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The Best Of Enemies
by Taylor SmithA tranquil New England town is rocked to its core when a young college co-ed is linked to a devastating crime and then goes missing. Innocent or guilty, someone thinks she knows too much. One woman, who believes in the girl's innocence, is determined to find her before she's silenced--forever.
The Best Peace Fiction: A Social Justice Anthology
by Robert Olen Butler Phong NguyenIn the first anthology of its kind, Robert Olen Butler and Phong Nguyen assemble an astounding collection of stories that cause readers to contemplate war, peace, and social justice in a new light. The fourteen stories featured in this volume explore the varied and often unexpected outcomes of violence. The authors explore the tragedies that occur closer to home—not on military battlefields but rather in places that are never meant to be battlefields, like schools and churches. The fiction reveals the violence that renders our most sacred and seemingly safest of places vulnerable.Not a utopian project, this book asks whether literature has a role in furthering the ongoing pursuit of peace and justice for all. While exploring tragedy, these stories also offer hope for healing, illuminating how people can move forward from the moments when their lives change and how they can regain and reshape safe spaces to find solace.
The Best Team Over There: The Untold Story of Grover Cleveland Alexander and the Great War
by Jim LeekeGrover Cleveland Alexander was one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history, with 373 career victories during twenty seasons in the Major Leagues. Elected into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1938, the right-hander remains a compelling—and tragic—figure. &“Pete&” Alexander&’s military service during World War I was the demarcation line between his great seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies and his years of struggle and turmoil with the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals after the Great War. Indeed, Alexander&’s service during World War I has all but been forgotten, even though it dramatically changed his life—and his game. Alexander served in the 342nd Field Artillery Regiment, which included big leaguers and star athletes among its officers and men. Naturally, the regiment fielded an outstanding baseball team, but it also faced hard service during the final weeks of the war. After the armistice in November 1918, the unit undertook occupation duty in Germany.The Best Team Over There examines this crucial period closely: where Alexander was stationed, how he was trained, how he withstood the effects of combat and shelling, how he interacted with his fellow athletes and soldiers, and how the war changed his baseball career, revealing for the first time the little-known details of this critical stage in the legendary pitcher&’s life and career. We can&’t truly understand Alexander and his enduring appeal to baseball fans without also understanding his life as a gunner and soldier.
The Best War Ever: America And World War II (The American Moment)
by Michael C. C. AdamsThe most readable―and searingly honest―short book ever written on this pivotal conflict. Was World War II really such a “good war”? Popular memory insists that it was, in fact, “the best war ever.” After all, we knew who the enemy was, and we understood what we were fighting for. The war was good for the economy. It was liberating for women. A battle of tanks and airplanes, it was a “cleaner” war than World War I. Although we did not seek the conflict―or so we believed―Americans nevertheless rallied in support of the war effort, and the nation’s soldiers, all twelve million of them, were proud to fight. But according to historian Michael C. C. Adams, our memory of the war era as a golden age is distorted. It has left us with a misleading―even dangerous―legacy, one enhanced by the nostalgia-tinged retrospectives of Stephen E. Ambrose and Tom Brokaw. Disputing many of our common assumptions about the period, Adams argues in The Best War Ever that our celebratory experience of World War II is marred by darker and more sordid realities. In the book, originally published in 1994, Adams challenges stereotypes to present a view of World War II that avoids the simplistic extremes of both glorification and vilification. The Best War Ever charts the complex diplomatic problems of the 1930s and reveals the realities of ground combat: no moral triumph, it was in truth a brutal slog across a blasted landscape. Adams also exposes the myth that the home front was fully united behind the war effort, demonstrating how class, race, gender, and age divisions split Americans. Meanwhile, in Europe and Asia, shell-shocked soldiers grappled with emotional and physical trauma, rigorously enforced segregation, and rampant venereal disease. In preparing this must-read new edition, Adams has consulted some seventy additional sources on topics as varied as the origins of Social Security and a national health system, the Allied strategic bombing campaign, and the relationship of traumatic brain injuries to the adjustment problems of veterans. The revised book also incorporates substantial developments that have occurred in our understanding of the course and character of the war, particularly in terms of the human consequences of fighting. In a new chapter, “The Life Cycle of a Myth,” Adams charts image-making about the war from its inception to the present. He contrasts it with modern-day rhetoric surrounding the War on Terror, while analyzing the real-world consequences that result from distorting the past, including the dangerous idea that only through (perpetual) military conflict can we achieve lasting peace.
