Baron Otto von Wchter, Austrian lawyer, husband, father, high Nazi official, senior SS officer, former governor of Galicia during the war, creator and overseer of the Krakow ghetto, indicted after as a war criminal for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles, hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the British, by Simon Wiesenthal, on the run for three years, from 1945 to 1948 . . . Philippe Sands pieces together, in riveting detail, Wchter's extraordinary, shocking story. Given full access to the Wchter family archives--journals, diaries, tapes, and more--and with the assistance of the Wchters' son Horst, who believes his father to have been a "good man," Sands writes of Wchter's rise through the Nazi high command, his "blissful" marriage and family life as their world was brought to ruin, and his four-year flight to escape justice--to the Tirol, to Rome, and the Vatican; given a new identity, on his way to a new life via "the Ratline" to Pern's Argentina, the escape route taken by Eichmann, Mengele, and thousands of other Nazis.
Knopf
|
9780525520962
|
Hardcover
Honorable Exit
By Clarke, Thurston
A groundbreaking revisionist history of the last days of the Vietnam War that reveals the acts of American heroism that saved more than one hundred thousand South Vietnamese from communist revengeIn 1973 U.S. participation in the Vietnam War ended in a cease-fire and a withdrawal that included promises by President Nixon to assist the South in the event of invasion by the North. But in early 1975, when North Vietnamese forces began a full-scale assault, Congress refused to send arms or aid. By early April that year, the South was on the brink of a defeat that threatened execution or years in a concentration camp for the untold number of South Vietnamese who had supported the government in Saigon or worked with Americans. Thurston Clarke begins Honorable Exit by describing the iconic photograph of the Fall of Saigon: desperate Vietnamese scrambling to board a helicopter evacuating the last American personnel from Vietnam. It is an image of U.S. failure and shame. Or is it? By unpacking the surprising story of heroism that the photograph actually tells, Clarke launches into a narrative that is both a thrilling race against time and an important corrective to the historical record. For what is less known is that during those final days, scores of Americans--diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, missionaries, contractors, and spies--risked their lives to assist their current and former translators, drivers, colleagues, neighbors, friends, and even perfect strangers in escape. By the time the last U.S. helicopter left Vietnam on April 30, 1975, these righteous Americans had helped to spirit 130,000 South Vietnamese to U.S. bases in Guam and the Philippines. From there, the evacuees were resettled in the U.S. and became American citizens, the leading edge of one of America's most successful immigrant groups. Into this tale of heroism on the ground Clarke weaves the political machinations of Henry Kissinger advising President Ford in the White House while reinforcing the delusions of the U.S. Ambassador in Saigon, who, at the last minute, refused to depart. Groundbreaking, page-turning, and authoritative, Honorable Exit is a deeply moving history of Americans at a little-known finest hour.
Doubleday
|
9780385539647
|
Hardcover
Never Remember
By Gessen, Masha
"A book that belongs on the shelf alongside The Gulag Archipelago." (Kirkus Reviews) "A short, haunting and beautifully written book." (The Wall Street Journal) The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten? Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag. They journey from Moscow to Sandarmokh, a forested site of mass executions during Stalins Great Terror; to the only Gulag camp turned into a museum, outside of the city of Perm in the Urals; and to Kolyma, where prisoners worked in deadly mines in the remote reaches of the Far East. They find that in Vladimir Putins Russia, where Stalin is remembered as a great leader, Soviet terror has not been forgotten: it was never remembered in the first place.
Columbia Global Reports
|
9780997722963
|
Audiobook
Only Plane in the Sky
By Graff, Garrett M.
Hailed as "remarkable ... incredibly evocative and compelling" (The Washington Post) and "oral history at its finest" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) , Garrett M. Graff's The Only Plane in the Sky is the most vivid and human portrait of the September 11 attacks yet, comprised of never-before-published transcripts, recently declassified documents, and original interviews and stories from nearly five hundred government officials, first responders, witnesses, survivors, friends, and family members. Here is a vivid, profound, and searing portrait of humanity on a day that changed the course of history, and all of our lives.
