This lively, entertaining, and often funny history of America's supermarket tabloids is the first book to offer a behind-the-scene's look at the intriguing world of tabloid journalism, and especially the unique personalities that made it such a tremendously successful and influential force in today's media. Perhaps no one is more qualified to give the complete insider's account of the tabs than Bill Sloan, who helped guide the destinies of three major tabloids in their heyday. Sloan profiles the publishing eccentrics who conceived the first national tabloids, the greedy owners and screwball executives who called the shots, the ruthless underworld manipulators who fed off of the tabloids' phenomenal success, and the money-driven journalists who did the dirty work. I Watched a Wild Hog Ate My Baby reveals the whole sometimes-sordid, often-silly, but always-amazing story behind the multibillion-dollar industry these characters spawned.
Based on candid interviews with the author, the fascinating personalities who created the tabloids explain in their own words how and why they built these notorious rags into powerful and often feared journalistic empires. The late, legendary Enquirer founder Generoso (Gene) Pope, former Enquirer president Iain Calder, Globe cocreator and longtime editor John Vader, and many others offer hundreds of funny, juicy, irresistible glimpses into their zany business. Sloan traces the development of the tabs from their beginnings in sleazy, gore-filled sensationalism or soft-core smut and sex scandals, through the celebrity crazes of Jackie O. and Princess Di. He also discusses the widespread influence of the tabloids today on television journalism and the Internet, where the distinction between news and entertainment is quickly vanishing.
This enjoyable, eye-opening account is must reading for anyone interested in the people and the trends that shape our popular culture.

Bill Sloan, "a master of the combat narrative" (Dallas Morning News), tells the story of the outnumbered American soldiers and airmen who stood against invading Japanese forces in the Philippines at the beginning of World War II, and continued to resist through three harrowing years as POWs. For four months they fought toe to toe against overwhelming enemy numbers--and forced the Japanese to pay a heavy cost in blood. After the surrender came the infamous Bataan Death March, where up to eighteen thousand American and Filipino prisoners died as they marched sixty-five miles under the most hellish conditions imaginable. Interwoven throughout this gripping narrative are the harrowing personal experiences of dozens of American soldiers, airmen, and Marines, based on exclusive interviews with more than thirty survivors. Undefeated chronicles one of the great sagas of World War II--and celebrates a resounding triumph of the human spirit.

"The Ultimate Battle" is the full story of the last great clash of World War II as it has never before been told. With the same "grunt's-eye-view" narrative style that distinguished his Brotherhood of Heroes (on the Battle of Peleliu), Bill Sloan presents a gripping and uniquely personal saga of heroism and sacrifice in which at least 115,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen from both sides were killed, as were nearly 150,000 civilians caught in the crossfire or encouraged to commit suicide by Japanese troops.
It is a story set against a panorama of more than 1,500 American ships, nearly two thousand Japanese kamikazes sworn to sink those ships, and two huge armies locked in a no-quarter struggle to the death -- the 541,000 GIs and Marines of the U.S. Tenth Army, and Japan's 110,000-man 32nd Army. Woven into the broader narrative, in "Band of Brothers" style, are the personal stories of men who endured this epic battle and were interviewed by the author. In many cases, their experiences are told here in print for the first time.
A few days after Japanese defenders surprised American assault troops by allowing them to land virtually unopposed on April 1, 1945, scouts of the 96th Division stumbled onto the outerworks of formidable Japanese defenses near Kakazu Ridge, where fierce fighting erupted. It would continue without respite for nearly three months as American forces used every weapon and strategy at their disposal to break through three cunningly designed Japanese lines of defense, each anchored by commanding high ground, intricate underground installations, and massed artillery. When one line was about to be breached, the Japanese would slip away to the next one, forcing the Americans to repeat the same exhausting and deadly "corkscrew and blowtorch" assaults all over again.
Much of the action in "The Ultimate Battle" unfolds among men pinned down under relentless fire on disputed hillsides, in the ruins of shell-blasted villages, and inside stricken tanks and armored cars. Sloan also takes readers aboard flaming ships and into the cockpits of night-fighter aircraft to capture the horror and heroism of men and vessels besieged by kamikazes.
When the battle was over, most of the GIs, Marines, and sailors who survived it were too worn out to celebrate. More than 49,000 of their comrades had been killed or wounded, and they knew that the even more brutal invasion of Japan's home islands loomed just ahead. But as Sloan makes clear, the slaughter at Okinawa helped to convince President Truman to use the atomic bomb against Japanese cities in the hope of shortening the war and averting a far more horrific loss of life.
"The Ultimate Battle" is a searing and unforgettable recreation of the Okinawa campaign as it was experienced by men who were there. It is filled with fresh insights that only those men can provide.