The Best War Ever: America and World War II (The American Moment)
by Michael C. AdamsThe most readable—and searingly honest—short book ever written on this pivotal conflict.Was World War II really such a "good war"? Popular memory insists that it was, in fact, "the best war ever." After all, we knew who the enemy was, and we understood what we were fighting for. The war was good for the economy. It was liberating for women. A battle of tanks and airplanes, it was a "cleaner" war than World War I. Although we did not seek the conflict—or so we believed—Americans nevertheless rallied in support of the war effort, and the nation's soldiers, all twelve million of them, were proud to fight. But according to historian Michael C. C. Adams, our memory of the war era as a golden age is distorted. It has left us with a misleading—even dangerous—legacy, one enhanced by the nostalgia-tinged retrospectives of Stephen E. Ambrose and Tom Brokaw. Disputing many of our common assumptions about the period, Adams argues in The Best War Ever that our celebratory experience of World War II is marred by darker and more sordid realities. In the book, originally published in 1994, Adams challenges stereotypes to present a view of World War II that avoids the simplistic extremes of both glorification and vilification. The Best War Ever charts the complex diplomatic problems of the 1930s and reveals the realities of ground combat: no moral triumph, it was in truth a brutal slog across a blasted landscape. Adams also exposes the myth that the home front was fully united behind the war effort, demonstrating how class, race, gender, and age divisions split Americans. Meanwhile, in Europe and Asia, shell-shocked soldiers grappled with emotional and physical trauma, rigorously enforced segregation, and rampant venereal disease.In preparing this must-read new edition, Adams has consulted some seventy additional sources on topics as varied as the origins of Social Security and a national health system, the Allied strategic bombing campaign, and the relationship of traumatic brain injuries to the adjustment problems of veterans. The revised book also incorporates substantial developments that have occurred in our understanding of the course and character of the war, particularly in terms of the human consequences of fighting. In a new chapter, "The Life Cycle of a Myth," Adams charts image-making about the war from its inception to the present. He contrasts it with modern-day rhetoric surrounding the War on Terror, while analyzing the real-world consequences that result from distorting the past, including the dangerous idea that only through (perpetual) military conflict can we achieve lasting peace.
The Best War Stories Ever Told (Best Stories Ever Told)
by Stephen BrennanThis is a truly incredible collection of stories about the battles of war, both on the front lines and behind the scenes. The authors range from ancient scribes like Julius Caesar to more modern masters like Theodore Roosevelt and Stephen Crane--you’ll even find a story from the King James Bible to make this experience truly complete! These stories capture the dizzying variety of feelings and experiences that war inspires, from the devastating to the inspiring. They are thought-provoking, entertaining, and disturbing, but always compelling. Whatever your feelings are about war, you’ll find that these stories will teach you something you didn't know about military history, stir up debate, and provoke conversation. This title is part of Skyhorse’s respected The Best Stories series, each of which is selectively edited and hand-crafted to include only the best stories from the best writers of the genre.
The Best and the Brightest
by Susan WrightEvery year, Starfleet Academy in San Francisco attracts many of the most talented and ambitious young people in the Federation. They come from all over the Alpha Quadrant, from hundreds of worlds and species, to prepare themselves for the challenges of the final frontier. Meet a new generation of cadets: a newly joined Trill just beginning the first of many lives; a Bajoran Vedek who finds himself torn between his vows and an unspoken love; a reckless young man fond of pushing the limits; a feline alien raised among humans; a brilliant but immature young woman with a lot to learn; and a native-born Earth woman with a talent for engineering. Together they will learn about courage, life, teamwork, and themselves. Their future is just beginning -- but one of them will not survive!
The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library Classics Ser.)
