It's the summer of 1964. The bush hat, not the steel helmet, is the favored headgear of the sixteen thousand American advisors in South Vietnam. They love their work, and they're very good at it. How can they possibly fail? Covering their war are a handful of foreign reporters, including novelist Daniel Ford. Armed with a camera and a notebook, he wanders the country on foot and by military transport--helicopter, jeep, landing craft, junk, armored personnel carrier, and an Air Force flare ship--from the Mekong Delta to the Central Highlands. Once or twice a week, or whenever he is reunited with his Hermes portable, he types up an account of what he has seen and done. Here is that journal, a generation after it was written. It is a freeze-frame picture of the Vietnam War before it became a quagmire. "How good-hearted we were " Ford says of himself and the men he met in his travels. "And how badly it all turned out."

The Second World War -- the worst thing that ever happened. It started in September 1939, with Hitler's Wehrmacht invading Poland from the west, while Stalin's Red Army stormed in from the east. Among their victims was a five-year-old named Basia Deszberg. The Russians shot her father and brother in the Katyn Forest, then loaded Basia, her sister, and her mother were loaded into a cattle car for a horrific three-week journey to the steppes of Kazakhstan, there to survive as best they could. Over the next eight years, they would escape through Persia, Lebanon, and Egypt to find safe haven in England. By contrast, Daniel Ford grew up in a United States mired by the Great Depression. Europe's agony was America's windfall Dan went from hardscrabble poverty to a college degree and a fellowship that took him to the English university where Basia was also a student. This is the story of their meeting, their travels, and their parting. It is, promises the author, both a love story and a history lesson, and one you will never forget.

When young Eddie Gillespie discovers a World War II airplane in the jungle, with a grinning skeleton at the controls, he sets a story in motion. Two American fighter pilots in the Chinese Air Force, with their English and Burmese girlfriends, and a Japanese suicide pilot whose name happens to mean "tree of the sun"--they clash at Rangoon, while the British empire falls about their ears. Here is a story of the Flying Tigers, immortalized by their exploits in Southeast Asia in the opening months of the Pacific War, as told by a man uniquely qualified to write about those stirring times.

Ford's history of the Flying Tigers won the award of excellence from the Aviation-Space Writers Association, while his novel of the Vietnam war inspired the Burt Lancaster film "Go Tell the Spartans," which the "Cincinnati Enquirer" called "one of the noblest films, ever, about men in crisis." Here he deftly melds fact and fiction in an unforgettable wartime romance. "You can't beat remains, kid," Lieutenant Atherton says in a beautifully limned conclusion. "They'll tell the story every time."

In 1941, Glen Edwards learned to fly in a fabric-covered biplane. Seven years later, he died in the crash of the Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing, the Air Force's most advanced jet-propelled aircraft and forerunner of the B-2 Stealth bomber of today. As a combat pilot in North Africa and Italy during World War II, and as a test pilot during a period of astonishing innovation, Edwards was among the best of a new generation of military aviators. The isolated desert base at Muroc, California, where Edwards crashed would be named in his honor. All through his military career, Glen Edwards kept a daily record of what he did and what he thought. Military historian Daniel Ford situates that diary in the context of World War II, the development of flight testing as a science, and the birth of an independent U.S. Air Force. He shows how military pilots in the 1940s augmented their seat-of-the-pants bravado and precision flying skills with rigorous academic training. Conveying both the exhaustion of combat and the exhilaration of flying some of the world's fastest, most sophisticated planes, the book traces the tragic course of Glen Edwards's career: the near-daily bombing missions over Africa and Italy, a record-breaking cross-country flight in the XB-42 Mixmaster, and trial flights in the YB-49 Flying Wing-the first plane Edwards ever actively disliked. The innovative Northrop bomber, Daniel Ford concludes, just wasn't ready for prime time. About 70,000 words; with photographs from the Air Force and the Edwards family. "A fascinating tale and a tribute to an unassuming man who simply loved to fly." -- Air&Space/Smithsonian

"The High Country Illuminator created Avalon by climbing to the fourth tower of old Number One lift and crying: 'Lest there be light '"

Thus begins the madcap adventure of a ski-bum winter toward the end of the 1960s. HCI is otherwise known as George Togalok, a Native American from the Salt River Canyon country. Around him assemble cunning Silver Fox, brainy Duke University, the Outt-keepers, Max, Max's Buddy, some fluffy birds, and other young slackers who want nothing more from life than the chance to ski the fluffy white powder of the Colorado Rockies. "The writing is adept," marveled the review for "Skier" magazine, 'the plot bewildering, the pace dizzy, and the skiing scenes (as the children say) are out of sight."