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
|
9781501182211
|
Paperback
Two Rings
By Werber, Millie
Judged only as a World War Two survivor's chronicle, Millie Werber's story would be remarkable enough. Born in central Poland in the town of Radom, she found herself trapped in the ghetto at the age of fourteen, a slave laborer in an armaments factory in the summer of 1942, transported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, before being marched to a second armaments factory. She faced death many times; indeed she was certain that she would not survive. But she did. Many years later, when she began to share her past with Eve Keller, the two women rediscovered the world of the teenage girl Millie had been during the war. Most important, Millie revealed her most precious private memory: of a man to whom she was married for a few brief months. He was - if not the love of her life - her first great unconditional passion.
PublicAffairs
|
9781610391221
|
Hardcover
Killing Crazy Horse
By O'reilly, Bill
The bloody Battle of Tippecanoe was only the beginning. It's 1811 and President James Madison has ordered the destruction of Shawnee warrior chief Tecumseh's alliance of tribes in the Great Lakes region. But while General William Henry Harrison would win this fight, the armed conflict between Native Americans and the newly formed United States would rage on for decades. Bestselling authors Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard venture through the fraught history of our country's founding on already occupied lands, from General Andrew Jackson's brutal battles with the Creek Nation to President James Monroe's epic "sea to shining sea" policy, to President Martin Van Buren's cruel enforcement of a "treaty" that forced the Cherokee Nation out of their homelands along what would be called the Trail of Tears.
Large Print Press; Large type / Large print edition
|
9781432890919
|
Paperback
In the Hurricane's Eye
By Philbrick, Nathaniel
The thrilling story of the year that won the Revolutionary War from the New York Times bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea and Valiant AmbitionIn the fall of 1780, after five frustrating years of war, George Washington had come to realize that the only way to defeat the British Empire was with the help of the French navy. But as he had learned after two years of trying, coordinating his army's movements with those of a fleet of warships based thousands of miles away was next to impossible. And then, on September 5, 1781, the impossible happened. Recognized today as one of the most important naval engagements in the history of the world, the Battle of the Chesapeake--fought without a single American ship--made the subsequent victory of the Americans at Yorktown a virtual inevitability.In a narrative that moves from Washington's headquarters on the Hudson River, to the wooded hillside in North Carolina where Nathanael Greene fought Lord Cornwallis to a vicious draw, to Lafayette's brilliant series of maneuvers across Tidewater Virginia, Philbrick details the epic and suspenseful year through to its triumphant conclusion. A riveting and wide-ranging story, full of dramatic, unexpected turns, In the Hurricane's Eye reveals that the fate of the American Revolution depended, in the end, on Washington and the sea.
Viking
|
9780525426769
|
Hardcover
At the End of the World
By Millman, Lawrence
In a remote corner of the Arctic in 1941, a meteor shower flashed across the sky for an unusually long time. Taking this to be a sign, one of the local Inuit proclaimed himself Jesus Christ. Another proclaimed himself God. Anyone who didnt believe in them was Satan. Violence ensued.. At the End of the World isnt just the remarkable story of a series of murders that occurred on the Belcher Islands, a group of wind-blasted rocks in Canadas Hudson Bay. Its also a starting place for a deeper cultural exploration. Against the backdrop of the murders, which highlight the fact that senseless violence in the name of religion is not a contemporary phenomenon and that a even people as seemingly peaceful as the Inuit can turn to chaos at the hands of one persons delusion, Millman addresses the burgeoning dawn of the digital era, following the murders trail to show how our obsession with screens is not unlike a cult and offering a warning cry against the erosion of humanity and the destruction of the environment. The story becomes a confluence of the consequences of generational trauma, outside religious evangelism, systemic racism against indigenous people, the perilous passage from the natural to the digital world, and what it means to be human in a time of technological dominance and climate disasters.. At the End of the World, available for the first time in paperback, is not a straightforward tale of true crime but an examination of many of the issues that have become dominant in the global conversation. In snippets of reflection, Millman asks us to look north for answers to many of the questions we all hold, literally, in our hands.
St Martin'S Press
|
9781250111401
|
Hardcover
The Hidden History of Burma
By Myint-u, Thant
How did one of the world's "buzzy hotspots" (Fodor's 2013) become one of the top ten places to avoid (Fodor's 2018) ?Less than a decade ago, the world cheered as a dictatorship crumbled and internationally beloved Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from twenty years of house arrest. Yet just three years after her landslide victory at the polls, the country stands accused of war crimes and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims.As an historian, former diplomat, and presidential advisor, Thant Myint-U was part of the momentous changes that pulled Burma toward democracy, working with the ex- generals and meeting many of the country's biggest supporters, from Bono to Barack Obama. Yet no one was prepared to Burma's underlying challenges, from fast- rising inequality, disintegrating state institutions, and the impacts of climate change, to the rise of China next door and the issues of race, religion, and "national identity" deeply rooted in the country's traumatic colonial past.In this riveting insider's diagnosis of a country at a breaking point, Thant Myint-U shows that Burma's perils, far from being unique, are many of the same facing all of us. Burma is a warning for the world.
