American military advisors in South Vietnam came to know their allies personally - as few American soldiers could. In addition to fighting the Viet Cong, advisors engaged in community building projects and local government initiatives. They dealt firsthand with corrupt American and South Vietnamese bureaucracies and not many would have been surprised to learn that 105mm artillery shells were being sold on the black market to the Viet Cong. Not many were surprised by the Communist victory in 1975. This memoir of a U.S. Army intelligence officer focuses on the province advisors who worked with local militias that were often disparaged by American units. The author describes his year (1969-1970) as a U.S. advisor to the South Vietnamese Regional and Popular Forces in the Mekong Delta.

With his thick German accent, William C. Bouck was known as the a Dutch Governora of New York. Descended from German immigrants who arrived in Schoharie County in the early 1700s, Bouck attributed his frugality, work ethic, and character to his humble farm

Sun and Wind was Standish James O'Grady's last work, which he was editing at the time of his death in 1928. Some parts of it were published as journal articles in his lifetime, but most is published here for the first time. Edward A. Hagan describes O'Grady as 'at once a political polemicist, a creative writer, and a somewhat unusual historian', involved in all three roles in this utopian treatise which 'reveals the pervasive influence of classical scholarship upon the Irish intellectual life of the period'. O'Grady argues for drastic change in Ireland in the first part and in the second makes extensive use of classical Greece as a model for Ireland.

The Green Republic, a novel first published in 1902, actually describes real characters and events at the turn of the century in Poyntzpass, Co. Armagh. O'Gara's fictional town of Jigglestreet in South Tyrone accurately represents the real Poyntzpass where O'Gara, under his real name - William Robert MacDermott (1839-1918) - worked as a dispensary doctor. The 'novel' is both a sophisticated sociological study of rural Ulster Protestants and a political argument for instituting joint stock company management of Irish agriculture. For MacDermott, the 'Green Republic' was an ironic title used not to describe Irish nationalism but to express his fears about the rise of the new force in agriculture - the former tenant farmers who were gaining title to their land. MacDermott believed that as long as irresponsible power remained in the hands of the old landlords or the new owner/occupiers, Irish agriculture would never operate to maximise production for the common good. The introduction is written by Edward A. Hagan.