Annie Crowley was one of eleven children born in the farmhouse at Kilnahone, outside the village of Ballygarvan in the County Cork. There were nearly twenty-four years between the oldest and youngest of the Crowley boys and girls, Their father died a few weeks after young Billy was born, and Jack the eldest emigrated to Australia not long after. Annie was six years old at the time, and a pupil at Ballygarvan National School, where the English language and English history were drilled into Irish children.
Then came the First World War, and Mary Crowley went off to become a nurse in England. Annie was needed at home then, to take care of the house and the younger children. She loved the farm work, but soon enough she became a rebel against the English crown, in the fight for independence that began at Easter Week in 1916. The struggle ended in a bitter civil war, as diehard Republicans fought the compromising leaders willing to accept an Irish Free State with token allegiance to London. Thousands of veterans of the Irish Republican Army emigrated to America, including her sweetheart Pat Forde from Ballinhassig. Thus Annie came to America, never again to see her mother or siblings, or the farm at Kilnahone.

This is the story that inspired the acclaimed Burt Lancaster movie, "Go Tell the Spartans." The year is 1964--early days in South Vietnam--and the U.S. Army Raiders have garrisoned a town that the French abandoned ten years before. The Viet Cong attack, and the Americans reinforce. They're not about to repeat the mistakes of the French

'Sad, bawdy, and compelling, ' wrote the "Detroit Free Press." Prophetic, too, of how the larger war would end.

Olga Greenlaw kept the War Diary of the American Volunteer Group--the Flying Tigers--while those gallant mercenaries defended Burma and China from Japanese aggression during the opening months of the Pacific War. Returning to the United States in 1942, she wrote 'The Lady and the Tigers', which war correspondent Leland Stowe hailed as "an authoritative, gutsy and true to life story of the AVG." Out of print for more than half a century, her book has now been brought up to date by Daniel Ford, author of 'Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers'. What's more, Ford explains for the first time where Olga and Harvey Greenlaw came from, how they became caught up in the saga of the Flying Tigers, and what happened to them after their tumultuous year with the AVG.

Larger than the state of Rhode Island and laced by a thousand miles of trails, the White Mountains have long been a hiker's paradise. Here is a first-person account of the world that begins where the pavement ends. Fishermen, backpackers, trail-bikers ... goofers, peak baggers, and through hikers ... you'll find them all in the White Mountains, and you'll meet them all in the pages of this compelling book.The year is 1975, when it was still possible to find space in a lean-to shelter, when the Old Man of the Mountains still showed his splendid profile over Franconia Notch, and when hikers still smoked.

John Boyd was arguably the greatest American military theorist since the sea power strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan at the turn of the 20th Century. Best known for his formulation of the OODA Loop as a model for competitive decision making, Colonel Boyd was also an original thinker in developing tactics for air-to-air combat, designing warplanes, and the fluid, mobile warfare known to the Germans as blitzkrieg and to modern armies as "maneuver warfare." As much as anyone, John Boyd was the architect of the two great campaigns against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, both the 1991 liberation of Kuwait and the 2003 "March Up" to Baghdad by the U.S. Army and Marines. But what of the costly, drawn-out insurgency that baffled the invaders once Baghdad had fallen? In this short book, Daniel Ford applies Boyd's thinking to the problem of counter-insurgency. Unlike the U.S. military in 2003, it turns out that Boyd had indeed put considerable thought into what might transpire after an effective "blitz" campaign. Indeed, he found many similarities between "blitzers" and what he preferred to call guerrillas, and he thought that they might be defeated by turning their own tactics against them. This is an expanded version of a dissertation submitted in the War Studies program at King's College London.

Your 12-week Guide to Running offers an achievable step-by-step guide to help get an unfit person to a definable goal - running a 5km race in 12 weeks. The book outlines how to get started, what's needed and how to make that first step. Then using the week-by-week guide the reader works towards the target goal in very gradual steps with a weekly programme plus basic tips on nutrition, motivation, stretching and so on. The emphasis is on a very gradual approach towards achieving the goal so that the reader feels comfortable and there is constant reaffirmation of achievements as he/she works through the programme. There will also be sections for the reader's own notes, which are important for that all-important feeling of success as he/she works towards the ultimate goal of looking better and feeling fitter.