savagely attacking scores of defenseless passenger ships and merchant vessels while hastily converted American cabin cruisers and fishing boats vainly tried to stop them. Before long, though, the United States was ramping up what would be the greatest production of naval vessels the world had ever known.
Then the battle became a thrilling cat-and-mouse game between the quickly built U.S. warships and the ever-more cunning and lethal U-boats. The historian Richard Snow captures all the drama of the merciless contest at every level, from the doomed sailors on an American freighter defying a German cruiser, to the amazing Allied attempts to break the German naval codes, to Winston Churchill pressing Franklin Roosevelt to join the war months before Pearl Harbor (and FDR's shrewd attempts to fight the battle alongside Britain while still appearing to keep out of it).
Inspired by the collection of letters that his father sent his mother from the destroyer escort he served aboard, Snow brings to life the longest continuous battle in modern times.
With its vibrant prose and fast-paced action, "A Measureless Peril "is an immensely satisfying account that belongs on the small shelf of the finest histories ever written about World War II.

Omo, Ali and Old Moon have taken up residence on Bear Hill where they meet members of another family who are instrumental in saving Omo from a bear attack. It turns out they are living in Omo's original shelter. They are invited to join Omo, Ali and Old Moon on Bear Hill. Unknown to them, a couple of "diggers" are stalking them or food and any other useful items they can steal.
They struggle through a blizzard. One of the "diggers" loses his life; and the other digger blames those on Bear Hill or hid death. He schemes to get even and finds an unusual method to do it. He experiences unexpected compassion from those he tried to hurt.

Omo, Ali and Old Moon have taken up residence on Bear Hill where they meet members of another family who are instrumental in saving Omo from a bear attack. It turns out they are living in Omo's original shelter. They are invited to join Omo, Ali and Old Moon on Bear Hill. Unknown to them, a couple of "diggers" are stalking them or food and any other useful items they can steal.
They struggle through a blizzard. One of the "diggers" loses his life; and the other digger blames those on Bear Hill or hid death. He schemes to get even and finds an unusual method to do it. He experiences unexpected compassion from those he tried to hurt.