W. W. Norton & Company
|
9781324003298
|
Hardcover
The Odyssey of Echo Company
By Stanton, Doug
A powerful work of literary military history from the New York Times bestselling author of In Harm's Way and Horse Soldiers, the harrowing, redemptive, and utterly unforgettable account of an American army reconnaissance platoon's fight for survival during the Vietnam War - whose searing experiences reverberate today among the millions of American families touched by this war.On a single night, January 31, 1968, as many as 100,000 soldiers in the North Vietnamese Army attacked thirty-six cities throughout South Vietnam, hoping to topple the government and dislodge American forces. Forty young American soldiers of an army reconnaissance platoon (Echo Company, 1/501) of the 101st Airborne Division and hailing from small farms, beach towns, and such big cities as Chicago and Los Angeles are suddenly thrust into savage combat, having been in-country only a few weeks. Their battles against both North Vietnamese Army soldiers and toughened Viet Cong guerillas are relentless, often hand-to-hand, and waged night and day across landing zones, rice paddies, hamlets, and dense jungle. The exhausting day-to-day existence, which involves ambushes on both sides, grueling gun battles, and heroic rescues of wounded comrades, forges the group into a lifelong brotherhood. The Odyssey of Echo Company is about the young men who survived this epic span, and centers on the searing experiences of one of them, Stanley Parker, who is wounded three times during the fighting. When the young men come home, some encounter a country that doesn't understand what they have suffered and survived. Many of them fall silent, knowing that few of their countrymen want to hear the remarkable story they have lived to tell - until now. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, dozens of personal letters written in the combat zone, Pentagon after-action reports, and travel to the battle sites with some of the soldiers (who meet their Vietnamese counterpart) , and augmented by detailed maps and remarkable combat zone photographs, The Odyssey of Echo Company breaks through the wall of time to recount ordinary young American men in an extraordinary time in America and confirms Doug Stanton's prominence as an unparalleled storyteller of our age.
The Ratline
By Sands, Philippe
Baron Otto von Wchter, Austrian lawyer, husband, father, high Nazi official, senior SS officer, former governor of Galicia during the war, creator and overseer of the Krakow ghetto, indicted after as a war criminal for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles, hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the British, by Simon Wiesenthal, on the run for three years, from 1945 to 1948 . . . Philippe Sands pieces together, in riveting detail, Wchter's extraordinary, shocking story. Given full access to the Wchter family archives--journals, diaries, tapes, and more--and with the assistance of the Wchters' son Horst, who believes his father to have been a "good man," Sands writes of Wchter's rise through the Nazi high command, his "blissful" marriage and family life as their world was brought to ruin, and his four-year flight to escape justice--to the Tirol, to Rome, and the Vatican; given a new identity, on his way to a new life via "the Ratline" to Pern's Argentina, the escape route taken by Eichmann, Mengele, and thousands of other Nazis.
Honorable Exit
By Clarke, Thurston
A groundbreaking revisionist history of the last days of the Vietnam War that reveals the acts of American heroism that saved more than one hundred thousand South Vietnamese from communist revengeIn 1973 U.S. participation in the Vietnam War ended in a cease-fire and a withdrawal that included promises by President Nixon to assist the South in the event of invasion by the North. But in early 1975, when North Vietnamese forces began a full-scale assault, Congress refused to send arms or aid. By early April that year, the South was on the brink of a defeat that threatened execution or years in a concentration camp for the untold number of South Vietnamese who had supported the government in Saigon or worked with Americans. Thurston Clarke begins Honorable Exit by describing the iconic photograph of the Fall of Saigon: desperate Vietnamese scrambling to board a helicopter evacuating the last American personnel from Vietnam. It is an image of U.S. failure and shame. Or is it? By unpacking the surprising story of heroism that the photograph actually tells, Clarke launches into a narrative that is both a thrilling race against time and an important corrective to the historical record. For what is less known is that during those final days, scores of Americans--diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, missionaries, contractors, and spies--risked their lives to assist their current and former translators, drivers, colleagues, neighbors, friends, and even perfect strangers in escape. By the time the last U.S. helicopter left Vietnam on April 30, 1975, these righteous Americans had helped to spirit 130,000 South Vietnamese to U.S. bases in Guam and the Philippines. From there, the evacuees were resettled in the U.S. and became American citizens, the leading edge of one of America's most successful immigrant groups. Into this tale of heroism on the ground Clarke weaves the political machinations of Henry Kissinger advising President Ford in the White House while reinforcing the delusions of the U.S. Ambassador in Saigon, who, at the last minute, refused to depart. Groundbreaking, page-turning, and authoritative, Honorable Exit is a deeply moving history of Americans at a little-known finest hour.