by David HalberstamDavid Halberstam&’s masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain."A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience.&”—The New York Times Using portraits of America&’ s flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country&’ s recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It is an American classic.Praise for The Best and the Brightest&“The most comprehensive saga of how America became involved in Vietnam. . . . It is also the Iliad of the American empire and the Odyssey of this nation&’s search for its idealistic soul. The Best and the Brightest is almost like watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller.&”—The Boston Globe&“Deeply moving . . . We cannot help but feel the compelling power of this narrative. . . . Dramatic and tragic, a chain of events overwhelming in their force, a distant war embodying illusions and myths, terror and violence, confusions and courage, blindness, pride, and arrogance.&”—Los Angeles Times&“A fascinating tale of folly and self-deception . . . [An] absorbing, detailed, and devastatingly caustic tale of Washington in the days of the Caesars.&”—The Washington Post Book World&“Seductively readable . . . It is a staggeringly ambitious undertaking that is fully matched by Halberstam&’s performance. . . . This is in all ways an admirable and necessary book.&”—Newsweek&“A story every American should read.&”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The Best of Fragments from France
by Bruce BairnsfatherA collection of British cartoons featuring Old Bill, “one of the best-loved characters of World War I,” created by a solider on the front lines (Warfare History Network).Bruce Bairnsfather was the most famous cartoonist of the First World War and his soldier characters Old Bill, Bert and Alf, faced with sardonic good humor everything that the Germans, the mud and their officers could throw at them. However, Bruce (known by some as The Man Who Won the War) never received the acclaim that he deserved for the morale boost that his cartoons gave to the troops at the front and to the people back at home. The 50th Anniversary of Bairnsfather’s death on 29 September 2009 offered an opportunity to redress the balance, and acknowledging it in combination with raising funds for Help for Heroes (H4H) seemed to be most appropriate.The cartoons reproduced in this collection were originally drawn for The Bystander, a popular weekly magazine, in which they appeared each Tuesday throughout most of the Great War. Their effect on the public was totally unexpected, and so dramatic that Bystander sales soared. The organization, with unerring good judgement, decided it had a winner in Bairnsfather, and published the first 43 of his cartoons in an anthology. It was produced in February 1916, given the name Fragments from France and sold for 1s. The success of the Fragments magazines was such that edition followed edition in rapid succession and at least eleven editions were published. Leafing through these pages, the reader will soon understand their tremendous popularity and success which have withstood the test of time.
The Best of Intentions: A 'fond and funny' story of friendship, community and staying true to yourself.
by Caroline ScottCharming, nostalgic and brimming with optimism – a sparkling story of friendship, community and staying true to yourself for fans of Lissa Evans and AJ Pearce. 'Turbulence and tribulation in paradise... A fond and funny novel about the power of patience, love and kindness' Fiona Valpy 1932: When gardener Robert Bardsley arrives at Anderby Hall, an Elizabethan manor house in the Gloucestershire countryside, it is home to &‘Greenfields&’, a community of artists and idealists. Robert has been employed to revive Anderby&’s famous roses and restore the topiary garden, but he also soon befriends the other residents: from colourful neighbour Trudie, who makes a formidable cocktail and keeps her late-fiancé&’s ashes on the mantelpiece, to composer Daniel, recovering from the horrors of the Great War. The only person he can&’t win over is Anderby&’s schoolteacher, Faye, who finds him . . . perfectly vexing. But just as Robert starts to feel at home, the residents discover that the old orchard has been sold to a property developer who has plans for an estate of Tudorbethan bungalows. Can they find a way to keep their creative community alive or will the new housing development put an end to the spirit of Greenfields? 'An ode to kindness, authenticity and optimism - just what we need at the moment!' Caroline Bishop '[A] warm and engaging story of community, friendship and resilience' Anita Frank 'How to live your best life is a topic of perennial fascination. Caroline Scott explores the challenges facing a utopian community of the interwar period in a beautifully written and wonderfully atmospheric story. It's hard to put down&’ Rachel Hore 'As clouds gather on the distant European horizon in the 1930s, the residents of Anderby Hall remind us of the importance of community, kindness and optimism' Flora Johnston '[A] wonderful, atmospheric read that I really couldn't tear myself away from. It's so beautifully written, with gorgeous, evocative descriptions of orchards, gardens, the seasons and an English country house. I was transported!&’ Tracy Rees 'A wonderful novel about the power of a creative community to heal and educate' Suzanne Goldring
The Better Part of Valor (Confederation of Valor #2)
by Tanya HuffFrom bestselling author Tanya Huff comes a new novel in the Confederation series of military science fiction, blending action, intrigue, courage, and humor with more twists than a trip through Susumi space…Even if she was saving the Confederation at the time, Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr is aware that questioning a general’s parentage to his face was not a strategic career move. But she never imagined it would land her as senior NCO on a top-secret recon mission practically guaranteed to go sideways. The target is an unidentified alien ship the size of a station, floating dead in space. Most of her intel comes from a civilian salvage operator who’s bargained his way onto her landing party while making it clear he won’t be taking any orders. Best of all, the mission’s commanding officer is a politically connected captain so heroic his troops tend to end up dead.But as soon as Torin and her Marines set foot on the strange vessel, the rules change. This ship isn’t empty. Communications are down. And if they can’t get back to tell the Confederation what they’ve found out, all of the known galaxy is going to learn about it the hard way…
The Bickersteth Diaries: 1914-1918
by John Bickersteth Donald CogganThis book is a studiously edited version of the eleven volumes and more than three thousand pages of the diarist's original work. Ella Bickersteth began to put it together for her six sons, because one of them was in Australia at the outbreak of the 1914–18 war.The book reflects upon church and politics, theological musings and matter-of-fact details of how an anxious mother, who was also a busy vicar's wife, kept going through the huge upheaval of war.