The battle of Saipan lasted twenty-five hellish days in the summer of 1944, and the stakes couldn't have been higher. If Japan lost possession of the island, all hope for victory would be lost. For the Americans, the island was the only obstacle between them and the Japanese mainland. The outcome of the war in the Pacific was in the balance. Their Backs against the Sea fuses fresh interviews, oral histories, and unpublished accounts into a fast-paced narrative of the Battle of Saipan. Combining grunt's-view grit with big-picture panorama (and one of the ugliest inter-service controversies of the war), this is the definitive dramatic story of one of the war's toughest and most overlooked battles- and an inspiring chronicle of some of the greatest acts of valor in American military history.

Five Dark Riders The President of the United States is coming to Dallas, Texas, where he will make a major speech and ride through the city in an open limousine - and where a sniper with a high-powered rifle will be waiting in a sixth-floor window to assassinate him. Despite many eerie similarities, the time is not November 1963; it is June 1936. And the assassin's intended victim is not John Fitzgerald Kennedy but Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The story begins when the body of a murdered teenager is discovered on a remote South Texas farm in what first appears to be an isolated crime of passion. But when sheep farmer Adam Wagner, on whose property the body is found, and schoolteacher Ellie Velasco, the murdered youth's cousin, join forces in an attempt to track down the killer, they stumble onto an intricate plot by five Nazi espionage agents personally assigned by Adolf Hitler to kill FDR. Adam and Ellie are an unlikely team. Ellie is a beautiful Hispanic woman with a deep distrust of all Anglos - Adam included -- because of a disastrous incident involving a friend of Adam's when she was a young girl. Adam is a World War I veteran left cynical, disillusioned, and mildly disabled by wounds suffered in France. But as they investigate further, they realize that they are the only two people in America, other than those directly involved in the assassination plot, who know what is about to happen. They try desperately to alert the Secret Service and FBI to the danger, but their warnings are either ignored or succeed only in drawing suspicion toward themselves. When FDR begins a train trip to Texas to visit the state's Centennial Exposition, and unknowingly heads toward a deadly rendezvous in downtown Dallas, the couple decides that their only hope of saving his life is to try to thwart the assassins on their own and against all odds. What follows is a breathless race against time with earth-shaking implications that sweeps them steadily deeper into a web of international intrigue - and their own intensifying love affair. Meanwhile, the future of the entire nation rests on whether they succeed or fail. Five Dark Riders is a fact-based historical thriller populated with numerous real people, ranging from FDR and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and senior Secret Service agent Edmund Starling, and it is filled with historically accurate incidents and situations. It tells in factual detail the story of the almost-forgotten trip to Dallas that the Roosevelts actually made 27 years before the Kennedy assassination.

This "Band of Brothers" for the Pacific is the gut-wrenching and ultimately triumphant story of the Marines' most ferocious -- yet largely forgotten -- battle of World War II.
Between September 15 and October 15, 1944, the First Marine Division suffered more than 6,500 casualties fighting on a hellish little coral island in the Pacific. Peleliu was the setting for one of the most savage struggles of modern times, a true killing ground that has been all but forgotten -- until now. Drawing on interviews with Peleliu veterans, Bill Sloan's gripping narrative seamlessly weaves together the experiences of the men who were there, producing a vivid and unflinching tableau of the twenty-four-hour-a-day nightmare of Peleliu.
Emotionally moving and gripping in its depictions of combat, "Brotherhood of Heroes" rescues the Corps's bloodiest battle from obscurity and does honor to the Marines who fought it.

The acclaimed, dramatic story of the first three months of the Korean War, when outnumbered and outgunned Marines and GIs executed two of the greatest military operations in history and saved South Korea--and the Marine Corps--from extinction.The Darkest Summer is the dramatic story of the first three months of the Korean War as it has never been told before. A narrative studded with gripping eyewitness accounts, it focuses on the fateful days when the Korean War's most decisive battles were fought and the Americans who fought them went--however briefly--from the depths of despair to the exultation of total conquest. Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of surviving U.S. veterans, it reveals how one ninety-day period changed the course of modern history and opens a unique and revealing window on an all-but-forgotten war.

A MARINE RIFLEMAN'S VIVID, BRUTALLY CANDID MEMOIR OF LIFE AND DEATH ON THEFRONT LINES OF WORLD WAR II IN THE PACIFIC
Jim McEnery's rifle company--made famous by the HBO miniseries The Pacific--fought in some of the most ferocious battles of World War II. This unforgettable portrait of men at war is a chronicle of the sacrifices, suffering, and raw courage of those in the foxholes, locked in mortal combat with an implacable enemy.