Never Remember
By Gessen, Masha
"A book that belongs on the shelf alongside The Gulag Archipelago." (Kirkus Reviews) "A short, haunting and beautifully written book." (The Wall Street Journal) The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten? Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag. They journey from Moscow to Sandarmokh, a forested site of mass executions during Stalins Great Terror; to the only Gulag camp turned into a museum, outside of the city of Perm in the Urals; and to Kolyma, where prisoners worked in deadly mines in the remote reaches of the Far East. They find that in Vladimir Putins Russia, where Stalin is remembered as a great leader, Soviet terror has not been forgotten: it was never remembered in the first place.
Only Plane in the Sky
By Graff, Garrett M.
Hailed as "remarkable ... incredibly evocative and compelling" (The Washington Post) and "oral history at its finest" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) , Garrett M. Graff's The Only Plane in the Sky is the most vivid and human portrait of the September 11 attacks yet, comprised of never-before-published transcripts, recently declassified documents, and original interviews and stories from nearly five hundred government officials, first responders, witnesses, survivors, friends, and family members. Here is a vivid, profound, and searing portrait of humanity on a day that changed the course of history, and all of our lives.
Two Rings
By Werber, Millie
Judged only as a World War Two survivor's chronicle, Millie Werber's story would be remarkable enough. Born in central Poland in the town of Radom, she found herself trapped in the ghetto at the age of fourteen, a slave laborer in an armaments factory in the summer of 1942, transported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, before being marched to a second armaments factory. She faced death many times; indeed she was certain that she would not survive. But she did. Many years later, when she began to share her past with Eve Keller, the two women rediscovered the world of the teenage girl Millie had been during the war. Most important, Millie revealed her most precious private memory: of a man to whom she was married for a few brief months. He was - if not the love of her life - her first great unconditional passion.
Killing Crazy Horse
By O'reilly, Bill
The bloody Battle of Tippecanoe was only the beginning. It's 1811 and President James Madison has ordered the destruction of Shawnee warrior chief Tecumseh's alliance of tribes in the Great Lakes region. But while General William Henry Harrison would win this fight, the armed conflict between Native Americans and the newly formed United States would rage on for decades. Bestselling authors Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard venture through the fraught history of our country's founding on already occupied lands, from General Andrew Jackson's brutal battles with the Creek Nation to President James Monroe's epic "sea to shining sea" policy, to President Martin Van Buren's cruel enforcement of a "treaty" that forced the Cherokee Nation out of their homelands along what would be called the Trail of Tears.
In the Hurricane's Eye
By Philbrick, Nathaniel
The thrilling story of the year that won the Revolutionary War from the New York Times bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea and Valiant AmbitionIn the fall of 1780, after five frustrating years of war, George Washington had come to realize that the only way to defeat the British Empire was with the help of the French navy. But as he had learned after two years of trying, coordinating his army's movements with those of a fleet of warships based thousands of miles away was next to impossible. And then, on September 5, 1781, the impossible happened. Recognized today as one of the most important naval engagements in the history of the world, the Battle of the Chesapeake--fought without a single American ship--made the subsequent victory of the Americans at Yorktown a virtual inevitability.In a narrative that moves from Washington's headquarters on the Hudson River, to the wooded hillside in North Carolina where Nathanael Greene fought Lord Cornwallis to a vicious draw, to Lafayette's brilliant series of maneuvers across Tidewater Virginia, Philbrick details the epic and suspenseful year through to its triumphant conclusion. A riveting and wide-ranging story, full of dramatic, unexpected turns, In the Hurricane's Eye reveals that the fate of the American Revolution depended, in the end, on Washington and the sea.