The Bicycle Man
by Allen SayThe amazing tricks two American soldiers perform on a borrowed bicycle are a fitting finale for the school sports day festivities in a small village in occupied Japan.
The Bicycle Man
by Allen SayThe amazing tricks two American soldiers perform on a borrowed bicycle are a fitting finale for the school sports day festivities in a small village in occupied Japan.
The Bicycle Runner: A Memoir of Love, Loyalty, and the Italian Resistance
by G. Franco RomagnoliG. Franco Romagnoli'sThe Bicycle Runner is an irresistible memoir of coming of age, friendship, love, and war during the perils of Fascist Italy.Like all boys growing up in Rome during the 1930s and 1940s, the author was expected to join the Balilla—Italy's fascist Youth Organization. With political divisions running deep in the families within his palazzo, he and his motley group of friends were recruited into the underground Resistance. Racing around Rome on bicycles, they smuggled messages and weapons for the partisans. Later, the author fled to the Italian countryside and narrowly avoided German mop-up operations—despite being sold out by his most trusted of friends. But this is much more than a war story. Lyrical in language, rich in sentimentality, and possessing the magic of a classic Fellini film, Romagnoli's memoir is a charmingly told tale of the search for manhood and the bonds of family and friendship.
The Bicycle Spy
by Yona Zeldis McdonoughMarcel loves riding his bicycle, whether he's racing through the streets of his small town in France or making bread deliveries for his parents' bakery. He dreams of someday competing in the Tour de France, the greatest bicycle race. But ever since Germany's occupation of France began two years ago, in 1940, the race has been canceled. Now there are soldiers everywhere, interrupting Marcel's rides with checkpoints and questioning. Then Marcel learns two big secrets, and he realizes there are worse things about the war than a canceled race. When he later discovers that his friend's entire family is in imminent danger, Marcel knows he can help -- but it will involve taking a risky bicycle ride to pass along covert information. And when nothing ends up going according to plan, it's up to him to keep pedaling and think quickly. . . because his friend, her family, and his own future hang in the balance.
The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews
by Peter Duffy<p>In 1941, three brothers witnessed their parents and two other siblings being led away to their eventual murders. It was a grim scene that would, of course, be repeated endlessly throughout the war. Instead of running or giving in to despair, these brothers - Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski - fought back, waging a guerrilla war of wits against the Nazis. <p>By using their intimate knowledge of the dense forests surrounding the Belarusan towns of Novogrudek and Lida, the Bielskis evaded the Nazis and established a hidden base camp, then set about convincing other Jews to join their ranks. As more and more Jews arrived each day, a robust community began to emerge, a "Jerusalem in the woods." <p>After two and a half years in the woods, in July 1944, the Bielskis learned that the Germans, overrun by the Red Army, were retreating back toward Berlin. More than one thousand Bielski Jews emerged - alive - on that final, triumphant exit from the woods.</p>
The Big Bang
by Roy M GriffisIn this page-turning post-apocalyptic thriller, Roy M. Griffis explores an alternate timeline in which America falls victim to a coordinated attack by Islamic jihadists and Chinese Communists. It's 2008 and George W. Bush is still president. Three years later, the man called "Lonesome George" is in hiding, leading the resistance from a secret location. Multiple plot lines skillfully braid the tales of resistance fighters in various parts of the country. Whistler is the hard-bitten commander of a military unit in Texas. Karen, a former congressional aide, stumbles through the radioactive rubble of Washington DC. Molly, a leftwing columnist in San Francisco, finally puts her talents to good use on the underground radio as the voice of the resistance. Alec, a famous Hollywood actor, loses his wife and daughter in the nuclear attack on Los Angeles and becomes a legendary fighter, inventing the gun that bears his name. A vivid imagining of an America gone horribly wrong, written in gripping detail.
The Big Book of Gun Trivia
by Gordon L. RottmanThe Big Book of Gun Trivia: Everything you want to know, don't want to know, and don't know you need to know
The Big Book of Gun Trivia
by Gordon RottmanA complete guide to weapons history, facts, myths and trivia, covering everything you wanted to know, didn't want to know, and don't know you need to know... Gordon Rottman offers a step by step guide through interesting gun facts and statistics, including a section on ammunition, while breaking apart popular myths and misconceptions. Covering subjects from weapons designations to the longest serving military rifles, where rifles get their names from, and everything in between, Osprey is proud to present The Big Book of Gun Trivia.
