Michael Prichard
Author
Language
English
Description
For all the talk of the Civil War "pitting brother against brother," until now there has never been a single book that traces the story of one family ravaged by that conflict. And no family could better illustrate the personal toll the war took than Lincoln's own. Mary Todd Lincoln was one of fourteen siblings who were split between the Confederacy and the Union. Three of her brothers fought, and two died, for the South. Several Todds-including Mary...
Author
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English
Description
A fast-paced narrative history of the coups, revolutions, and invasions by which the United States has toppled fourteen foreign governments-not always to its own benefit."Regime change" did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the Spanish-American War and the Cold...
Author
Publisher
Tantor Media, Inc
Pub. Date
2010
Language
English
Description
John Mosier presents a revisionist retelling of the war on the Eastern Front. Although the Eastern Front was the biggest and most important theater in World War II, it is not well known in the United States, as no American troops participated in the fighting. Yet historians agree that this is where the decisive battles of the war were fought. The conventional wisdom about the Eastern Front is that Hitler was mad to think he could defeat the USSR because...
Author
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English
Description
To what extent was Rosario 'Russell' Bufalino involved in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa? In the CIA's recruitment of gangsters to assassinate Fidel Castro? Secretive, even reclusive, Russell Bufalino quietly built his organized crime empire in the decades between Prohibition and the Carter presidency. His influence reached the highest levels of Pennsylvania government and halls of Congress, and his legacy left a culture of corruption that continues...
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English
Description
He was named by The Atlantic Monthly "the most sought-after strategist in the Democratic party." He was targeted by National Review as the Democratic Party's "poet goon." From his unique perspective, Robert Shrum gives us an epic and personal story of the struggle for power in America during the past four decades.With wit and humor, rare candor, and a wealth of detail, Shrum vividly recounts the real personalities and real forces that shaped the outcome...
67) Libra
Author
Language
English
Description
In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are...
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English
Description
On June 27, 1844, a mob stormed the jail in the dusty frontier town of Carthage, Illinois. Clamorous and angry, they were hunting down a man they saw as a grave threat to their otherwise quiet lives: the founding prophet of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. They wanted blood. At thirty-nine years old, Smith had already lived an outsized life. In addition to starting the Church of Latter-Day Saints and creating his own 'Golden Bible'-the Book of Mormon-he had...
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English
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Description
In On The Wealth of Nations, America's most provocative satirist, P. J. O'Rourke, reads Adam Smith's revolutionary The Wealth of Nations so you don't have to. Recognized almost instantly on its publication in 1776 as the fundamental work of economics, The Wealth of Nations was also recognized as really long: the original edition totaled over nine hundred pages in two volumes-including the blockbuster sixty-seven-page "digression concerning the variations...
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English
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Description
When James K. Polk was elected president in 1844, the United States was locked in a bitter diplomatic struggle with Britain over the rich lands of the Oregon Territory, which included what is now Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Texas, not yet part of the Union, was threatened by a more powerful Mexico. And the territories north and west of Texas-what would become California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and part of Colorado-belonged to Mexico....
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English
Description
Americans are accustomed to thinking that World War II ended on August 14, 1945, when the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. Yet on the mainland of Asia, in the vast arc stretching from Manchuria to Burma, peace was a brief, fretful interlude. In some parts of Asia, such as Java and Southern Indonesia, only a few weeks passed before new fighting broke out between nationalist forces and the former colonial powers. In China, a fragile and incomplete...
72) Dark Descent
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Language
English
Description
Two years after Titanic came another ship disaster of equal magnitude.
On May 29, 1914, after a collision in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Empress of Ireland sank in minutes, taking 1,012 passengers and crew to their deaths. The disaster shocked the world but then was forgotten with the torpedoing of the Lusitania and the engulfing cataclysm of World War I. Now, in Dark Descent, acclaimed author and diver Kevin McMurray revives the story of this...
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English
Description
In this groundbreaking work, leading historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tells the story of our hemisphere as a whole, showing why it is impossible to understand North, Central, and South America in isolation without turning to the intertwining forces that shape the region. With imagination, thematic breadth, and his trademark wit, Fernandez-Armesto covers a range of cultural, political, and social subjects, taking us from the dawn of human migration...
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English
Description
Still unsolved, still baffling, still claiming new victims. Here are the untold stories. A pilot reports a strange haze enveloping his plane, then disappears; eleven hours after fuel starvation, as if calling from a void, he is heard 600 miles away. He requests permission to land, then vanishes forever. A freighter steaming over placid seas disappears without a trace. A pleasure yacht ghosts past without a soul on board. A pilot calls for help because...
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English
Description
In The Emergency State, leading global affairs commentator David C. Unger reveals the hidden costs of America's obsessive pursuit of absolute national security. In the decades since World War II, presidents from both parties have assumed broad war-making powers never intended by the Constitution and intervened abroad to preserve our credibility rather than our security, while trillions of tax dollars have been diverted from essential domestic needs...
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English
Description
As recently as 11,000 years ago, "near time" to geologists, mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, ground sloths, giant armadillos, native camels and horses, the dire wolf, and many other large mammals roamed North America. In what has become one of science's greatest riddles, these large animals vanished in North and South America around the time humans arrived at the end of the last great ice age. Part paleontological adventure and part memoir, Twilight...
77) The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate
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English
Description
In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world's hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe's pitiless climate and limited...
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English
Description
Long-time physician Sherwin B. Nuland presents a provocative and stimulating collection of stories illustrating the vagaries of medical practice over the years. Among the fascinating and probing questions that Nuland investigates are:-What does the first Hippocratic Oath really mean?-What happens when knowledge comes before we're ready for it?-Why does major surgery using only acupuncture work?-Is there really sympathy between the organs of the body?-What...
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English
Description
In early March 1861, civil war loomed. By late April, Americans had begun to kill their fellow citizens. Cry Havoc! recounts in riveting detail the events that divided the states and reveals how quirks of timing, character, and place all conspired to transform the nation into a battlefield. Nelson Lankford, author of Richmond Burning, chronicles the eight critical weeks that began with Lincoln's inauguration through the explosion at Fort Sumter...
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English
Description
Based on extensive interviews with Japanese and American survivors, letters, diaries, and other primary sources, Danger's Hour explores the May 11, 1945, attack on the USS Bunker Hill, one of the deadliest kamikaze attacks of World War II. The book details the story of the ship herself (a technological marvel), her crew, and her kamikaze adversaries. Maxwell Taylor Kennedy shows how crucial this battle was to victory in the Pacific, even though it...