At the End of the World
By Millman, Lawrence
In a remote corner of the Arctic in 1941, a meteor shower flashed across the sky for an unusually long time. Taking this to be a sign, one of the local Inuit proclaimed himself Jesus Christ. Another proclaimed himself God. Anyone who didnt believe in them was Satan. Violence ensued.. At the End of the World isnt just the remarkable story of a series of murders that occurred on the Belcher Islands, a group of wind-blasted rocks in Canadas Hudson Bay. Its also a starting place for a deeper cultural exploration. Against the backdrop of the murders, which highlight the fact that senseless violence in the name of religion is not a contemporary phenomenon and that a even people as seemingly peaceful as the Inuit can turn to chaos at the hands of one persons delusion, Millman addresses the burgeoning dawn of the digital era, following the murders trail to show how our obsession with screens is not unlike a cult and offering a warning cry against the erosion of humanity and the destruction of the environment. The story becomes a confluence of the consequences of generational trauma, outside religious evangelism, systemic racism against indigenous people, the perilous passage from the natural to the digital world, and what it means to be human in a time of technological dominance and climate disasters.. At the End of the World, available for the first time in paperback, is not a straightforward tale of true crime but an examination of many of the issues that have become dominant in the global conversation. In snippets of reflection, Millman asks us to look north for answers to many of the questions we all hold, literally, in our hands.
The Hidden History of Burma
By Myint-u, Thant
How did one of the world's "buzzy hotspots" (Fodor's 2013) become one of the top ten places to avoid (Fodor's 2018) ?Less than a decade ago, the world cheered as a dictatorship crumbled and internationally beloved Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from twenty years of house arrest. Yet just three years after her landslide victory at the polls, the country stands accused of war crimes and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims.As an historian, former diplomat, and presidential advisor, Thant Myint-U was part of the momentous changes that pulled Burma toward democracy, working with the ex- generals and meeting many of the country's biggest supporters, from Bono to Barack Obama. Yet no one was prepared to Burma's underlying challenges, from fast- rising inequality, disintegrating state institutions, and the impacts of climate change, to the rise of China next door and the issues of race, religion, and "national identity" deeply rooted in the country's traumatic colonial past.In this riveting insider's diagnosis of a country at a breaking point, Thant Myint-U shows that Burma's perils, far from being unique, are many of the same facing all of us. Burma is a warning for the world.
The Odyssey of Echo Company
By Stanton, Doug
A powerful work of literary military history from the New York Times bestselling author of In Harm's Way and Horse Soldiers, the harrowing, redemptive, and utterly unforgettable account of an American army reconnaissance platoon's fight for survival during the Vietnam War - whose searing experiences reverberate today among the millions of American families touched by this war.On a single night, January 31, 1968, as many as 100,000 soldiers in the North Vietnamese Army attacked thirty-six cities throughout South Vietnam, hoping to topple the government and dislodge American forces. Forty young American soldiers of an army reconnaissance platoon (Echo Company, 1/501) of the 101st Airborne Division and hailing from small farms, beach towns, and such big cities as Chicago and Los Angeles are suddenly thrust into savage combat, having been in-country only a few weeks. Their battles against both North Vietnamese Army soldiers and toughened Viet Cong guerillas are relentless, often hand-to-hand, and waged night and day across landing zones, rice paddies, hamlets, and dense jungle. The exhausting day-to-day existence, which involves ambushes on both sides, grueling gun battles, and heroic rescues of wounded comrades, forges the group into a lifelong brotherhood. The Odyssey of Echo Company is about the young men who survived this epic span, and centers on the searing experiences of one of them, Stanley Parker, who is wounded three times during the fighting. When the young men come home, some encounter a country that doesn't understand what they have suffered and survived. Many of them fall silent, knowing that few of their countrymen want to hear the remarkable story they have lived to tell - until now. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, dozens of personal letters written in the combat zone, Pentagon after-action reports, and travel to the battle sites with some of the soldiers (who meet their Vietnamese counterpart) , and augmented by detailed maps and remarkable combat zone photographs, The Odyssey of Echo Company breaks through the wall of time to recount ordinary young American men in an extraordinary time in America and confirms Doug Stanton's prominence as an unparalleled storyteller of our age.