The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security
by Richard TomlinsonRichard Tomlinson was recruited by MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, during his senior year at Cambridge University. He quickly gained the trust and confidence of one of the world's most effective intelligence organisations. MI6 relied on Tomlinson to smuggle nuclear secrets out of Moscow, to run an undercover operation in Sarajevo while the city was under siege, and to infiltrate and dismantle a criminal group that sought to export chemical weapons capabilities to Iran.
The Big Break: The Greatest American WWII POW Escape Story Never Told
by Stephen Dando-CollinsThe story opens in the stinking latrines of the Schubin camp as an American and a Canadian lead the digging of a tunnel which enabled a break involving 36 prisoners of war (POWs). The Germans then converted the camp to Oflag 64, to exclusively hold US Army officers, with more than 1500 Americans ultimately housed there. Plucky Americans attempted a variety of escapes until January, 1945, only to be thwarted every time.Then, with the Red Army advancing closer every day, camp commandant Colonel Fritz Schneider received orders from Berlin to march his prisoners west. Game on! Over the next few days, 250 US Army officers would succeed in escaping east to link up with the Russians - although they would prove almost as dangerous as the Nazis - only to be ordered once they arrived back in the United States not to talk about their adventures. Within months, General Patton would launch a bloody bid to rescue the remaining Schubin Americans.In The Big Break, this previously untold story follows POWs including General Eisenhower's personal aide, General Patton's son-in-law, and Ernest Hemingway's eldest son as they struggled to be free. Military historian and Paul Brickhill biographer Stephen Dando-Collins expertly chronicles this gripping story of Americans determined to be free, brave Poles risking their lives to help them, and dogmatic Nazis determined to stop them.
The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America
by Norman Mailer John Buffalo MailerSet against the backdrop of George W. Bush's re-election campaign and the war in Iraq, John asks his father to look back to World War II and explore the parallels that can and cannot be drawn between that time and our current post-9/11 consciousness.
The Big Fight (Gallipoli To The Somme) [Illustrated Edition]
by Captain David Fallon M.C.Includes the First World War Illustrations Pack - 73 battle plans and diagrams and 198 photos"Gallipoli and the Western Front to the end of 1916, as experienced by the author who served with the Australians and 1/Buckingham Bn of the O&B LIThis book is an account of the author's battlefield experiences at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Fallon was a pre-war regular (Northumberland Fusiliers) who, when war broke out, was a staff sergeant instructor at the Australian Royal Military College in Duntroon. Transferred in some unexplained fashion to the Australian army he took part in the Gallipoli landings on 25 April 1915, which he describes in gory detail, as he does the rest of the fighting till he was evacuated in December. Back in the British army he was commisioned into the Buckingham Battalion (TF) of the O & B LI (145th Bde/48th Division) with which he fought on the Western Front till badly wounded at the end of 1916. He seems to go out of his way to make his descriptions of the fighting as bloody as possible, and as for the Germans, he has a chapter entitled "Hun Beastliness" in which he makes unbelievable statements such as the two examples which follow: It was the nude body of the Mother Superior. She had been nailed to the door. She had been crucified. In the ruins we brought out the bodies of four nuns, unspeakably mutilated. Their bodies had been stabbed and slashed each more than a hundred times. They had gone to martyrdom resisting incredible brutes. They had fought hard, the blond hair of their assassins clutched in their dead hands. And again, at Wytschaete: Above the wreck of the skyline trench bayonets stuck up, and on them were the severed heads, with horrible smiles under their English caps, of twenty of my men. Referring to German soldiers he writes: They hate the bayonet. The cold steel is not for Hans. Shades of Dad's Army, Lcpl Jones and "They don't like it up 'em"."-Print ed.
The Big Fix: Rebuilding Australia's National Security
by Albert PalazzoThe character of war is constantly changing, and so too must the approach to national security. But Australia&’s defence policy is broken. Successive governments have not approached the nation&’s security with the intelligence, resoluteness and seriousness it requires. After more than 120 years of defence policy centred on dependency, the geopolitical situation demands new thinking by politicians and policymakers to secure the nation for the future. In light of technological progress, the shifting balance of power in the Pacific and the worsening danger of climate change, Australia needs a new approach in order to charts its own course. In The Big Fix, defence strategist Albert Palazzo proposes a defence policy centred on the strategic defensive, which presents the best military fit for Australia, given its geography and the current state of military technology. Crucially, he elevates climate change to primacy in the national security hierarchy and explains how we cannot afford to ignore it as a security factor. And he asks: what is stopping Australia&’s leaders from seriously considering other options for the nation&’s security?